Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University, by Richard Bradley. HarperCollins, 400 pages, $25.95.

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, by Ross Gregory Douthat. Hyperion, 304 pages, $24.95.

What is Harvard that we are mindful of it? That's the question raised by Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, by Ross Gregory Douthat, and Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University, by Richard Bradley.

"Ruling class"? "World's most powerful university"? I don't think so. Neither book proves what its subtitle asserts-can't-and it's worth noting that all the attention recently given to Harvard president Larry Summers' attempted career suicide only confirms that if you're thinking of Harvard as a single entity with a soul or any semblance of one, you're mistaken.

But before we tackle the broader issue, let's get to what Harvard lit concentrators might call the normative portion of the review. Both Harvard Rules and Privilege make pretty good jobs of their respective subjects. Ostensibly about the same thing, in fact these books are more like parallel tracts. Ross Gregory Douthat, an undergraduate at Harvard from 1998-2002, has written a memoir about his time at the College, the preppy 369-year-old acorn from which the great university grew. Meanwhile, Richard Bradley-once known as Richard Blow, the former executive editor of John Kennedy Jr.'s George and a master's degree holder in history from the school-writes about the oak, the modern Harvard multiversity with its $23 billion endowment, its 19,000 students and 15,000 employees, its campus sprawling across Cambridge, threatening-to paraphrase Henry James-to spread to the dreary academic suburb of Allston across the river.

Mr. Bradley's focus is mostly on Mr. Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, whom Harvard University installed as president in 2001 and who has endured three difficult years in that job. Mr. Summers is Falstaffian-combative, colorful, impulsive-and Mr. Bradley gets great pleasure chronicling the fights he's picked: the Cornel West Wars, the Stand-Off with Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Flaying of Dean Harry Lewis, the Core Curriculum Dying in the Dark. Mr. Bradley's literary technique is the "tick-tock," as embodied in this fairly typical sentence: "It was the summer of 2001, and Skip Gates was getting worried."

Mr. Douthat's book is more reflective. His characters-principally himself, but also the heterogeneous mixture in his freshman dorm that the admission's office confected ("the Rachels and Nicks, the Danforths and Siddarths and Rabias and Nates," as he writes)-care little about the affairs of kings. They arrive at the Yard with their parents, say good-bye to them, furnish their rooms, try to buy beer, and seek sex partners and grades good enough to allow them to go to graduate school-a pattern that apparently persists, a current undergraduate having told The New Republic's Jason Zengerle in the midst of Summersgate that "most students at Harvard don't give a shit about the administration."

Mr. Douthat (pronounced, I think, DO-that) is a good observer, if hardly a novel one, in showing just how awful the undergraduate experience can be at Harvard for a certain type of intelligent young arrival. The product of an unconventional Catholic, sometimes macrobiotic family in New Haven, his head was turned by the possibility of social acceptance by one of the school's fraternities, called "final clubs." This goal having eluded him, he turned his intense longing on a pretty, complicated classmate named Rachel Polley, who would only suck his fingers before she fell asleep in his bed. "This is completely surreal," he tells her with pleasure. Alas, pleasure turned to pain: A sailing-team junior named Eric Swaggart Allenby carried off the bewitching Rachel, and Mr. Douthat was left to tear apart his dorm room. Timiditas is the true Harvard motto where sex is concerned: Mr. Douthat remained, in his roommate's cruel phrase, "a virgin by choice: the choice of the women of America."

The years passed, and Mr. Douthat got laid and became an editor at the right-wing Harvard Salient (he found his club after all). Although his years at Harvard semi-radicalized him, he doesn't dump on the school's politics. As he sees it, the problem with Harvard isn't a right-left political one but a right-brain/left-brain one: The professors in the humanities no longer believe in their material, while the economists and scientists believe too much in theirs, leaving the undergraduates to treat their four years as essentially a jobs-and-contacts fair.

"Harvard is a terrible mess of a place-an incubator for an American ruling class that is smug, stratified, self-congratulatory, and intellectually adrift," he writes.

Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts Hall, Mr. Bradley is chronicling Larry Summers down to the pizzas he has an assistant pick up and the food spots those pizzas leave on this "prodigious and sloppy eater['s]" shirts. It helps Mr. Bradley's book that he's a pretty good digger. The brouhahas of Mr. Summers' first thousand days were well covered in the daily press, but it's my impression that he has still gotten stuff no one else has. Mr. Douthat's book, at least, suggests so: At one point in Privilege, he laconically comments about the first volley in the Cornel West Wars, a 2001 meeting at which Mr. Summers pressured the African-American university professor-who, among other offenses, had backed Al Sharpton for President-to leave the school. "To this day, nobody knows what happened in that interview, save that Summers left thinking all was well, and West left in a fury," Mr. Douthat writes.

But here comes Mr. Bradley with details galore: "At 3:15 p.m. on October 24th," Mr. Summers and Mr. West meet in the president's office-"perhaps thirty-five feet long by fifteen feet wide"-and Mr. Summers asks for Mr. West's help in "fuck[ing] Harvey Mansfield." Mr. Mansfield is the school's conservative professor of government, who'd suggested that grade inflation was the fault of whites who wanted to help the underprepared minorities that prestigious universities like Harvard let in under affirmative action. When Mr. West refused to support an attack on Mr. Mansfield-"'I don't need that kind of talk about a colleague,'" Mr. Bradley reports his saying (is that Mr. West's own voice I hear filling the journalist's tape recorder?)-Mr. Summers turned on him, telling him that he suspected Mr. West was giving out inflated grades himself and asking to see the transcripts of his classes. For a president of Harvard to request the grade transcripts of a University Professor-its most prestigious faculty position-is like the President asking the director of the Federal Reserve for his time card: He can do it, but he shouldn't expect his putative employee to stick around for long. Soon, Cornel West was gone to Princeton and Larry Summers' Sister Souljah moment was on the front page of The New York Times.

There were ramifications to Mr. West's departure within Harvard. He was a protégé of the politically skillful head of the African-American studies department, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (known as Skip), who dug in for a fight. Mr. Summers invites; Skip feints; Mr. Bradley teases. On page 91, we learn that "Gates would get his face time with the president. But it wouldn't turn out exactly as he'd hoped"; and on page 206, that "in his ongoing chess match with Larry Summers, Skip Gates appeared to have checkmated his opponent …. though the game appeared to be resolved, it was, in fact, far from over." Then, finally, on page 275: "The Skip Gates matter also seemed largely resolved …. Gates had leveraged his position … to make gains not just for himself, but also for his department." Mr. Summers winds up adding Africa to Mr. Gates' African-American studies department and securing Mr. Gates a million-dollar donation for a multi-volume encyclopedia of African and African- American history. Yet at book's end, Skip Gates may be headed off anyway; we await the afterword in the paperback edition.

So here's the obvious question, most evidently for Mr. Bradley but also, I think, for Mr. Douthat: Does any of this matter? Memoirs can make room for themselves with their writing, while a nonfiction book of the sort Mr. Bradley has attempted can sweep you up in its account through the very heat of its breath. But Harvard presents a special challenge, in that no one can really say what Harvard is anymore. You can try to trade off its historic importance, its soul, as Mr. Douthat does, or off its size, as Mr. Bradley does, but neither signifies what it seems to. "Setting a story at Harvard conveys history, power, and tradition," Mr. Bradley writes. "Harvard raises the stakes." But for all that, the school isn't easy to write about right now. Its professoriat is bland-tell me, for instance, what Skip Gates stands for-and its effect on our culture is more like that of a telephone company than a content provider. It's no longer a school for Puritan deacons, nor a finishing school for Protestant men, nor Joe McCarthy's "Kremlin on the Charles." There are 300,000 graduates of Harvard in the world today-what defines them? What does an ed-school graduate have in common with a B-school one, or with the "final club" man that Ross Gregory Douthat banally and bootlessly wished to be?

Fortunately,there'sMr. Summers-the Rock-'em, Sock-'em Robot of university presidents. "There was no question that whenever Larry Summers decided to step down as president of Harvard, he would leave the university bigger, richer, more powerful, and more influential," Richard Bradley ends Harvard Rules. "The only question was whether he would leave it better." Recent events suggest we may find this out soon. In January, Mr. Summers stepped up to the bully pulpit again, making a suggestion at a conference of economists that women might be under-represented in math and the sciences because their brains aren't adapted for it-a comment that might have been forgiven (there he goes again!) except, as the full transcript that was released later showed, he also mused at the same meeting about why there were so few Jews in farming, whites in basketball and Catholics in investment banking.

