To those of you leery of back-jacket "advance praise," let me say straight off that British biographer John Baxter's nearly 500-page deconstruction of Woody Allen amply lives up to the adjectives that adorn its hindquarters. "Often hilarious"? You betcha! How else to describe Mr. Baxter's strenuous exercises in overinterpretation? ("Pervaded as it is by a sense of personal helplessness and inadequacy, Sleeper also offers an insight into Allen's psychology.") Is this new bio really a "bracing corrective to the usual … studies"? Yup!–though the studies Mr. Baxter seems most intent on "correcting" are atlases and geographical surveys. He informs us that rich and famous people like Mr. Allen live on "Central Park East opposite the Metropolitan Museum" (when they're not relaxing in posh "South Hampton"); East 79th Street is "just off Sixth Avenue"; and The Bronx, Mr. Allen's birthplace, is "that windy borough east of Manhattan." Is Woody Allen: A Biography really "compulsive reading"? Mm- hmmm ! My editor compelled me to read it. (I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was paid to do so.)

Mr. Baxter's book is one of two biographies of Mr. Allen coming out this winter; in February, Scribner will publish The Unruly Life of Woody Allen , by Marion Meade (whose other subjects, I couldn't help noticing with a tiny anticipatory frisson , run the gamut from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Madame Blavatsky). The crucial difference between these and Eric Lax's excellent–if, admittedly, authorized–1991 life of Mr. Allen is, of course, that Mr. Lax's book was published before that fateful day in January 1992, when Mia Farrow discovered that her lover was snapping "classic 'split-beaver' shots" of her adopted daughter. The likelihood that you'll want to pick up either of the new books will probably be directly proportional to your desire to possess, in a single official-looking, predigested volume, the contents of the innumerable newspaper and magazine articles that have chronicled Mr. Allen's erotic, familial and marital adventures since then.

Pre-1992, his life was a standard great American success story, Brooklyn Pop-Entertainment Division: ugly-duckling childhood spent avoiding parental bickering to $10,000-a-week standup gigs by age 28. Mr. Baxter traces Mr. Allen's ascendance in ample if often indiscriminate detail: Thirty pages on the making of What's New Pussycat? seems a bit much, especially when there are half as many on important films like Annie Hall and Interiors . Perhaps because he's writing the first biography of Mr. Allen that includes the grisly and (we thought at first) anomalously tawdry post-1992 era, Mr. Baxter goes out of his way to emphasize what he sees as a unifying thread of bad moral character running from the Brooklyn years straight through to the height of the actor-director phase. Needless to say, he singles out Mr. Allen's treatment of the fairer sex as a harbinger of things to come; at times, you can practically hear him pursing his lips in disapproval. Mr. Allen's divorce from second wife Louise Lasser, the author grimly reports, was effected with "indecent" haste–whatever that means.

The constant tut-tutting about every aspect of Mr. Allen's life, artistic as well as personal–Mr. Baxter manages to find a telltale "cold-blooded quality" in, of all things, Annie Hall –is too bad, because the author, an old hand at Hollywood bios (he's "done" Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini and Steven Spielberg), knows how to whip up the amusing trivia: Who knew that Vivian Vance, Lucille Ball's TV sidekick and the star of Mr. Allen's 1966 play Don't Drink the Water , was contractually obliged to stay 20 pounds overweight during the run of I Love Lucy ? It would have been fun to have more of this, but instead you get character assassination of the 5-year-old Allan Konigsberg, about whom, the author triumphantly declares, the boy's own mother said, "something went sour." Reading that, I couldn't help wondering how much contact Mr. Baxter has had with Jewish mothers.

Mr. Baxter's lousy geography is, in fact, a nice symbol for his fragile grasp of pretty much everything else about New York–especially Jewish New York. (Very early on, he wrings his hands over what he apparently sees as the terrible conundrum presented by the filmmaker's given name, Allan Stewart: "Why," the author agonizes, "two Scots names? Nobody is any longer sure." Scots? Scots ? You mean those aren't Jewish names?) Matters aren't helped by the portentous, block-that-metaphor prose ("stranded by the receding high tide of leisure spending …"); the deadening penchant for idle pedantry (do we really need the Latin names of the trees that surrounded P.S. 99 in Flatbush?); and a dangerous tendency to combine the purest conjecture with slippery-slope logic in order to produce "deep" psychological and esthetic insights. One typical example: Unfounded speculation as to whether Mr. Allen might have visited a prostitute in the 1950's leads to a confident assertion about the filmmaker's "attraction to the idea of paid sex" and, thence, to a lengthy discussion of the profound significance of prostitutes in his films.

At least until you get to the Soon-Yi, Mia, classic-split-beaver stuff, Mr. Allen's alleged flaws are pretty much those you'd expect in a canny, extremely successful, hardheaded professional, a self-made man who's confident of his own talent and impatient (and rude) with professional–and personal–connections who can't meet his idiosyncratic standards. This is the "real" Woody Allen, Mr. Baxter suggests, and the author goes so far as to distinguish this Mr. Hyde throughout his narrative from his more sympathetic, Dr. Jekyll half–the half Mr. Baxter calls "Woody Allen," the famous screen persona we all love, the masturbation-obsessed, thanatophobic everyman, a cowardly, girl-crazy " nebbish with uncombed collar-length red hair and an obvious bald spot."

