Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth married in 1836, when he was 24 and she was 21. From then until the time of their divorce 20 years later, Catherine got pregnant at least a dozen times, had at least two miscarriages and gave birth to 10 children. Nine survived infancy, eight reached adulthood, and all of them disappointed their father, who lamented “having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.”

A new group biography, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (FSG, 256 pp., $25) by Robert Gottlieb, documents the lives of the mediocre progeny of a great man. Making use of existing scholarship, Mr. Gottlieb has digested the stories of the Dickens children into easily consumed biographical sketches, illustrated with photographs and portraits. But this neatly condensed book offers more than mere trajectories of not-so-great lives. Instead, Mr. Gottlieb, the dance critic for this paper, has produced a comparative study of child-raising, one that would seem to attest to the value of contemporary ideas: cuddling, affirmation, diagnosis of pathologies, psychopharmacology, college. The Victorians were more resigned. A child’s path through life was not so much guided as observed and judged, perhaps with the occasional input of a phrenologist. A failed child was a failure. A dead child was dead. “There are things about the Victorians that we will never understand,” Mr. Gottlieb writes. And yet, after brief contemplation of today’s pampered scions (George W. Bush, Paris Hilton, Chet Hanks), the Victorians might have had a point.

Dickens was 25 when his eldest son Charley was born. The author already enjoyed massive popular success, with The Pickwick Papers in serialization and Oliver Twist in the works. While it’s certain that having so many toddlers underfoot likely affected, say, Dickens’s description of the Jellyby household in Bleak House (“We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark ...”), it would be hard to identify any parallels between the extraordinary juveniles in Dickens’s books and his own brood. As Mr. Gottlieb notes, “There was, in fact, almost no overlap between the real children and the imagined ones.” By the time his own children reached adolescence, most of Dickens’s novels had been written—which is not to say that Dickens did not turn his own children into Dickensian sketches.

Three more children arrived by the time Dickens turned 30, and a pattern soon emerged: initial enthusiasm followed by utter disillusionment. An excitable father, Dickens seemed happiest during his children’s infancy. “He bombarded friends with news of their arrivals, their christenings, their charms, their accomplishments,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. Charley is referred to in letters as “the infant phenomenon” and “the infant wonder.” Frank, the fifth, is “decidedly a success—a perpetual grin is on his face: and the spoon exercise is amazing.” And of the youngest, known as Plorn, Dickens fondly wrote, “we have in this house the only baby worth mentioning; and there cannot possibly be another baby anywhere, to come into competition with him. I happen to know this, and would like it to be generally understood.”

The Dickens children were raised by Charles, Catherine and Catherine’s sister Georgina. Since Catherine spent much of the time between births recovering physically and suffering from postpartum depression, Georgina had primary maternal child-rearing duties. “Catherine represented all the messy business of life—sex, childbirth, ill health,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. “Georgina was the devoted mother/sister.” In the paternal role, Dickens took responsibility for polishing the children for public life. He monitored their education, discipline and careers. He demanded neatness and punctuality. He also presented them to the world at birth and at their comings of age, named them ambitiously (the eponyms included literary figures like Walter Savage Landor, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding and Edward Bulwer-Lytton), and provided them with lots of amusement and entertainment.

“What a wonderful father he was!” writes Mr. Gottlieb. At first, anyway. Life in the family’s house in London included elaborate holiday productions starring the children, written and produced by their father. The Thackerays and the Tennysons were family friends. Each child also earned his or her own nickname, including Mild Glo’ster (Mamie), Lucifer Box (Katey), Young Skull (Walter), The Ocean Spectre (Sydney) and Skittles (Alfred).

“The Plornish Maroon is in a brilliant state, beating all former babies into what they call in America (I don’t know why) sky-blue fits,” Dickens wrote of his youngest son, Edward, whose original nickname, “Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter,” Dickens soon abbreviated to “The Noble Plorn” and eventually just Plorn, the name by which Edward was known for the rest of his plain and forlorn life.

As the children grew, one by one, Dickens’s enthusiasm turned to ashes. Having earned his success and overcome childhood poverty while still a teenager through his own impressive energy and drive, his children’s complacency and lack of ambition disconcerted him. “I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son,” writes Dickens of Charley. (This “lassitude of character” is attributed to Charley’s mother.) Of Frank: “A good steady fellow ... but not at all brilliant.” And Plorn: “he seems to have been born without a groove. It cannot be helped. He is not aspiring or imaginative in his own behalf.”

Mr. Gottlieb writes with avuncular concern and sympathy for the Dickens children, who had to cope not only with a famous, exigent and publicly critical father but also a broken home. In 1857, Dickens fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress. “By 1858,” writes Mr. Gottlieb, “he had made up his mind to change his life and ruthlessly expelled Catherine from it, packing her off to her own establishment (with a generous settlement) and removing her children from her—except for Charley, now twenty-one and his own man.” The children floundered through this estrangement from their mother and a Victorian culture generally lacking notions of self-esteem, self-improvement or much self-examination.