At a meeting afterward, several members of the faculty called for their president's resignation, and a further meeting that may prove to be Mr. Summer's Waterloo is scheduled for March 15. While Mr. Summers divides the school more with his poor relationship skills than any extremist ideas, there's something heartening-especially if you're a journalist-about the fury he ignites. In an interview with The Times, Cornel West said, "I've been praying for the brother, hoping he would change." What I say is, "You go, grrl"-Larry Summers gives hope to anyone who wants to write about Harvard.

D.T. Max is a 1984 graduate of Harvard College. Random House will publish his first book, The Dark Eye: A Scientific and Cultural History of Fatal Familial Insomnia, Mad Cow and Other Prion Diseases, in the spring of 2006.

This is how Sammy's Hill came to be: Last spring Harvey Weinstein, the co-head of Miramax Films, ran into Kristin Gore, daughter of the former V.P., at a benefit for a charity Ms. Gore's older sister, Karenna Gore Schiff, works with. Mr. Weinstein told Ms. Gore that he was looking for someone to write " Bridget Jones Goes to Washington ." Ms. Gore, a former Saturday Night Live writer, said, "What a coincidence-I want to write a novel." Mr. Weinstein said, "Then write this one." And so was born the first work of fiction from the Gore family (not counting the offerings of that distant black-sheep cousin, Gore Vidal).

Could there be a less promising beginning for a novel? Could more compromised hands touch a work of fiction than those of a movie producer? Or less imaginative ones than those of a member of the Gore family? Not to punish the daughter for the virtues of the father, but Big Al and his next of kin seem too sensible to make good novelists. They're statespeople, pillars of the liberal establishment, concerned public-spirited citizens who can consider the fate of the globe but not, one would think, the inner life of an individual. Good fiction requires passion, not irrefragable civility. What made Kristin think she could beat the family curse?

The protagonist of Sammy's Hill (what a godawful title) is Sammy Joyce, a 26-year-old health-care specialist on the staff of an Ohio Senator named Robert Gray. Known to his staff as "RG," Gray is honest and fair-minded, a man truly interested in issues. His reputation carries him onto the Democratic Presidential ticket as the running mate of Governor Max Wye. The pair win the election in November. At book's end, RG packs up to make the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue, taking Sammy with him to the office of the Vice President, from which she will now help him tackle the health-care crisis.

Immediately one thinks of the crack Jay Leno made on the Tonight show after reading a synopsis of the novel: "Apparently, that boring gene doesn't fall far from the tree." Ms. Gore's maiden effort is indeed part wonky political novel, but mostly it is Bridget Jones Goes to Washington. (One hears Mr. Weinstein exhaling in relief.) True to the archetype from which she springs-ultimately Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice -Sammy is an awkward everygirl with a lively mind who doesn't quite fit into society's idea of what a young lady should be. She is too internal, too goofy, to please the masses. A self-described "dork," she chats up telemarketers because she likes them. She has a series of goldfish she cannot keep alive; the last, having survived a power outage that froze his bowl, she dubs Shackleton.

Also true to her fictional forebears, Sammy is torn between two men: seamy Aaron Driver, a speechwriter for the sleazy and ambitious Senator John Bramen; and nice Charlie Lawton, a journalist for The Washington Post. Aaron is sexier, but all the while he's dating Sammy he's also keeping a bit on the side in New York. V. bad.

Sammy devotes much of her psychological energy to trying to appear competent and professional, a policy analyst for the world's foremost representative body. Not likely: She has a gift for embarrassing herself. She first meets Charlie, the Post writer, when she accidentally knocks him over trying to back subtly out of a Senate committee briefing room. More grievously, she sends a dirty e-mail to Aaron, only to find that she's c.c.'d it to his entire high-powered address book. Charlie, honest as Darcy, reports on it in The Post under the headline "Rx for Trouble: Health Care Aide Spreads Dirty Mass E-Mail."

This second unpromising encounter between Charlie and Sammy does nothing to dissuade the reader that they'll wind up together. This book has no suspense or tension, no plot twist you can't see kicking up dust in the distance. Actually, I don't think narrative tension is particularly important in this sort of drama; what the reader wants is sharply drawn characters. Ms. Gore, perhaps because she's trained in the quick hits of comedy writing, doesn't deliver. Aaron isn't someone you'd want to screw and Charlie isn't someone you'd want to cuddle; RG doesn't inspire and Senator Bramen doesn't repulse. You know what Ms. Gore is trying to do-you can almost imagine an actor doing it-but you don't feel it.

The novel lives or dies with Sammy. Here Ms. Gore has a road map, and goodness knows she tries to follow it. Sammy often sounds like Bridget Jones: "I was disgruntled to discover, upon critical examination in my bathroom mirror, that I had not pulled off the supermodel transformation as scheduled." At one point, she promises herself that in the next half-hour she will work on her inner peace. She gets pimples and wears an ugly sweater-a "spray of spangles around the neckline"-to an important meeting.

But whereas Helen Fielding convinces us that Bridget is not just a woman who thinks she's a loser, but a woman who many others are certain is a loser, one never doubts for a minute that Sammy Joyce is a winner. She can talk about how intimidated she feels until America adopts a single-payer health-care system, but whether she's having sex with the wastrel Aaron or briefing RG on the virtues of Canada's drug-price restrictions, Samantha-like her creator-never seems less than lovable. She's endearing while pretending she isn't.

A curiosity in Sammy's Hill -and by no means to the novel's advantage-is that Robert Gray, Sammy's boss, is the double of the author's father. RG is "a good-looking man [whose] gray flecks … made him look distinguished." He's "serious about everything," Samantha writes, "[and] it was clear that his focus was on his mission rather than himself. I realized how rare this was the more I was exposed to other politicians." RG is what makes Sammy run, her real love. I leave it to the therapists to figure out whether such father-love is healthy for Ms. Gore; for the reader, it's a problem. The Al Gores of this world do not make good fictional characters.

Why not? It's the decency thing again. And it's Kristin Gore's fatal flaw, just as it was her father's. Cloning Bridget Jones sounds easy, but it's actually hard if you haven't lived its message: The world is a cruel, lonely place and we survive in it only through acts of private generosity, the most exquisite of these being love. Bridget Jones smoked, binged, drank like a fish, bought lottery tickets and spent hours checking her messages. Sammy's creator makes her a workaholic, the patriotic Ms. Gore's message being that serious, public-spirited and trusting people win out in life.

That's not a message that resonates with readers. The stunning author photo of Kristin-streaky blond hair and perfect Gore choppers-says it all. Not just about the novel, but about the November election. If George Bush beats John Kerry, it won't be because of Teresa's loose lips or Osama's sleeper cells, but because of Vanessa and Alexandra, Senator Kerry's handsome, intimidating daughters. Albert Gore was similarly graced. His triad of sirens-the alpha female Karenna, the literary Kristin and the mysterious Sarah-flanked him when he spoke, but beautiful daughters don't help a pol connect with the crowd. In fact, no Presidential candidate with an attractive daughter has, by my reckoning, won the Presidency in the television era: Margaret Truman? Tricia Nixon? Amy Carter? Chelsea Clinton? It's odd to think that the Bush twins, Barbara and Jenna, with their petty truancies and those bodies that not even Vogue could make look good, could be the Bush campaign's secret weapon, but it's true. For that matter, they also strike me as more promising novelists. At least they have issues.

It doesn't seem fair, does it? But as RG tells Sammy when one of her drug bills gets killed in a political horse trade, "That's simply the way it is …. End of story." Somewhere out there, I hear Karl Rove laughing-or is it Harvey Weinstein crying?

D.T. Max will publish his first book, The Dark Eye: A Scientific and Cultural History of Mad Cow and Other Prion Diseases (Random House), in the fall of 2005.

British biographer Richard Holmes is intimate with literature's greats. He's a natural gossip with an eye for detail: Shelley had a library on his doomed sailboat; Boswell thought of patenting a device that slid the sleeper out of bed automatically. He tells his stories with an erudite, lighter-than-air writing style. Here's how he opens an essay on the long-lost papers of a friend of Byron's: "Scrope Berdmore Davies, whose remarkable trunk caused considerable excitement in London literary circles this winter, was a university don and a society gambler–a combination of métiers that would have interested Dostoyevsky, and which certainly fascinated Byron." And he's got more than a little of the prosecutor in him. Just when his ideas get to seem a little speculative, he persuades us with a forgotten diary, a manuscript tucked into the back of a book, a letter lost in an archive.