The author isn't the first to distinguish "Allen" from "Woody Allen." Looking back, it's tempting to see the explosion of vituperation that greeted the 1992 revelations about Mr. Allen's private life as an expression of something deeper–something that had nothing to do with sexual mores and taboos; something that was a lot like betrayal, and hurt. Hurt, because we all suddenly realized that "Allen" wasn't, in the end, "Woody Allen"; that maybe "Woody Allen," whom we liked to think was us , was after all a fiction. Mr. Baxter cites with approval a French taxi driver on the subject of Mr. Allen's popularity: "Well … look at him…. He's short. He's bald. He's ugly. He can't get laid. He's just like me." As usual, the author's cultural tone-deafness, his ignorance of his subject's turf and milieu, lead him woefully astray. The whole point of "Woody Allen" was, in fact, the opposite: He was short and bald(ing) and plain and did get laid–by an army of ravishing partners in a host of films, from the ditzy Annie Hall to the nymphomaniac wonderbra-ed countess in Love and Death to the angelic Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan .

Mr. Allen created in "Woody Allen" a character no self-respecting Manhattanite could resist believing in: the average-looking guy who watches Holocaust documentaries and cites Sartre and thereby gets the girl. Then Soon-Yi happened. "Allen," you realized, was capable of moral and sexual grotesqueries that "Woody Allen" just joked about. Precisely because of the way you'd been able to identify with him, you felt snookered.

Had Mr. Baxter immersed himself in more than a bunch of newspaper clippings and transcripts of interviews with minor figures and people with whom Mr. Allen doesn't talk anymore, he'd have picked up on some of this; he'd have figured out a meaningful way to connect the scandalous stuff that makes books like this fun (and makes them sell) with the broader cultural stuff that makes them worth taking seriously. But he's way out of his element–he's somewhere east of Manhattan, in the windy Bronx, poring over the famous headline that read, according to him, "President to City: Drop Dead."

The subtitle of Mr. Baxter's book could well have been "Baxter to Allen: Drop Dead." Why did he bother to write (copiously) about someone he clearly doesn't like–or, for that matter, understand? As you slog through this tawdry book, you realize that the author's anger and bile are secondhand, generic–default mode for celebrity biographers, the dirtmongers whom Mr. Allen crudely mocked in his grim, self-pitying Celebrity . The rest of us can be excused for having confused "Allen" with "Woody Allen," but Mr. Baxter positively relishes the Jekyll-Hyde model: He needs adorable, helpless, schlumpy "Woody" to beat up cold, mega-rich, hardheaded "Allen." It's a cheap trick. No serious biographer would use persona to beat up personality, just as no serious reader would be so foolish as to judge a book by its cover.

Appearances can be deceiving. To the satisfaction of pretty much everyone but the most conservative culture warriors, the past generation of classical scholarship has demonstrated just how "exotic and distant" (to quote one recent volume on Attic vase-painting) the Greek world is. If the Athenians' refined achievements in politics and art and philosophy make them appear familiar and reassuringly Western and even modern to us, they were also a people who organized themselves, like Native Americans, by tribe; whose "everyday" china featured images that would make Tom of Finland blush; whose idea of respectable churchgoing was to get all dolled up in their Sunday best and kill some piglets, the rotting bodies of which they would dig up a few months later. Greek democracy is nice, and somehow culturally reassuring, but what about Greek slavery?

There's no question that the new installation is a vast improvement on the past-not the ancient past, but the Met's past. The artifacts, selected from the Met's superb, gigantic collection, are intelligently annotated and-eschewing the grandma's-attic approach of earlier times-crisply displayed. The statuary in the main room, the 140-foot-long Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery, which runs parallel to Fifth Avenue, has been organized in meaningful clusters that successfully fill the space (thereby alleviating the feeling that the room is merely a drafty corridor to the still awful, still ridiculously overpriced restaurant). Two adjacent Roman copies of the

"Diadoumenos," a work by the High Classical Greek sculptor Polykleitos powerfully convey how a canon of artistic "classics" was already being established and promulgated during ancient times.

But many of the objects are presented in ways clearly intended to emphasize not esthetic or art-historical points, but rather social "themes" and everyday human activities; the effect is to make the Greeks seem not all that different from you and me. One vase, depicting a matron choosing jewelry, is placed next to a bronze hand-mirror; another, showing athletes in competition, shares a vitrine with an aryballos , the little ceramic oil bottle such athletes would have carried around the locker room. Calvin Tomkins found the juxtaposition of a painting of a woman holding a phiale , a ritual vase, with a fourth-century B.C. silver phiale , "oddly moving." It made him think of Matisse.