"There is something frequently comic," he wrote in his 1985 book Footsteps , "about the trailing figure of the biographer: a sort of tramp permanently knocking at the kitchen window and secretly hoping he might be invited in for supper. How many of Shelley's houses I stood outside, knocking and knocking!" But Mr. Holmes doesn't just knock. He jimmies the catch while the owner is out, climbs in, finds precisely what's valuable and lets himself carefully out. He combines the delicacy of the literary essayist with the get-the-story-no-matter-what imperative of the journalist, a potent combination.

His new collection of essays, Sidetracks , is a successor to Footsteps . The earlier book was wondrous, a combination travelogue, lives of the Romantic poets and their retinues, and rumination on the art of biography. It's a series of brief takes on historical figures. Mr. Holmes went to Paris in the wake of the unrest of the 60's to trace the steps of an earlier generation of English radicals like Wordsworth and Byron. His rallying cry is a graffito he sees on a Paris wall: "Imagination au pouvoir ." All power to the imagination. So truly does he follow this precept that at one point a check bounces because he has dated it 1772. The anecdote is instructive: Past and present are fluid; all history is meta-history.

Sidetracks is another work of starts and stops, of "seeking and snuffling" on biographical trails that don't quite pan out. It's a record of dead ends. Mr. Holmes explains it this way: "To be sidetracked is after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever. But no true biographer would mind that, if he can take a few readers with him."

Sidetracks isn't Footsteps . It doesn't have that miraculous balance. It has instead the slight staleness of an omnium-gatherum–"required writing," as Philip Larkin put it. Still, there are many special moments in the new collection. How could there not be? Nosing around the lives of Romantic, pre-Romantic and simply lowercase-R "romantic" literary figures is Mr. Holmes' gift. There's a perceptive short essay on the poet Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton was born in 18th-century Bristol, but he wrote his poems in the voice of a 15th-century monk he called Thomas Rowley, a name he'd seen on a gravestone. So convincing were the poems that many critics of the time believed they were really Rowley's. Chatterton's poetry was thus an early and particularly imaginative act of biography. There's also an excellent essay on young James Boswell in Holland, haplessly trying to improve himself, get laid, patent his magic bed–and record it all in his journals.

The meatiest piece is "The Feminist and the Philosopher," a version of which was originally published as an introduction to a Penguin Classic. It's the story of the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the radical political philosopher William Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft is Mr. Holmes' ur -subject. She was beautiful, intensely alive and a good letter writer. And everyone she knew felt compelled to write about her. Indeed, the narrative of Footsteps sputtered and coughed as Mr. Holmes looked for a protagonist among the engagé English intellectuals in Revolutionary France. Then he found Wollstonecraft, "brisk, cheerful, daring, strangely modern … my exemplar and my guide."

Fifteen years later, Mr. Holmes is still in love. Wollstonecraft is back from the Revolution. She has been dumped by the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. She has had a child with him. Godwin is a stiff, unpopular man, a radical theorist about to be knocked down by the reactionary politics of post-Revolution England. They meet and insult one another–Wollstonecraft finds Godwin uncool. Mutual affection ensues, "friendship melting into love." (The phrase is Godwin's.) Theirs is the sort of relationship Manhattanites can appreciate. Godwin and Wollstonecraft live together but keep separate offices. They make common cause against enemies and edit each other's work. The sex is wonderful. Mary in a later note to Godwin: "I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections–very dear–called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair." Mary becomes pregnant, but, tragically, she dies in childbirth (the baby grows up to become Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the poet's wife and the author of Frankenstein ).

Godwin is left prostrate by his lover's death. In a burst of energy he writes Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman . It is a detailed, unflinching tribute to Mary, an early form of the warts-and-all biography. It makes their friends furious. Mr. Holmes praises Godwin's late-blooming humanity, his emergence from theory into life, noting that "his biographic explorations are far more convincing than his philosophic ones."

But are they? Here's where I part company with Mr. Holmes. It's not at all clear from the passages he quotes that recording life was Godwin's real gift. His prose never quite comes up to his remarkable subject. It's awkward, blown-up. Here's Godwin on the end of Mary's marriage to Gilbert Imlay: "It is sufficient to say that the wretchedness of the night which succeeded this fatal discovery of Imlay's unfaithfulness, impressed her with the feeling, that she would sooner suffer a thousand deaths, than pass another of equal misery." A thousand deaths? Equal misery? It's second-rate Samuel Johnson. It makes me wonder why Mr. Holmes, his own ear so well-tuned, praises it so lavishly. Is it because Godwin gave up philosophy for biography, idea for life?

Mr. Holmes believes that a preference for people who feel is innate to biography. "Biography itself," he writes in Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage , "with its central tenet of empathy, is essentially a Romantic form." This seems limiting–what about the role of analysis and criticism?–but it's also self-fulfilling. Mr. Holmes is most famous for his biography of Shelley, and more recently a two-volume Coleridge. Both of these figures were destined to be Romantics in their prose as much as in their lives. They lived in what Godwin called "the empire of feeling." They tried to preserve the intensity of personal experience in their writing. Not surprisingly, Richard Holmes grooves on them. He is on the book-laden boat that Shelley sails into oblivion in the Gulf of Spezia. He, with Coleridge, awakes from a dream about the Khan Kubla and is unfortunately called out by that great literary head-scratcher, the unnamed person on business from Porlock.

One suspects that Mr. Holmes' own relationship with his wife, the novelist Rose Tremain, helped determine his take on Wollstonecraft and Godwin. There are plenty of asides in Footsteps and Sidetracks that suggest that, like Godwin, Mr. Holmes saw himself in his early years as "unlovable"–all that knocking on the windows of homes where long-dead poets lived–and that he, too, made a redemptive marriage later in life. If we were dealing with an ordinary biographer, this kind of remark would be out of bounds. (Who cares about Leon Edel's private life?) But self-identification is the very point of the Holmes project. In Footsteps , its function is quite complicated. The interplay between what Mr. Holmes experiences tracking down Robert Louis Stevenson or Shelley or Wollstonecraft and what they experience in their own lives, his trick of writing a book in which he is influenced by his subjects and, rather wonderfully, his subjects are influenced by him, comes off as an elaborate metaphysical play. It's part of the fun. In Sidetracks , it feels as though the decks are stacked for romance and Romantics against thought and thinkers.

Is the Romantic sensibility such a wonderful one? One admittedly deformed branch gave us Hitler via Friedrich von Schiller and Richard Wagner. But this sort of intellectual analysis is not where Holmes' heart is–and with Holmes it's always about the heart. He is like one of those elderly opera-goers who nods through the early scenes and only perks up when the lovers pledge amor' eterno . Then it's back to his daydream until the climactic moment that sends one or the other lover to an early grave–and then the opera-goer sighs, "How romantic!"

D. T. Max, a contributing editor at The Paris Review, writes frequently about literature.

Is it possible to capture the human condition in 270 pages? In City of God , his 10th work of fiction, E.L. Doctorow gives it a try.

City of God has many voices and many time frames. It has poetry, Holocaust memoir and descriptions of the formation of the universe. Einstein and Wittgenstein make appearances. Its ambitions are equal to any millennial task. Yet its achievements are more domestic than you might expect. Mr. Doctorow's wide lens quickly focuses in on recent events on our small island. That's just as well because that's when his book is at its best. When he writes about 15 billion years of history, he gets lost in the cosmos; when he writes about Jewish soldiers in World War II, or the look of the Manhattan waterfront, he shows that there are few novelists with talent as deep as his.

City of God begins as a millennial mystery. We learn of a peculiar dilemma facing Thomas Pemberton, the priest in charge of St. Timothy's Espicopal Church on the Lower East Side: An eight-foot brass cross is missing from behind the altar. At first, Pemberton suspects a crackhead and goes to flea markets looking for it. Then he suspects the local art dealers. But soon he gets a call from a husband-and-wife rabbinical couple who run a new organization called the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. Sarah Blumenthal and Joshua Gruen know where the cross is: It's on their roof. It showed up there in the middle of the night. Either the cause was a freak tornado or a deus ex machina . In short order, one kind of mystery has replaced another. Is Jesus looking to convert?

If Jesus wants to call a halt to Christianity on a nice round anniversary, Pemberton is the man to receive the message. He's a 60's refugee who, after 30 years of trying, is now close to giving up his struggle to reclaim his religion from its track record, which for him reached its lowest low in the Holocaust. Here's an exercise Pemberton gives his congregation: "I asked them to imagine … what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn't some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. Something as earth-shaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau.… I went into some possibilities. A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp?"

The Episcopalian hierarchy isn't wild about such sermonizing. Hairshirts were fine for the early Christians, but that was then. The higher-ups reassign Pemberton to hospice work on Roosevelt Island. This is just a way station for him. If God's only begotten son has abandoned Christianity, how can he not follow? At novel's end, he converts, too. He joins the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism and finds solace in a faith with less to apologize for.

City of God has much to admire in it, not least that this is the first philo-Semitic novel in recent memory written by a Jewish writer. (I'm not counting the sentimental Chaim Potok.) Perhaps it should be welcomed just for balance. There are some astonishing set pieces in this book, too. Most notable is a narrative fractured throughout the book in which Sarah Blumenthal's father describes his experiences as a boy in the Kovno ghetto during the Second World War. Basing his narrative on a victim's diary, Mr. Doctorow has a chance to show the compact scene-drawing skills that have served him so well over the years. His smooth economical style–I am a moral man telling you a moral story–reinforces his core political point: A single righteous soul can undermine an evil army.

There's a wonderful passage about a young Jewish bombardier's experiences in World War II. It is written in a sort of loose blank verse reminiscent of David Jones' poetry, full of eerie coincidences that reach toward myth. When his plane is shot down over France, he parachutes through stormy clouds and lands roughly, dragged by his chute: "And in the ensuing silence he realized/ he held in one hand an ulna/ a tibia in the other./ He'd arrived in a field of the war before,/ reopened by an errant shell of this war./ It was the improvised graveyard of ancient bones/ and skulls … / the skeletal warriors of his father Ben's generation/ hastily shoveled under as the Great War moved on."

I admire Mr. Doctorow's daring for trying to pull this off–and succeeding.

But I have trouble with the book's basic premise, which I read as: Judaism good (or at least Judaism as redefined by the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, a sort of hyper-Reconstructionism); Christianity bad. The flip side of philo-Semitism is anti-Christian bias. Coming in for the most blame is St. Augustine–the philosophy behind his City of God is at the opposite extreme from Mr. Doctorow's leftist humanitarianism. According to St. Augustine, Romans, Jews and other unbaptized souls aren't just mistaken–they're damned. Mr. Doctorow, through Pemberton, treats this as a crucial moment in the evolution of the modern world–a considerable simplification.

Intolerance has roots in Judaism, too. Two thousand years of divergent history have done a great deal to obscure this fact, but if one is going back all the way to Augustine, why not go back to Abraham? No sooner has God chosen him than Abraham goes to his father's house and smashes all the Pagan idols. Can you blame him? The glee, the revelation: just one God, not dozens? And you'd damn well want everyone to share your discovery. The very nature of monotheism is tribal.

Another problem with City of God is the narrator, a writer named Everett, a stand-in for Mr. Doctorow down to the Long Island home and the Bronx High School of Science diploma. Everett is following Pemberton around in order to turn him into a character in a novel. This Rothian setup has comic potential, never realized. Everett has very little love for his subject. He prefers to ruminate. He meditates on how language and physics and stories resonate with a parallel instability. He uses words like "steatopygous" and "flocculent."

When Everett imagines himself in the heavens–"As the earth spins on its axis, its planetary sloppage of water rises in tidal swells continuously around its periphery, bulging like the cornea of a farsighted eye"–he nearly collapses under the Nova -style verbiage. He's a luftmensch who can't quite get airborne.

Most peculiarly, he has this thing about movies–the superficiality of the plot, the simplification of motive, the thinness of the vocabulary. "Film language is an oxymoron," Everett declares. "Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions." He takes a meeting with B., a film director who wants him to write a screenplay. Everett finds him … shallow.

Has Mr. Doctorow seen a movie lately? One can almost imagine this story in the hands of Paul Thomas Anderson, the innovative director of Magnolia . As he did in that film, Mr. Anderson might bring all the characters together to sing a threnody for our civilization in the culminating scene. How about "Wise Up" out of the mouths of the Kovno ghetto commandant, Pemberton, Jesus, Einstein and St. Augustine? This is more than a notion. The structure of City of God , as of Ragtime , owes a lot to film grammar. The conversations picked up in the middle, the closeups, the interpolations of the long Holocaust story–all these resemble film, and film-inflected fiction. Indeed, part of the chafing one feels while reading this book is its ambition to transcend the linearity of reading. Mr. Doctorow is not a self-hating Jew–but he turns out to be a self-hating screenwriter.

Every economic and political system needs a philosopher to stamp the lives of the rank and file with meaning, a wise man to tell the people who they are. There could be no true Romans before Virgil or Communists without Marx. The British subconsul in India knew his Hakluyt and his Kipling. It made him stand straighter when "God Save the Queen" was played. Consider Manhattan at the close of the you-know-what. Those tired brokers folding themselves into their hired cars at the end of a long day, those legal associates calling their fiancés to say, "Sorry, dinner's off; I'm working late on a deal." Why do they do it? Who tells them what they do is not only necessary but right? Who gives them their identity?

Adam Smith? Too brutal. Walt Whitman? Too wacky. Tom Wolfe? Too too. Perhaps there's no one. Perhaps there isn't a philosopher for our giddy post-Cold War capitalism, because there can't be. That's what I'd say. Money moves so fast that thought simply gets out of the way. The Nasdaq is beyond the structures of discourse.

Frederick Turner, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Shakespeare's 21st-Century Economics , thinks otherwise. According to Mr. Turner, our muse has been hiding in plain sight all along: Time to brush up your Shakespeare.

But this is not a how-to manual like the newly published Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage . Mr. Turner is not handing out directions to the corner office. He's repositioning Shakespeare as our prosperity's cheerleader.

Mr. Turner acknowledges the evident objection. "The reader who has encountered Shakespeare in school or university may find … [this] surprising, even shocking," he writes. Shakespeare lived in a world of words. What did he know about finance? His experience of modern markets was tempered by layers of feudal and royal perquisites. His America was an island ruled by an intellectual, a brave new world where money was unknown. Prospero, despite the name, holds a book, not a wallet.

But Mr. Turner flips the coin to show us Shakespeare as Jacobean "media tycoon." While other playwrights lived one step ahead of the sheriff, Shakespeare was an instinctive bourgeois. An eager acquirer of property, he bought a home in Stratford, inherited another, picked up some tithe leases at a good price and capped it off with a choice building in central London. He was a partner in his own theater company. When he retired, he was worth the equivalent, roughly, of a million dollars. No Park Slope intellectual snob, Mr. Turner argues, Shakespeare's core insight is that "human-created value is not essentially different from natural value." In plainer language, Shakespeare loved art, nature and money.

Mr. Turner finds confirmation for his theory in the plays, which he sees as a serial advertisement for capitalism. He notes, first, Shakespeare's luxuriant language. His vocabulary and syntax are the poetic equivalent of an Internet I.P.O. Flirtation with chaos is part of their vigor. They refute limits. Second, Mr. Turner sees the plays as espousing a free-market ethos. There is for instance The Winter's Tale , which he reads, Keynes-like, to suggest that growth is a prerequisite for prosperity. "Contrary to the conventional wisdom," he writes, The Merchant of Venice "actually endorses the taking of interest." Shylock's flaw is not greed–greed is good–but fanaticism. He forgets the market is never personal. He should have doubled his money and got out. A pound of flesh has no resale value.

Mr. Turner notes how in Shakespeare fiscal terms like "trust," "goods" and "bond" had none of the deadness that surrounds them today. He's right: If someone bets you "dollars to doughnuts," you're probably stuck with a bore on an airplane. This was not always so. Money once was the most lyrical of languages. In the opening of King Lear (King Lira?), Cordelia tells her father, "I love your majesty/ According to my bond." Lear sees Cordelia as an ingrate unable to verbalize her emotions. Generations of critics (perhaps thinking of themselves) have seen her as an idealist, unwilling to suck up to get ahead. Mr. Turner sees her as simply eloquent. For him, she is touching on the primal stuff of life, because financial arrangements make life livable. Family and culture, not to mention comfort and affluence, are impossible without them. The "wisdom … of bonds and obligations," Mr. Turner writes, "[is] that … spiritual and emotional ties are always embodied–even incarnated, in the religious sense–in economic relations, and economic relations are the medium out of which the highest expressions of heart and spirit emerge." Cordelia owes her dad her love–that, beautifully, is the bottom line.