What about thinking about the Greeks? The new exhibition is informative and elegant, but too often the attempts to provide meaningful historical and sociological context (as opposed to casual surface resemblances) fall short: There are minor omissions whose cumulative effect is to rob the Greeks of their real strangeness. A text describing a fifth-century B.C. marble relief of a maenad (a female Dionysiac groupie) dutifully notes her ritual attire, says something about Bacchic revels and makes a high-minded reference to Euripides' Bacchae -but tastefully neglects to mention that the matrons who attended the annual Dionysiac ritual were occasionally inspired to go whole hog: to indulge in the ritual dismemberment and eating of wild animals. Some wall text placed next to a prize-amphora, typical of those given for victors in regional games, points out that "athletic contests became a unifying, peacemaking force" in Greek culture; I'd like to see something about the way in which the idea of competition fueled every aspect of Greek culture-not only in sports but in the arts, politics and law. The Athenians enjoyed-and deserved-their reputation as the most litigious people on earth. One of the reasons I first loved the Greeks, and wanted to study them, was their sheer cantankerousness: They reminded me of my contentious Jewish relatives.

On a recent visit, I saw that a lot of people were wandering around the central sculpture gallery, gazing at the barrel-vaulted ceiling. It's not hard to understand why: The statues are bound to fade somewhat into the background in a room clad in limestone of almost exactly the same sandy-gray as the figures themselves. But of course, in ancient times those marble figures were garishly gilded and painted in lifelike, decidedly un-Martha Stewart colors; the Met's color scheme seems to have been chosen to match the statues as they are now-visual clichés of classical purity-rather than as they once were. That's as apt a metaphor as I can think of for the uneasy relationship between the Met (which is to say, us) and the Greeks. Is the installation about them, or about us and our need to feel elevated-to find relief from our own cultural messiness by gazing at artifacts whitewashed of their bizarreness?

The moment you walk into the Met's Egyptian wing, you're overwhelmed with texts and photographs and maps and graphs. By contrast, the wall text and item descriptions in the new Greek galleries are terse and more discreetly placed, as if you didn't really need them. You do need them-and something else that's missing, too. Blame it on those contrary Greeks, maybe, if not on the Met; certainly not the generous donors whose largesse helped make these galleries possible. They have given the city a fine present; still, even the most spectacular civic space to open in years can't fully contain the Hellenes themselves-noble, savage, enlightened, inscrutable. But then, one should always beware of gifts bearing Greeks.

O.K., so what's a tesseract? No, it's not expensive Italian flooring, nor is it the new Meredith Monk performance piece. It is, as we learn about 20 pages from the end of this complex and intriguing novel, a four-dimensional object-a hypercube-which, when unraveled and splayed out for those of us doomed to live in only three dimensions, looks like an extended crucifix. "A hypercube unravels to a tesseract. Four dimensions unravel to three," as Alex Garland, the author of The Beach , the 1996 Gen-X-meets- Lord-of-the-Flies cult favorite, not so helpfully explains. "A hypercube is a thing you are not equipped to understand. You can understand only the tesseract." Actually, I can't understand the tesseract, either, but no matter: For all the abstruse and off-putting sci-fi overtones of its title, this subtle fiction has nothing to do with the higher math and a lot to do with good old-fashioned storytelling about big, old-fashioned themes-the mysteries of love and violence and death, the strange workings of fate.

But then, Mr. Garland, a 28-year-old Englishman, is not what you'd call timid. The Beach may have looked like little more than a slight, ironic comment on backpacker culture and a certain kind of naïve turista colonialism (its characters were aimless, able-bodied, Caucasian twentysomethings of assorted nationalities looking for a "perfect beach" in Thailand), but it was, in essence, a psychologically and anthropologically acute retelling of the oldest story of them all: the expulsion from Paradise. (Once the backpackers find the beach, with its seductive promise of a cooperative, Edenic existence totally free from want, things begin to go wrong-subtly at first, and then catastrophically.)

It's not hard to see why The Beach was so enthusiastically received: Mr. Garland tells a good, straightforward story, and he writes with great polish and superior control; so much control, in fact, that, like his characters, you don't really realize what's going on until it's too late. There you are, reading along, enjoying the sparkling Southeast Asian scenery and the thought of those endless, neatly planted rows of marijuana, and next thing you know people are being disemboweled.

In the new book, Mr. Garland returns to Southeast Asia, with a story set in the Philippines; in just about every other way, however, The Tesseract marks a significant departure from, and growth since, The Beach . As its title suggests, this work is structurally complicated, both convoluted and allusive. Like a tesseract, it is composed of three dimensions that, in the end, inevitably imply a larger and more significant fourth.

The three dimensions are three ostensibly unrelated narratives that turn out, of course, to be connected. An Englishman, Sean, flees for his life from two mobsters; a middle-class Philippine doctor named Rosa puts her two children to bed while daydreaming about her first love; and two street kids, Vincente and Totoy, recite their dreams, in return for money, to Alfredo, a wealthy Philippine doctoral student. The book is so cunningly constructed that you can't discuss any of these three narratives in too much detail without giving away the connections; suffice it to say that each story is delicately observed and ingeniously linked to the others not merely by the contrivances of plot-a final scene that manages to get all the characters into one place-but also by the tiniest, seemingly casual elements (songs, names, numbers).

But the most attractive thing about Mr. Garland's novel is that despite its "exotic" setting, it completely avoids the wide-eyed, National Geographic , aren't-the-natives-interesting school of travel writing. Whether in his laconic descriptions of Rosa's childhood in a rural fishing village, where late-summer typhoons "turn coconuts into cannonballs," or in his equally cool but vivid imagining of a budding mobster's businesslike, rather exacting sadism ("Hands … I said hands. Not hand"), the author, who has lived in the Philippines for extended periods, isn't show-offy or self-congratulatory with his details. Instead, he pulls off the remarkable feat of making everything seem natural and familiar to you, too. The transparency of Mr. Garland's writing looked dangerously like thinness in The Beach , given that novel's simple, linear form; here it serves extremely well, allowing you to keep your focus amid all the sudden jumps in time frame and point of view. (It allows Mr. Garland to focus more, too. This book is filled with characters more textured than anyone in The Beach . Even the mobster's four henchmen, briefly encountered, are vivid, present; they have histories.)

The Tesseract 's Philippine setting is crucial. Here, Mr. Garland can make certain of his larger points-about people's susceptibility to certain kinds of control (social, familial) and to obvious kinds of class oppression-in a way that would be difficult, if not impossible, if the novel were set in London or New York. The arbitrary cruelty of a powerful plantation owner, for instance, would be hard to translate to a Western setting.

What connects the book's three discrete episodes is, in fact, the sense that there are powers controlling our lives which we feel but can't quite see; that human motivation and action, irrational as they may be, somehow conform to vast unseen symmetries-of psychology, destiny, coincidence, whatever. Hence, a petty criminal who spends the entire novel fleeing death suddenly, almost on a whim, offers his life to save an innocent woman; the child of a woman forced to break off her engagement to a deformed boyfriend is deformed in precisely the same way as the abandoned lover; a rich man who seeks to impose meaning on the (possibly made-up) dreams of tragic children is unable to grasp the (possibly very obvious) reasons for his own life's greatest tragedy. Only when you can see the whole pattern-when, as it were, all three parts are placed side by side-can you see the irony, get the joke. This is the "fourth dimension."

In novels, this sense of the underlying coherence of things is reflected in what, back in high school English, we used to call "plot." I wondered, as I got to the end of Mr. Garland's novel, whether some kind of embarrassment about anything so old-fashioned led him to invoke, unnecessarily, a symbol as abstruse as the "tesseract." All he's really talking about is plot, Fate, the way things just are and always have to be-things that he seems already to know a lot about. The tesseract stuff sticks out as being fussy and inauthentic, "writerly."

Mr. Garland's shiny prose can be so pleasurable in itself that I've wondered whether those of us who are enthusiastic about him (J.G. Ballard, in blurb mode, declares him the new Graham Greene) aren't perhaps reading too much into him. I worry that Mr. Garland's technical proficiency, the way he has of smoothing out his sentences and story lines and tying them into glossy bows, makes it just look as if it all adds up to something significant about fate and human nature-makes it just look like he's in control, when in fact he's just lucky. But after two novels that left me haunted, I'm willing to give this original and ambitious writer the benefit of the doubt. "We can see the thing unraveled, but not the thing itself," one character says to another at the end of The Tesseract . I'm fairly sure that this book, like its author, is the thing itself.

Who'd be crazy enough to see a shrink whose name means "earnest morals"?

Fortunately for the readers of The Treatment , Daniel Menaker's enjoyable if flawed first novel, Jake Singer is, and does. A youngish Jewish teacher at a tony uptown prep school for the "emphatically rich," Jake suffers from a neurotic anomie best characterized, perhaps, as being Early Philip Roth: stalled career, an Arctic relationship with his widower cardiologist father, a chronic inability to make relationships with Nice Girls stick. To treat his Upper West Side angst, Jake begins analysis with the implacable Dr. Ernesto Morales, a strict Freudian whose heavy black beard and "diabolical smile" give him a decidedly Mephistophelean aspect. To say the least: Morales, a Cuban and devout Catholic, decorates his office with crucifixes, has a keen interest in the stock market and declares to the diffident Jake that "opinions are testicles," to be offered at one's own risk. And you thought you had transference issues.

The Treatment is ostensibly about how Morales coaches Jake through reconciliation with his distant father and, more, into a successful relationship with a beautiful young Park Avenue widow, Allegra Marshall, who has some very real problems of her own. (She finds herself in danger of losing her adopted daughter Emily.) But more than anything else, the novel is really about Jake's relationship with-or, more precisely, his resistance to-Morales. Its best moments lie, indeed, in its dead-on depiction of the loony, slightly paranoid dynamic of the patient-analyst relationship; Mr. Menaker perfectly captures the exquisite frustration that an intelligent, literate person is likely to feel on committing himself to a relationship in which it's impossible ever to have the upper hand. "'You have been coming three times a week for how long-two months now?'" Morales superciliously asks Jake during one of their early sessions.

To which Jake replies, "'Four … But who's counting.'