Why does Mr. Turner care about a long-dead playwright's take on cash flow? For most of us Shakespeare is the pre-eminent poet of the English language. Full stop. His stock is a steady earner (compare with Milton, who has been practically delisted); there's no need to boost Shakespeare's value by erecting a statue in front of the Exchange. Besides, Mr. Turner is not a popularizer. His aim is to settle a score with the intellectual classes, who, in his opinion, turned their backs on free-market ideals to embrace the great evils of communism and fascism. From the 1930's until 1989, the people of Eastern Europe and elsewhere lived with the results of this folly. Then, in a series of bloodless revolutions, ordinary citizens–Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Corazon Aquino et al.–threw off communism and authoritarian government and brought their countries back to free enterprise and democracy. Mr. Turner reprises this well-known history whenever he gets a chance, sometimes sounding like a Shakespearean messenger, dressed in tights, lugging a herald's horn, reporting on an off-stage battle. His goal is to put Shakespeare's prestige behind this capitalist coup.

Unlike many poets, Shakespeare rarely gets pressed into service in the culture wars. It's useful to know why, because the principal fault of this odd, intriguing book is not that it's wrong, but that it's arbitrary. Even an argument based on biographical fact can be misleading. The image of Shakespeare the prosperous burgher depends on the surviving legal documents–but legal documents tend to give that impression. And they're pretty much all we have. What did Shakespeare look like? We can't be sure. How did he compose? We have no manuscripts we can be certain are in his hand.

The plays tend to be conservative in message, but perhaps this is because acting troupes were dependent on noble and royal patronage. Shakespeare kept his head down. What did he really believe? In many cases, he's on record both ways, sort of, depending on which critic you trust.

Truly, the plays point in all directions. If Mr. Turner is right, and the word "bond" to Shakespeare was as mellifluous as "flower," connoting all that is good and natural in the world, why, in The Merchant of Venice , is the word spat like a curse?

And then there's Timon of Athens , a play as far as we know, written around the same time as King Lear . Generous Timon begins rich, surrounded by friends. But they turn their backs on him when he goes bankrupt. Abandoned and bitter, he becomes a desert recluse. No warm talk of bonds, debentures and mortgages here. Timon hates the world and its artificial constructs. Only nature can be trusted. A couplet tells the story: "Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt?/ Since riches point to misery and contempt?" Not much of a mantra for day traders.

Oh, has a novel ever had a murkier provenance than this one? I mean, fires and file cabinets with multiple drafts and handwritten notes on loose pieces of paper and a widow who changed her mind? "The real quality of the paint is always determined by the man who ships it rather than by those who mix it," the luckless narrator of Invisible Man learns. Cut and paste and, whoosh, call it a novel.

I don't think Ellison would have minded the battle royal over the publication of Juneteenth . No one was fonder of the polyphony of American democracy than Ralph Waldo Ellison; he enjoyed it so much it practically consumed him.

Still, have any of the disappointed critics actually read the words on the page? They're terrific. The language tightens the scrotum, it's so good. O.K., maybe it's just one riff of the novel Ellison spent 45 years trying to finish. Maybe it's not a novel at all. I have my doubts about whether a novel with vast American themes, a novel that embraces "realism extended beyond realism," as Ellison described his perpetual work in progress, is achievable, not unless your name is Melville. (The whale got away. Let's admit that.) But Juneteenth contains the most resonant and alluring uses of the American idiom I've read in a while. It's got dream speech and movie talk and the music of the revival meeting and the language of the juke joint all rolled into one. It rolls and riffs. Get down to the bookstore and open it and read, brothers and sisters, read.

Juneteenth doesn't quite have a plot. What it has is an extended two-character interaction that at times forms itself into a coherent narrative and other times seems to follow more the baggy logic of a dream. In the beginning, we are in 50's Washington, D.C., and Adam Sunraider, a xenophobic racist senator, lies in his hospital bed, victim of an assassination attempt. He is kept company by a black preacher named Reverend A.Z. Hickman, a.k.a. God's Trombone. What can be the connection between the two men? Two hints emerge: Sunraider's oratory sounds a lot like preaching; and he starts calling Hickman "Daddy." Intermittently, Sunraider regains awareness. The aged Reverend Hickman nods off. Their states of consciousness merge. Their trains of thought meet in a kind of oblique call and response–and ultimately a story gets told.

Sunraider was Hickman's adopted son, it turns out, a light-skinned boy he named Bliss (as in ignorance is …). Hickman had trained Bliss for the family business. His main job was to pop out of a huge coffin at revivals and cry out: "Lawd, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Was Hickman behind the assassination attempt? Was he trying to put Bliss in a coffin for real? After all, Bliss had turned against his own people. He had exposed black weakness as only one of their own could. Bliss, for his part, imagines he has successfully fled his blackness. His

"hi-yaller"skin allows him to steal the perquisites of superiority in a racist society. The truth turns out to be more complex. As Hickman and Bliss delve deeper into their past, we learn the secret of Bliss' birth. He is white. Hickman knew it, but raised him in the black community, hoping to create a man who could bridge the gap and bring people together, a new Lincoln.

This makes the book sound cleaner than it is. In fact, there are a lot of loose ends, big and small. Some are probably the result of the crewcut the volume's editor, John F. Callahan, gave the original manuscript; others come from the fact that the manuscript was far from finished when Ellison died, age 80, in 1994. It's not clear to me whether a white woman who tries to kidnap the 6-year-old Bliss at a revival meeting is the same woman who, it is revealed later, gave birth to him and abandoned him to Hickman. The ending of the novel, a dream sequence in which Sunraider wanders into an eerie bird shoot, is wonderful–but I can't see how it brings this particular story to an end. Bliss seems one chapter short of being as full a literary creation as Hickman.

If nothing else, Juneteenth leaves you with a strong sense of what Ellison was trying to do during the mid-50's, when most of this text was written. He was already after a very different book than Invisible Man (1952), which became a best seller and won the National Book Award. Ellison's writing wasgrowing broader and more exuberant. Invisible Man 's paranoiddreamlike movement is like Dostoyevsky. Juneteenth is denser, darker (pun intended) and more gothic. The descriptions are Faulknerian, the dialogue by the more ascetic moderns, Joyce and Eliot. Ellison was abandoning "proper English" for the vernacular. There's plenty of room for the reader to explore what the behavior of a white man raised by a black man to think he is a black man means, but the point here is language. I had not expected Ellison to move on from Invisible Man with such speed. He was an astonishing learner. Reading Juneteenth , I understood the stories that circulated over the years about how Ellison was just too fond of this book to publish it; he liked sitting at home reading it, chuckling to himself. He was watching himself get better. It's only a shame time ran out, but then, I suppose, it had to.

Here's a representative passage, Hickman and Bliss' call and response as they explore slavery at a revival meeting. The occasion is Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865, the date that Union soldiers brought the slaves of Texas the news–two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation–that they were free.

What was it like then, Rev. Bliss? You read the scriptures, so tell us. Give us a word.

WE WERE LIKE THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES!

Amen. Like the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel's dream. Hoooh! We lay scattered in the ground for a long dry season. And the winds blew and the sun blazed down and the rains came and went and we were dead. Lord, we were dead! Except … Except …

… Except what, Rev. Hickman?

Except for one nerve left from our ear …

Listen to him!

And one nerve in the soles of our feet …

… Just watch me point it out, brothers and sisters …

Amen, Bliss, you point it out … and one nerve left from the throat …

… From our throat–right here !

… Teeth …

… From our teeth, one from all thirty-two of them …

… Tongue …

… Tongueless …

… And another nerve left from our heart …

… Yes, from our heart …

… And another left from our eyes and one from our hands and arms and legs and another from our stones …

Amen, hold it right there, Rev. Bliss …

… All stirring in the ground …

… Amen, stirring, and right there in the midst of all our death and buriedness, the voice of God spoke down the Word …

… Crying Do! I said, Do! Crying Doooo–

–these dry bones live?

He said: Son of Man … under the ground, ha! Heatless beneath the roots of plants and trees … Son of Man, do …

I said, Do …

… I said Do, Son of Man, Doooooo!–

–these dry bones live?

Amen! And we heard and rose up. Because in all their blasting they could not blast away one solitary vibration of God's true word…. We heard it down among the roots and among the rocks. We heard it in the sand and in the clay. We heard it in the falling rain and in the rising sun. On the high ground and in the gullies. We heard it lying moldering and corrupted in the earth. We heard it sounding like a bugle call to wake up the dead. Crying, Doooooo! Ay, do these dry bones live!

So if publishing Juneteenth was a mistake, let us have more of them.

Anyone involved in creating or canonizing The New Yorker of the 40's and 50's will hate Mary Corey's The World Through a Monocle: 'The New Yorker' at Midcentury . That's my guess. But I found it stimulating, not just in thinking about how to think about The New Yorker but about magazines in general. The title is misleading. It suggests that you're in for another celebration of the uniqueness of the magazine. Here at 'The New Yorker' , Remembering Mr. Shawn's 'New Yorker' , The World Through a Monocle –nothing jarring in that. In fact, though, Ms. Corey has more in common with Ninotchka than Brendan Gill or Ved Mehta. A lecturer in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she applies her synthesizing vision to questions that editors and writers don't have the time or the disposition to think about very often. What is the overall message of a magazine, including its advertising? What is its attitude toward women? What is its implicit class voice? If Ms. Corey had chosen to write about Jane Austen or the Free Speech movement, this approach would be cliché, another squirt from the cultural studies gun, but applied retroactively to The New Yorker in what she defines as its "greatest period of cultural potency," it's intriguing. She's trying to find out not only what talented writers as diverse as E.B. White, John Hersey, St. Clair McKelway and John Cheever had in common, but what readers actually took away from the magazine.

First, a warning: There are many things you won't find there. Ms. Corey has no opinion on David Remnick. She does not say whether she thinks Tina Brown destroyed William Shawn's legacy or resurrected the spirit of New Yorker founder Harold Ross. She does not care if Lillian Ross and William Shawn had a secret alliance. I suspect if you said to Ms. Corey, "meet me at the Century," she'd think, "Century City?"

Ms. Corey's heresy–the reason this book will not find a place on the New Yorker buff's shelf–is that she doesn't care about the difference between editorial matter and advertising copy. The reader takes them in, in the same way. She means nothing personal in applying this idea to The New Yorker . She tips her beret to the solidity of the famous wall that separated The New Yorker 's editors and writers from its advertising salespeople. Few magazines kept the wall intact as The New Yorker did when it came time to write about big business and pollution or the dangers of smoking. This purity, to Ms. Corey, is admirable but not material. The definition of a successful magazine is that the ads and editorial content work together, not apart. " The New Yorker served its postwar audience alternately as a shopping guide, an atlas and a Bible …," she writes. "By combining these disparate elements, the magazine was able to transmit a version of the real world that incorporated some of that world's most troubling features. Advertisements for cigarettes or whiskey or luxury liners were not seen as inimical to serious articles concerning African-American heroin addicts, unwed mothers, or the bombing of the Bikini Atoll."

Ms. Corey is not the first to point out that there was something weird about all those Tiffany and De Beers diamond ads in the pages of a magazine that championed life on a small Connecticut farm with a manual water pump. The mixed message of The New Yorker was something cultural critics such as Mary McCarthy were pointing out as early as the 40's, and by the 60's it had become a commonplace. But Ms. Corey is as far as I know the first to claim that the ads were not just reflective of The New Yorker 's success but key to it. She writes: "For socially conscious people of status and wealth, virtue was a precious commodity–a quality that made it easier to savor privilege." The guilty consumer was The New Yorker 's best customer and its ultimate product. At its peak, the magazine was third in circulation among weeklies, behind only Time and Newsweek . It was a national power.

Ms. Corey is less sure-footed when she analyzes the way The New Yorker depicted various groups in its pages, specifically communists, minorities and women. (The list seems arbitrary. Why not vegetarians?) She is often obvious. Her theorizing gets muddled. She substitutes the zinger for the larger thought. She points out, for instance, that The New Yorker took considerable risks in opposing Communist witch hunts at home but approved of America's participation in the conflict in Korea. "The magazine's approach to the Cold War [was] that Communism was indeed a threat to the United States," she writes, "but was not a threat in the United States. Anti-Communism was strictly an export good." Then she moves on to gender. She sees "a snarling contempt for women and a unequivocal disinterest in equality" in the magazine, adding that "the closer [it] got to home, the farther [it] veered from democratic principle." What about those American communists we just heard about? Or, for that matter, African-Americans? During founding editor Harold Ross' tenure, The New Yorker practiced a pointy-elbowed humor that spared no one. His was the humor of the speakeasy. As Ms. Corey points out, under Shawn, things tightened up. "'Kindly' and 'pleasant-faced' Negroes [now] seem[ed] to abound in the postwar New Yorker ," she notes, adding that even what she calls the "'Maids Say the Darndest Things' genre," "a series of humorous offerings describing servants' foolishness, illiteracy, bad grammar, and inability to decode the upper-middle-class text, entirely excluded black servants from its sizable canon."

Ms. Corey is mystified by this exclusion, which seems to me to follow the dictum that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual classes. The Irish were fair game in The New Yorker , as were the Italians and Southerners, who to many of the magazine's writers were as exotic as Catholics. Establishment New Yorkers who were Jewish (albeit reluctantly), like William Shawn and the Fleischmann family, the magazine's owners, felt more warmly toward blacks, with whom they didn't compete and whose history of oppression felt familiar. This sort of biographical explanation is hardly foolproof, but Ms. Corey should have explored it. As it is, the J-word never appears in these pages. As a Hegelian, Ms. Corey is allergic to biographical analysis–we are all playthings of larger cultural forces. Too bad, because she might have found that the personality of William Shawn alone explained a lot to her, especially the magazine's complex attitude toward women. It hired them, while it made fun of them, yet by 1954 a majority of New Yorker readers were women.

Also, Ms. Corey mistakenly assumes that everything that is in the pages of a magazine is put there for a purpose. Cobbling together a magazine is, in fact, a semi-desperate act.

All the same, I admire this book. It has the smell of honest intellectual effort to it, a whiff of Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, two writers who overcame misgivings similar to Ms. Corey's to become important New Yorker contributors. While Mary Corey is no McCarthy or Macdonald, she's a capable writer. And reader. She uncovers The New Yorker 's ideology without trampling those cool columns of elegant prose. She fights it, but like Ninotchka, she has a taste for bright, twinkling lights.

A slow moderating trend in Iranian politics at last resulted in the cancellation of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. At least that's the idea. I pray all the mullahs heard the word. On the assumption that Mr. Rushdie will be allowed to live out his natural lifespan, I feel O.K. pointing out that from start to finish the whole thing was like a gimcrack Rushdie fable, some exotic Rushdie catch hauled up from the sea of stories: the writer who grew visible by vanishing.

In nine years of fatwa , Mr. Rushdie published five books. He wrote plenty of reviews, and we read about him constantly. In London in 1994, I saw him at two literary parties in as many days. Soon afterward, back in Manhattan, I stood and applauded him at a New York Public Library reception. What sort of hiding is this, Salman-ji? Thanks to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Mr. Rushdie became a nabob, with the best table in the house. Only he couldn't make a reservation.

When the experience of living under that miserable fatwa finds a place in Mr. Rushdie's fiction, it will really be payback time, pataphysics squared. In the meantime, we have The Ground Beneath Her Feet , presumably the last book to be born in Mr. Rushdie's fecund captivity. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is another of the author's playful and baggy riffs on the novel. It is not his best, but it's not bad. It's got all of Mr. Rushdie's wondrous narrative tricks, his flirtations with postmodernism: the hyper-aware narrator, the story that seems all seams, lots of foreshadowing and back-cutting and that great magpie vocabulary of the former colonial with flypaper for ears. The drawback is the basic narrative, a comic epic starring star-crossed pop stars Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, as narrated by their childhood friend Rai, a photographer with a Rushdie-like gift for puns. As Bertolt Brecht said so memorably, "Boy meets girl. So what?"

It all begins in a maternity ward in Bombay in the 1930's. Lady Spenta Cama, wife of a prestigious Parsi lawyer, is pregnant. But the baby–Gayomart, she plans to call him–arrives stillborn. The delivery of his tiny corpse is quickly followed by a surprise: There was another baby in the womb. Thus Ormus Cama makes his entrance into the world over his twin's dead body. Meanwhile, V.V. Merchant and Ameer Merchant (no relation) have come to visit Lady Spenta at her bedside. They fall in love and marry, but their personalities turn out to be more different than the echo of their family names would suggest. V.V. is an archeologist, Ameer a developer. Their baby, little Rai, grows up torn between past and present, India and America, nostalgia and hope.