"'We shall get back to your anger in a moment …'"

Exchanges like this will be achingly familiar to anyone who's lain in a consulting room, silently loathing the standard-issue shrink décor: "the Käthe Kollwitz print … the African mask …"

Because The Treatment is art and not life, the tyrannical Morales can shun the real-life therapist's mask of non-reactive blankness, revealing his own bullying persona to the cowering yet resentful Jake in scenes that, to the initiate, will be as painful as they are funny. Morales is a kind of Freudian Torquemada: not so much a psychoanalyst as the stern embodiment of pre-Prozac psychoanalysis itself, an impatient, bearded father-figure who has no time for the mewlings of patients who can't see the Big Picture-who want their insight now, dammit. "You are not Shiva, Mr. Singer, nor Attila nor Hitler, nor even Sharles Starkweather," Morales snaps at a rebellious Jake. "You are not so lethal as you wish to believe. Now please lie down."

Delicious as all this is, there are serious problems. Mr. Menaker, who for many years was an editor at the "old" New Yorker and is currently a senior editor at Random House, occasionally commits an authorial gaffe that, in view of his résumé, is odd-the kind of obvious thing editors are always crawling down writers' throats about. "Our brains seem to require us to try to account for everything, to transmute the brute happenstance of our lives into logical, explanatory narratives," Jake observes at one point. This English-teacher tendency to articulate the "themes" of the novel may be in character for Jake, but it reads as if Mr. Menaker didn't trust his story to tell itself.

In a way, you can see why he was nervous. When Jake muses that "[t]here are periods when your life takes on the eerie, overdetermined quality of an analytical session … your life turns into something like fiction," it's hard not to be reminded of the eerie, overdetermined quality of much that goes on in The Treatment whenever Jake (and Mr. Menaker) leaves Morales' office for the real world. The Morales stuff is so true, and so much fun, that the book's actual plot-a melodrama involving Allegra's adopted daughter Emily and a plan to get her back, hatched by the mean-spirited, controlling husband of the child's birth-mother, Sarah-feels like an intrusion.

Similarly, the mad Cuban is so vivid that the other characters seem flat and unpersuasive in comparison-no one more so than the allegedly alluring Allegra herself. Whatever you know about her-she's beautiful, she's rich, she's surprisingly dirty-minded and vulnerable for a Park Avenue shiksa-you know simply because Jake, which is to say Mr. Menaker, tells you. But you have to take it on faith, since the character doesn't live or breathe on her own.

It's not that the child-custody subplot is badly written. If anything, the intricate story of Emily's birth mother, Sarah-a divorced young upstate waitress who meets a great guy named Paul, loses him in a freak accident, gives up their daughter at birth and marries another, not-so-great Paul-has the laconic authority and judiciousness of detail you associate with old New Yorker fiction. ("An old gray Ford Escort was parked close to the door of Jonesy's sub shop," the Sarah section begins, with tight-lipped self-assuredness.)

The problem is that the Edward Hopper-like world of Jonesy's sub shop is light-years away from the Dali-esque landscape inhabited by Morales-despite the author's efforts to superimpose the one on the other. Yes, you know that Jake's attempts to save Allegra's daughter from the machinations of the evil Paul II are meant to serve as a vehicle for showing how he's matured emotionally, how he's finally able to commit to Allegra and the scary responsibilities of adulthood (that other "Treatment"); but he-like the book-seems to get a lot more stimulation on Morales' couch than in Allegra's bed. Some of the Morales material appeared a while back in The New Yorker , and it's tempting to think that Mr. Menaker, when he decided to make a book of it, figured he had to "open out" the New-York-Jews-in-therapy-shtick, to make it more novelistic by adding the ostensibly heavier child-custody stuff and taking the action upstate. But for all the laughs it generates, the conflict between Morales and Jake is the real drama here; everything else is just activity.

There's no denying that The Treatment keeps you delightfully hooked until its satisfyingly undramatic climax, in which bad Paul II doesn't shoot Jake and doesn't, in turn, get shotgunned by Sarah during a contrived showdown. But you keep wishing there'd been more shrink.

It's Morales who haunts the book, much as he haunts, hilariously, Jake's anxious dreams. (In one of these, the good doctor "lobbied the halls of Congress on behalf of a particular brand of very large Cuban stogie": In this book, a cigar is never just a cigar.) And it's Morales, rather than the earnest, troubled Singer Sr. or Sarah or Allegra, who gives the book its philosophical fiber as well as its fun. When the newly self-confident Jake tells Morales he's leaving analysis, the abandoned doctor-whose ever-worsening material circumstances are due, you can't help feeling, to the rise of Prozac-delivers himself of a tirade in which he offers his potent … testicles on everything from the end of the Cold War to the evils of psychopharmacology to the dubious legacy of Charles Darwin, "the man who must bear the responsibility for the end of meaning." Like pretty much everything else Dr. Earnest Morales says, this is not only funny, but very likely true. If Mr. Menaker had been less resistant to Morales than Jake was, less conflicted about the Cuban's real worth, his novel might have resolved its split-personality problems and evolved into an integrated whole. You don't have to be Freud to know that a treatment that never gets past its resistance to its own analyst can't be an unqualified success.

The act of literary larceny that tells you something really interesting about David Leavitt's writing isn't the one you probably already know about. That, of course, was the case in which the author appropriated a central episode from Stephen Spender's autobiography to serve as the plot for his 1993 novel While England Sleeps , thereby generating a successful libel suit by Spender (the original version of Mr. Leavitt's book was pulled in England and had to be expurgated) and a great deal of negative publicity.

It also inspired the only stretch of Mr. Leavitt's own writing in which the author-the first gay writer prim enough to get an overtly "gay" short story published in William Shawn's New Yorker -flirted briefly with something resembling wit. (The 1997 collection Arkansas contains a dry, funny novella called The Term Paper Artist , about a gay writer named David Leavitt who's reduced to writing term papers in exchange for sex after being accused of plagiarizing the autobiography of an English … etc.) Much more revealing, in terms of Mr. Leavitt's artistic personality, is the comparatively minor bit of shoplifting that occurs on page 109 of his 1990 collection of stories, A Place I've Never Been.

The purloined sentence is one with which Mr. Leavitt attempts to capture the essence of erotic attraction between two characters. "When one person's body touches another person's body," he writes, "chemicals under the skin break down and recombine, setting off an electric spark which leaps, neuron to neuron, to the brain." This, as it happens, is, verbatim, a sentence he used on page 140 of his 1989 novel, Equal Affections . In the earlier book, the line is used by a character who's addicted to cybersex: Sitting day after day in front of his screen, he can't imagine that desire is anything more than a reductive accident of chemicals and electrical impulses.

What's interesting about this déjà vu is that Mr. Leavitt decided that the line-originally used to describe an emotionally remote person's pathetic attempt to justify his failure to connect-was equally appropriate for real, living, flesh-and-blood lovers. Eros, shmeros: It's all the same to him.

No one has ever accused Mr. Leavitt of having a vivid sense of the erotic-his lack of just that is, no doubt, what got him into the pre-"hot" New Yorker -and this line, with its elaborate yet ultimately evasive pseudoscience, is a perfect example of why. Mr. Leavitt has always had a diagnostician's cool eye, and at the beginning of his career, before the onset of his latest, rather grand Henry James Period (a recent slim volume of expatriate pensées , co-authored by Mr. Leavitt and Lindsey Mitchell, is called Italian Pleasures ), that detachment admirably served his narratives about the elaborate self-deceptions families and individuals use to avoid painful self-knowledge. Those stories, and even his flawed first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes , offer finely drawn failures: closeted prep school teachers, tersely disappointed mothers, thwarted fag hags-to say nothing of the underdeveloped young homosexuals who populate Mr. Leavitt's fiction, compulsively rereading their favorite children's books while wondering why their more intellectually adventurous boyfriends have grown bored with them.

But the novels that have followed made you realize that the flip side of Mr. Leavitt's talent for rendering disappointment and lack is an inability to represent grown-up emotional engagement (an inadequacy of which the recycling of the "neuron to neuron" line may be the best symbol). There's always been something unpersuasive, something at once overly schematic and insufficiently textured, about his handling of the bigger themes-death and emotional liberation in Equal Affections , erotic and political passions and betrayals in While England Sleeps . This limitation is perfectly mirrored by the author's stylistic shortcomings: Mr. Leavitt may have perfect pitch when it comes to suburban anomie, but he gets into serious trouble whenever he strays from the bridge-and-tunnel set. The worst thing about While England Sleeps wasn't that it appropriated Spender's life, but that it got Spender's world-the astringent cleverness, the incestuous, catty alliances-so disastrously wrong. Its characters all sound suspiciously like the blandly troubled, middlebrow suburban Jews of Mr. Leavitt's early stories. ("My, you certainly do have a lot of books," the Spender character remarks.) In this author's hands, pretty much everything ends up looking like just another Leavittown.

With the appearance of Arkansas , it looked as if Mr. Leavitt was about to break through to something new, something less hermetic and more adult, but The Page Turner , true to its title's forlorn allusion to Art's ancillary characters, drags us right back into drably familiar territory. What's jarring in this novel of the classical music world is what jarred in While England Sleeps : Mr. Leavitt transforms a place he's all too obviously never been-a place, you'd think, of great gusto (emotional, artistic)-into an all-too-familiar landscape of small personalities and minor emotional frigidities.

If the temperature is low, it's not for a lack of activity. In this short novel's long opening, Paul Porterfield, an 18-year-old piano student, turns pages at a recital given by the famous pianist Richard Kennington. In Rome, the two embark on a brief affair while Paul's clueless mom, Pamela, mistakenly thinks Kennington is interested in her. A frightened Kennington leaves Rome (and the novel) without warning. Meanwhile, the dog belonging to Kennington's longtime lover has died, which so upsets the lover, a famed impresario called Mansourian, that he forgets to have enough cash on hand to pay a male prostitute.

In the book's final 100 pages, Paul's Juilliard roommate gets a blowjob while reading The Wall Street Journal . Mom learns the Awful Truth when she comes across some gay pornography, and a snapshot of Kennington, while vacuuming under Paul's bed. Paul, having realized he'll never be a great talent, allows himself to be kept by Mansourian. Mom flies to New York for a climactic confrontation with Kennington, whom she mistakenly thinks is carrying on with Paul, only to be hustled away into a cab by Tushi Strauss, the famous lady violinist. In the novel's last paragraph, the Journal blower declares his love for the blowee. They're on a Ferris wheel.