Soon Vina, a half-Greek, half-Indian girl born in America, comes to live with her father's distant relatives in Bombay. Vina happened to be out when her mother murdered her entire family and then committed suicide, so she (Vina) shares with Ormus and Rai a lively respect for the power of fate. When she meets Ormus outside a record shop, they fall in love. The harmony of The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the flow of Rai's observations on culture, history and personality. The melody is the love duet of composer Ormus and singer Vina. The grace notes are Mr. Rushdie's risky potshots at his tormentors. He decries the "public crooks" of India. He taunts "the men with the heavy weaponry … all those arnolds carrying terminators, all those zealous suicidists with their toilet-brush beards." He blasphemes. In my favorite passage in the book, Rai apostrophizes: "Let's not invent anything as cruel, vicious, vengeful, intolerant, unloving, immoral and arrogant as God just to explain a stroke of dumb, undeserved luck. I don't need some multi-limbed Cosmic Dancer or white-bearded Ineffable, some virgin-raping metamorphic Thunderbolt Hurler or world-destroying flood and fire Maniac, to take the credit for saving my skin. Nobody saved the other fellow, did they? Nobody saved the Indochinese or the Angkorans or the Kennedys or the Jews." Go, Salman, go!

When the lovers leave Bombay and chase one another around the world, Rai, half in love with each, follows to record it all. Ormus works at a pirate radio station off the coast of England. Then, a car wreck leaves him in a coma from which only Vina's kiss can wake him. They move to New York, make the club scene. They form the band VTO, whose album Quakershaker is the best selling disk since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . Quakershaker turns out to be more than just a hit. It is a portent. A series of earthquakes follow its success, culminating in the "great earthquake of '89," which cuts the ground away from beneath the ill-fated Vina's feet.

The surge of earthquakes is part of the shifting fault line between magic and realism in The Ground Beneath Her Feet . Gayomart, the stillborn twin, enjoys an afterlife worthy of a Stephen King novel. Ormus can't get him out of his head, literally. He brain-waves to Ormus the next big pop tune, and Ormus goes on to compose it. The gift takes practice. While still in Bombay, Ormus almost scoops Bob Dylan on "Blowin' in the Wind." He gets the tune but mishears the words ("The ganja, my hemp, is growing in the tin; the ganja is growing in the tin"). But he composes "Yesterday" faultlessly just ahead of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He becomes a huge and secretive international star. "How could he say," Rai points out, "I have a dead twin, I follow him in my dreams, he sings, I listen, and these days I'm getting better at hearing the words. Getting better all the time." There it is: Thanks to Gayomart, Ormus' career comes together. (Heh, heh.)

This is where Mr. Rushdie loses me. Ormus claims that he lives in the same world as Vina and Rai. With Gayomart's help, however, he can also see through to an alternate reality, like a tear in a movie screen. In the world they all share, Oswald's rifle jams, England sends troops to Vietnam, and Joseph Heller writes a novel called Catch-18 . In the world he can glimpse only sometimes, everything is more like our History 101. J.F.K. dies in Dallas, England sits out Indochina, etc. What purpose do these alterations serve? Realities are fungible and subjective, I'm hip to that, but I don't see how that matters in this case. You could write a book in which the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building changed places and all the New York taxis were painted green, but what would you have really changed?

Perhaps that's why this book failed to hold me in the end, despite its many wonders. Mr. Rushdie's best novels, Midnight's Children and Shame , have a casual feel, but the vision that created them is highly concentrated and pure. Every gambit pays off. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is hit-or-miss. It alternates great scenes and longueurs . Over all, it's far stronger on Bombay and childhood than on New York and rock. It's always just a little too absorbed by its own ingenuity, a little too pleased by what it's taking on, a little too there-for-its-own-sake. I prefer my magic realism with less ghee-whiz.

Now that he's gone–he says it's "99.9 percent" certain–we're ready for the summing up. But we've already been at it for years. Larry Bird, early in Michael Jordan's career, called him a god in human form. The longtime Laker star Jerry West, Mr. Clutch himself, said Mr. Jordan was the only player who reminded him of himself. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing this book recently in The New York Times , wrote that Mr. Jordan was a "magician," an "icon" and a "legend." But my favorite comment came from a member of the Spanish squad that played against the United States in the 1984 Olympics. "Michael Jordan?" a dazed Fernando Martin told an interviewer, "Jump, jump, jump. Very quick. Very fast. Very, very good. Jump, jump, jump."

Where Michael Jordan the athlete is concerned, I don't think David Halberstam's 17th book, Playing for Keeps , has much to add. This long study has the customary Halberstam virtues, but it also has a large problem: We know the story already. How can we not? We're awash in sports media. Perhaps a kind of willed ignorance of this fact is necessary in writing a book of this kind. Mr. Halberstam's basic conclusion is that Mr. Jordan was the dominant player of his age because he was the most talented, the hardest working and the one who wanted most to win. Very good. Very fast. Jump, jump, jump. He was also the most beautiful, thanks to a dazzling smile. He took the game "to a new level." (I counted this phrase and its variants 26 times in Playing for Keeps , but I'll come back to Mr. Halberstam's style later.)

Mr. Halberstam starts his story with Mr. Jordan as a young high school player in Wilmington, N.C. (He neglects to mention that baby Michael was born in our very own Brooklyn.) As a freshman, Mr. Jordan was so skinny he was actually cut from the varsity basketball team. But he filled out, and he worked hard, and by his senior year in high school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which had an excellent basketball program, was certain it wanted him. "There was a kind of underground quality to the early sightings of Jordan," Mr. Halberstam recalls, "not unlike the early sightings of the young Julius Erving." Pro scouts and other interested parties began to notice. When Mr. Jordan hit the winning basket in the final seconds of the N.C.A.A. finals as a freshman against Georgetown in 1982, the secret was out.

I'll skip over the 1984 N.B.A. draft,Mr. Jordan's high-scoring early years, the Bulls' first "three-peat," the Dream Team, the Nike endorsements, Space Jam , the gambling controversies, the horrific murder of Mr. Jordan's father, Mr. Jordan's stint with the Chicago White Sox organization and so on.

If you don't know about these already, it's unlikely that you'll be much interested in Mr. Halberstam's book.

Let's fast-forward instead to June 1998. There are 6.6 seconds on the clock. The Utah Jazz are trying to force a seventh and deciding game in the N.B.A. championships. Mr. Jordan has just scored to bring the Bulls within one and has quickly stolen the ball back. Turn to the photograph in the insert of Playing for Keeps or go to Barnes & Noble and thumb Mr. Jordan's own glossy keepsake, For the Love of the Game , and see the same moment from three angles. Mr. Jordan is to the left of the key. He has feinted, causing Bryon Russell the defender to stumble. Mr. Jordan has squared up and released a jumper. Look at the faces of the Utah fans–the mouths open in anguish, the woman in the grayish shirt collapsing onto the broad shoulder of her boyfriend, whose own fists are clenched. It's like a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: There, in a distant corner of the frame, is a single Chicago fan, his arms raised up, beaming, living an entirely different moment.

The match-up of Mr. Halberstam on Mr. Jordan is most successful when Mr. Halberstam gets to play to his strengths. During his long journalistic career he has written often and interestingly on business, race and culture. This helps Playing for Keeps stay a move ahead of most sports books. It is the skillful recapitulation of a business and cultural moment. Mr. Jordan's arrival in the league, as Mr. Halberstam points out, happened to coincide with David Stern's elevation to N.B.A. commissioner. Mr. Stern and Mr. Jordan, hand-in-glove, with ESPN taping it all and Nike providing the footwear, changed basketball from a marginal sport with a drug problem into a worldwide pop-culture juggernaut. Fortune magazine estimated that during the course of his career, Mr. Jordan earned $10 billion for the league, the broadcasters and the advertisers. Mr. Halberstam observes astutely that Mr. Jordan's success as a pitch man derives from his remarkable position vis-à-vis America's most painful divide: "If … he of the brilliant smile," Mr. Halberstam writes, "was not burdened by the idea of race, why should you be burdened by it either?"

Time for a literary parlor game. Mr. Halberstam is to writing as blank is to basketball? But I have no idea who blank might be. Let's try something else, let's give each home-team author a New York streetscape. I'll show you how it works. Janet Malcolm is Gramercy Park, perfect and fussily precise. Tom Wolfe is Third Avenue (sorry, Tom). Norman Mailer, of course, is 42nd Street, though by now he's over by the Fed Ex offices on 11th Avenue. In this game, Mr. Halberstam is literature's Lexington Avenue. His prose isn't always pretty, but it's readable. There are snarls, vendors blocking the lanes and many fender-benders (such as the following: "That first summer back, [Jordan] went out to Hollywood to shoot a goofy movie in which he co-starred with Bugs Bunny"). But in the end Mr. Halberstam gets you there. Not even the fact that Mr. Jordan reneged on an interview could stop our best and brightest.

Due to the pressure of publishing schedules, some questions go unanswered. I would have liked to know how long Mr. Halberstam thinks the world Mr. Jordan made will endure. Since the book went to press, the bubble is already showing signs of bursting. Mr. Jordan retired at the conclusion of a long owner lockout. Sneaker companies are beginning to question the wisdom of promoting sports stars. Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended for choking his Golden State coach, has come to the Knicks. In Mr. Halberstam's eyes, I imagine, this is three-quarters of the apocalypse. But we'll have to wait for the book tour to find out.

Mr. Halberstam doesn't try to guess what Mr. Jordan's second act will be. At his retirement press conference, Mr. Jordan's wife, Juanita (who appears in only one paragraph in Mr. Halberstam's book), announced that she expects her husband to stay home and help raise the kids. Others speculate that he will go to work for Nike or McDonald's. The New York Post says he is studying piano with Ahmad Rashad.

At the same press conference, when journalists asked Mr. Jordan why he was only "99.9 percent" sure he would retire, he responded defiantly: "Because it's my 1 percent and not yours. I chose to walk away knowing that I could still play the game. That's exactly the way I wanted to end it." My suggestion, offered in all humility, is that whatever this great icon, magician and legend turns to next, it shouldn't have too much to do with math.

Does the law require you to be wary of a man who sends you flowers? Must you ask why when a convicted felon wants to use your bank account to receive a wire transfer? Is giving your fellow man the benefit of the doubt (also known as generosity of spirit) a crime?

Yes, according to the verdict in The Crime of Sheila McGough , Janet Malcolm's seventh book, a beautifully written and tautly argued meditation-provocation on the law. The book is meant to reverse that court verdict, but it also subverts in a broader sense because it challenges our assumptions about what a story-a legal argument, a journalist's account, party gossip-must be.

The events, as narrated by Ms. Malcolm: In 1990, Sheila McGough (pronounced Mc- Guff ), a Washington, D.C., lawyer, was convicted of 14 felony counts in a Federal court and sentenced to three years in prison. The main charge was that she failed to keep in her attorney trust account $75,000 sent to her by a business associate of one of her clients. Instead, she followed her client's instructions and gave him the money, less $5,000 he owed her in legal fees. The business associate objected, sued and a settlement was reached. Three years later, the Government went after Ms. McGough. This is the surprising part: Even in an era when a President risks impeachment for lying in a civil suit, a case like this is unusual. There are so many exculpatory possibilities. Perhaps Ms. McGough made an innocent error. She was just out of law school. Perhaps her client tricked her. Send her to bar counseling or turn her over to Judge Judy. But disbarment and three years' time?

This is the sort of story Ms. Malcolm is drawn to. She likes to report on normal-seeming professionals-psychoanalysts, journalists, biographers-who turn out to have a complicated relationship with the truth. She pulls back the white collar to reveal the ring. Our soothsayers are not frauds, but they turn out to be fabulators. For them there is no truth, only story. To be able to determine the narrative shape of people's lives is intoxicating, and once they have tasted this power, they want more: new lives to reconfigure. Which involves them in something like seduction. The psychoanalyst buries himself in his "impossible profession." The journalist becomes "a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness." The biographer is like "the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers." In her new book, lawyers get their turn.

Here's some information the prosecutors made much of at the trial. Ms. McGough's client, Bob Bailes, had a history of fraud. She knew this. She also knew he often had no fixed business address and sometimes worked out of his car. Any fool could see that Bailes, who died in 1995, was a lifelong con man. Why couldn't Ms. McGough see it? The prosecution had an explanation: Bailes sent Ms. McGough flowers. This detail clinched the case. Here was a story the whole jury knew: Ms. McGough was a lonely woman, on her way to spinsterhood, lured into participating in crime by a practiced con man.

Ms. Malcolm rejects that story. She goes through the evidence and re-interviews the participants and makes Ms. McGough's case again. She finds evidence of false testimony and tampered-with documents. In large measure, she convinces you that the crime of Sheila McGough was no crime. The story the prosecution told was wrong.

For a writer of Ms. Malcolm's searching intelligence, this isn't enough of a challenge. For her, the real question isn't why justice miscarried. Justice gets botched a hundred times a day. The question is: Why Ms. McGough? If an error in handling an escrow fund doesn't usually land you in jail, why this time? If this book is to be believed, the strange and very Malcolm-ian answer is that Ms. McGough was guilty of non-narratability. She refused to turn her actions into a credible story. She was, Ms. Malcolm notes, both "almost preternatural[ly] honest" and "maddeningly tiresome and stubborn." I am who I am, in all my contradictions, Ms. McGough offered, I am true to life. The jury voted to convict on a Wednesday in late November-with time left over to do their Thanksgiving shopping.

Ms. Malcolm wants us to know that The Crime of Sheila McGough is as much an artifact as the crime of Sheila McGough. She reminds the reader that she has the hammer and the nails. She tells when she catches a cab, grabs a train, grows irritated or bored or skeptical, or runs out of tape. It is a style that has become ubiquitous among smarter feature journalists, and I blame her for that. She is great at it, though, the best. That's the construction job. Now for the seduction.

The journalist focuses on the subject; the subject experiences the exhilaration of being the center of the journalist's intense, quasi-erotic attention. Since she spelled out the dynamic so superbly in the now famous opening to The Journalist and the Murderer , I'll call it Malcolm's Law. Here it is again: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns-when the article or book appears- his hard lesson." This appears to shed light. Janet Malcolm casts herself in the role of a Bob Bailes. She is a con artist writing about a con artist and his dupe.

Perhaps. But Ms. Malcolm is like one of those velociraptors in Jurassic Park . She is always learning, testing for weaknesses. Could there be an exception to Malcolm's Law? She didn't see one when she wrote The Journalist and the Murderer . The key word was "every": every journalist, every subject. Joe McGinniss seduced and betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald. The critics, against her protests, added that in In the Freud Archives , Janet Malcom seduced and betrayed Jeffrey Masson (note all those J.M.'s). But what if the subject were so egoless, so innocent, that the seduction-betrayal dynamic short-circuited? What if a virgin were found who could resist the lure of narrative, who could hold at bay that "lumbering prehistoric beast that knocks over everything in its path as it makes its way through the ancient forest of basic plots"?

The description of the first meeting with Ms. McGough, at a downtown Manhattan coffeeshop, is a delight, Ms. Malcolm in full flower, full of surprising observations and quick slits with the analytic knife. Ms. McGough, she writes, "was small and blonde and pretty, and her voice was fresh and girlish, formed for phrases like 'Gee whillikers!' and inflected by habits of unremitting good sportsmanship. She looked younger than her 54 years. Prison had evidently not broken or marked her. With her pale, translucent skin and single-strand pearl necklace and decorous navy-blue suit, she might have been the director of a small foundation or a corporate wife from Scarsdale, in town for a matinee. She talked almost uninterruptedly for the two hours of our meeting.… [But she] was not interested in telling a plausible and persuasive and interesting story. She was out for the bigger game of imparting a great number of wholly accurate and numbingly boring facts."

Ms. Malcolm pursues the romance, anyway, going down to Washington, visiting her home, maneuvering to open Ms. McGough up for study. But Ms. McGough doesn't recognize what's going on. She believes in truth, not narrative. "The journalistic subject is normally someone with a story to tell; you might even say to sell," Ms. Malcolm writes. "With Sheila, the task, on the contrary, was to try to coax a story from the morass of her guileless and incontinent speech." The verbal clutter drives Ms. Malcolm crazy. "With Sheila there has never been any question of enjoyment," she writes, describing theirs as "the most abstinent of any journalistic relationship I have known." Ms. McGough is committing a new crime: She is wasting the journalist's time, just as she wasted the court's. If she were the jury, Ms. Malcolm would convict. But by the end of the book, a different feeling emerges, one of admiration: Ms. McGough "has settled into my imagination as an exquisite heroine," Ms. Malcolm writes, all the same happy to be rid of her. "When I think of [her], I am awed by her disdain for the disguises for self-interest that the world offers us so it can get its business done."

It may seem that this is too neat, that the story of the story hides a different moral. Perhaps Ms. McGough outbluffed Ms. Malcolm, perhaps she was guilty after all. Or, alternatively, Ms. Malcolm's lust cooled. Perhaps in the end a roué is relieved to find a girl who doesn't know or care about sex-and the journalist a subject indifferent to narrative.