The problem is that there's no middle-nothing that justifies, structurally or thematically, the end of the book. Mr. Leavitt may assume that the mere juxtaposition of these episodes will result in a narrative mosaic about desire and self-knowledge and a failure to connect-standard Leavitt themes-but there's a serious shortage of grout here. Indeed, despite its rarified milieu, The Page Turner turns out to be a disjointed catalogue of by now familiar Leavitt characters and gestures: anxious suburban moms, vacuous gay sons, frightened older men, the flight from desire. The stylistic weaknesses are equally familiar. There are lazy and unintentionally funny attempts at establishing a cosmopolitan mise en scène ("' Un cappuccino ,' Paul said, for the first time putting into practice the Italian he had been studying"). And the flat-footed, homogenized dialogue-once again, all the characters appear to have grown up on the same block in the Five Towns ("I'm the man who stuck his hand into a garbage disposal," the allegedly distingué Kennington declares. "Like in Carrie .")-is alleviated, alas, only by flights of High Artistry. When Pamela finds herself "ensconced in sorrow's hinterlands," or when Kennington's desire for Paul becomes so great that only the "speed bumps of anxiety" hold him back, it occurs to you that the next time Mr. Leavitt appears in The New Yorker may well be under Block That Metaphor.

The irony of the Spender debacle is that it was, ultimately, good for Mr. Leavitt-it shocked him out of the narrow narrative and thematic spaces he'd been holed up in and pushed him toward a new and promising place called Arkansas . Despite its trans-Atlantic settings, The Page Turner doesn't go anywhere; it's a retreat, another instance of recycling. Those who admired the results of Mr. Leavitt's recent flirtation with risk-taking can only hope that in his next book, he will break out once again and resume his exploration of new and different places.

Some ungenerous souls may object that there is something just the tiniest bit passive-aggressive about choosing a word that 99.9 percent of all humans will not know as a title for a major work about the unity of all human knowledge. But the title of Edward O. Wilson's new book turns out to be perfect–a genetic blueprint, so to speak, for what lies within. There is, first of all, "consilience" itself, which, as Latinists everywhere, to say nothing of the coconut-oiled summer throngs who have gobbled up William Whewell's 1840 tome The Philosophy of Inductive Sciences (from which Mr. Wilson cribs this term) will know, means "a jumping together"–in this case, the linking together of all known physical and metaphysical phenomena as explained by a few basic scientific principles. Mr. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist, explains that he has chosen this abstruse term over some more common runners-up–"coherence," for instance–because "its rarity preserves its precision," never pausing to wonder whether precision may be moot where meaningfulness is absent. And if what precedes the colon in Mr. Wilson's title smacks of a deliberate obscurantism, what follows– The Unity of Knowledge –hints at an equally typical grandiosity.

Indeed, despite the impressive breadth of Mr. Wilson's agenda and the detailed scientific data that he marshals in its support, this work, clearly meant to be the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner's Big Book, turns out to be an intellectually disappointing affair, wavering between data-bloated, often meandering and methodologically unsound arguments on the one hand, and vaporous claims that go largely unsubstantiated on the other.

Consilience is meant to describe a theory of how all branches of knowledge, from the hard sciences to the rather more unquantifiable behavioral and cultural phenomena–the impulse to artistic creativity, the incest taboo, ethics, the concept of beauty, the existence of universal themes of art–are ultimately linked, and therefore somehow explainable and even predictable, by a small set of principles rooted in the nature and operations of material things (chemicals, genes, neurons, atoms) and the scientific disciplines that account for them (chemistry, evolutionary biology, physics). Hence, Mr. Wilson believes that we can give precise and useful definitions of moral sentiments by analysis of neural and endocrine responses, or can use evolutionary biology to provide a meaningful account of the religious impulse toward communion with a higher being. This has huge implications. If there is indeed a "united system of knowledge," humankind "will be positioned, godlike, to take control of its own ultimate fate … [to] alter not just the anatomy and intelligence of the species, but also the emotions and creative drive that compose the very core of human nature."

Consilience falls roughly into two parts, the first concerned with science and its history ("The Enlightenment," "The Natural Sciences," "The Mind"), the second with the humanities ("The Arts and Their Interpretation," "Ethics and Religion"). It would be nice to be able to say that Mr. Wilson's errors of knowledge and method in the case of the latter are the forgivable ones of a scientist straying outside of his chosen field; but the author's penchant for selective use of available evidence, rhetorical bet-hedging and improbable argumentative leaps of logic are detectable on his own turf as well.

In an early example of how "consilience by reduction" of complex phenomena into their tiniest material components is supposed to work, Mr. Wilson declares that he will show how "to trace a magician's dream all the way down to an atom"–that is, to account for an allegedly widespread psychological and cultural phenomenon (dreams about snakes as religious symbols) by showing consilience between it and a material fact from the natural world (the chemistry of the human brain, with a pinch of historical anthropology thrown in). Snakes, according the author, are the "most frequently conjured" animals to appear in dreams across cultures, a claim that sounds as though it could be true, but which he nowhere bothers to substantiate. He then refers to the snake paintings that a Peruvian shaman called Pablo Amaringo produces during the dreamlike delirium induced by a drug called ayahuasca , extracted from a jungle vine. Mr. Wilson characterizes these hallucinations as "the dreams of a shaman," which allows him to proceed to a discussion of the biochemistry of human dreams; he then shifts gears to a discussion of the anthropological origins of the widespread "innate" aversion to snakes in humans, snakes his way into a discussion of certain serpentine religious symbols and ends triumphantly with the story of how the German chemist Friedrich Kekulé gained insight into the structure of the benzene molecule, a circle (get it?) of carbon and hydrogen atoms, after dreaming of one such symbol, a snake devouring its own tail.

Unfortunately, the appeal of this argument is more novelistic than scientific and doesn't make for rigorous science. It depends on, among other things, a slippery identification of hallucinations with normal dreams, but simply because Mr. Wilson calls Amaringo's hallucinatory highs "dreams" doesn't make them dreams. The mere fact that both hallucinations and dreams can include snakes or can be "bizarre," as Mr. Wilson states, doesn't mean they are constituted in similar enough ways to justify his attempt to link Pablo Amaringo's South American highs and Friedrich Kekulé's Mitteleuropäische naps.Eminent sleep researchers like Allan Rechtschaffen have shown that we think of dreams as being "bizarre" only as a result of selective memory–most dreams are fairly dull, and we only remember the bizarre ones. This case suggests that Mr. Wilson's own dream of totalizing consilience seems itself to be based on selective use of evidence and theories. However genuine his occasional mea culpas ("I apologize to the slighted scientists"–i.e., those whose theories and data he says he has no space to include; "And yes–lest I forget–I may be wrong"), they aren't enough to restore confidence in what can sometimes look like argumentative sleights of hand.

The author clearly knows that the biggest challenge to his consilience model is the connection he wants to make between the material sciences and the arts and humanities, and it is there that his book fails. He doesn't ever grapple seriously with the objections raised in the past generation by thinkers whom he terms, with dismissive inaccuracy, "radical postmodernists"–under whose "black flag of anarchy" he carelessly lumps together deconstruction, postmodernism, Afrocentrism, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, eco-feminism, neo-Marxism, an assemblage designed to strike terror into the hearts of USA Today readers everywhere–only to brush them off by mere assertion. The "disturbing problems" raised by those isms are best solved, he declares, "by simply walking away from Foucault and existentialist despair." Ah, well. Who needed France or 20th-century thought, anyway?

Mr. Wilson nowhere seriously addresses the objections implicit in the most interesting and intellectually legitimate of these black-flaggers–deconstruction–which, among other things, implicitly calls into question the nature and validity of all of the categories and assumptions that are the unquestioned bases for his grand thesis. Assumptions, to name just one set, about the supremacy of order over chaos, of coherence over incoherence. At least one black flag that a radical postmodernist might raise is that the very modes of classification that Mr. Wilson assumes are immanent in the natural world (the classical classification of the kingdoms, phyla, etc.) are arbitrary–not in the sense that the available data do not support them, but rather in the broader sense that our understanding of these data, and the categories that to us seem inevitable, natural and right, are products of our minds and cultures. You could–and some cultures probably do–classify animals by whether they taste good, or flowers by whether they look pretty on your Alvar Aalto coffee table or not. It's the old Eskimos-have-20-words-for-snow thing: Cultures invent classifications because they answer culturally specific needs. But for an almost embarrassingly arrogant Mr. Wilson, Jacques Derrida's paradoxes "await solution, though one need not feel any great sense of urgency in the matter."

It's not that you have to be sympathetic to the flag-wavers; this reviewer certainly is not. But even readers who applaud Mr. Wilson's impatience with the increasing specialization and mind-numbing professionalization of academic life, and with the glossolalian excesses and anarchic relativism that is the legacy of the various "post-"s will feel uneasy embracing an argument that coasts along on grand assertions, rather than engaging with methodical argument potential objections to Mr. Wilson's own worldview. He is the Mr. Magoo of scientific theory, genially oblivious to everything he can't or won't see, heedlessly crashing through the intellectual landscape and leaving a trail of destruction behind.

The real problem here lies with his materialist perspective–his desire to ground explanations of the most abstract and complex phenomena of human experience in the empirical data provided by biology, chemistry, physics. "If brain and mind are at base biological phenomena," he writes, "it follows that the biological sciences are essential to achieving coherence among all the branches of learning, from the humanities on down to the physical sciences." But that doesn't follow at all–any more than it follows that you'll be able to make sense of a sentence like "his book was a soufflé of grandiose claims and questionable methodology" simply because you know the chemical composition of the proteins found in chicken eggs. You don't need a Ph.D. in biology (or anything else) to smell an argumentative Rattus rattus here.

Mr. Wilson begins his book with a chapter called "The Ionian Enchantment" (an allusion to the ancient Greek physicists' dream of a theory of Everything) in which he describes, among other things, how he abandoned the born-again religion he grew up with for the more firmly grounded faith in hard science. Consilience suggests that you can take the boy out of fundamentalism, but not vice versa. Asserting rather than proving the truth of its premises, it is a work, ultimately, more of faith than of reason.