The two girls were groomed for marriage, but the boys were expected to launch careers in the armed forces, business or abroad. In the 19th century, Mr. Gottlieb explains, “university was the exception, far from the rule—and since the boys had no particular academic aptitudes, university was not an option for them except for the eighth-born Henry, and he had to plead to go to Cambridge to study law rather than being sent abroad like five of the others.”

Mr. Gottlieb defends the boys in their plight, particularly those dispatched to the far corners of the empire (one ended up as an unsuccessful Canadian Mountie; another died in debt after traveling to India; two went to raise sheep in Australia). “Yes,” Mr. Gottlieb admits, “half a dozen of them appear somewhat unfocused, even feckless.” But Mr. Gottlieb’s keenness to overturn history’s verdict of their ineptitude wins over the reader. “The saddest story is that of Plorn, a sensitive and nervous boy who couldn’t even handle a normal school situation and was then sent off alone, at sixteen, to the raw world of the Australian outback,” he writes.

The two girls had their own troubles. Katey entered into a white marriage with the brother of Wilkie Collins, whom Mr. Gottlieb describes as probably homosexual, “perhaps not in practice but in inclination.” Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mamie, chose not to marry, and Mr. Gottlieb says she might have had “lesbian tendencies.” Regardless of Mamie’s sexual orientation, she ended up in a situation more out of a Henry James novel than a Dickens one: she did not leave home until after her father’s death, whereupon she entered into a possibly sexual relationship with a clergyman and his wife, a “shadowy couple” that she had met through her involvement in a charity movement called Muscular Christianity. The rest of the family thought they might have exploited her for her money.

Several of the children “were undermined by drink” or had gambling addictions. At least one of them probably would have been medicated today. “When he is in full school employment, there is a strange kind of fading comes over him sometimes; the likes of which I don’t think I ever saw,” writes Dickens of his eldest son, Charley. Katey, the acknowledged favorite of her father, had a habit of obsessively touching the furniture and checking under the bed the same number of times on a daily basis. Frank stuttered and sleepwalked. Sydney, another early favorite of Dickens, went to sea, where he racked up so much debt as an adult that he earned his father’s disgust. Dickens confessed to another of his children: “I fear Sydney is much too far gone for recovery and I begin to wish that he were honestly dead.” (“This to Sydney’s brother!” marvels Mr. Gottlieb.)

The family’s attitude toward death is remarkable. When the profligate and worrisome Sydney did die of illness at 25, the family openly expressed its relief. “I fear we must feel that his being taken away early is the most merciful thing that could have happened to him, but it is very, very sad to have to feel this,” wrote his Aunt Georgina. So too with the baby who died before her first birthday, Dora: “If we could bring her back to life, now, with a wish, we would not do it,” Dickens reportedly said. We can picture Mr. Gottlieb shaking his head in dismay.

One unexpected conclusion of reading Mr. Gottlieb’s book is the realization that modern institutions intent on improving people—the therapies and education that offer progress and standardization to those who each begin life from a uniquely disadvantaged place—also serve as more effective propagators of dynasties. It seems not totally by accident that the most successful Dickens child, Henry, never had any peculiar mental tics, studied at Cambridge and became a lawyer. “Out of our large family of nine children there was only one who seemed to me to be really quite sane,” Katey later wrote of him.

Today, the path of the children of successful men and women would be to turn the other eight children into Henry: groomed into a functional sanity, coddled into college and an extended young adulthood that allows for some indiscretions, then passing into a career through carefully nurtured (if not inherited) industry. From this path Bushes, Kerrys, Kennedys, Gores, Romneys and one Clinton seem to have emerged with self-esteem and sense of entitlement fully intact. Our institutions of meritocracy might launder provenance, but they also secure privilege.

editorial@observer.com

The culmination of the great rewriting of Wallace was “Farther Away,” The New Yorker essay Jonathan Franzen published about his friend last year. “The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms,” Mr. Franzen wrote, setting forth a corrective, anti-hagiographic approach and a reprimand to all the fanboys and girls making Infinite Jest-themed Google maps, mining the author’s marginalia and tattooing themselves with inspirational Wallace quotes. The Wallace he knew was unmoved by hummingbirds, insensitive to a certain female and not averse to some figurative dick swinging. Mr. Franzen warned Wallace fans to approach their hero with a little more self-regard—“David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyper-considerateness and moral wisdom at face value,” he wrote—and ended up looking like a Salieri to Wallace’s Mozart. But he gave us a powerful piece of writing and an honest exposure of the sort of emotional apoplexies that most humans would be ashamed to reveal.

In a new biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (Viking, 368 pp., $27.95), by D.T. Max, the two strands of posthumous Wallace revisionism—the psychological and the reproachful—converge. Mr. Max reinserts Wallace’s history of depression and addictions into the sanitized record the author left of his life in his nonfiction. He also takes on, pace Mr. Franzen, the un-beatification of a literary saint.

The tempering of Wallace-adulation that was fascinating coming from an exasperated friend can at times feel ungenerous from a biographer. Mr. Max does not overtly dislike his subject, but in depicting Wallace as a bundle of pathologies and deceptions, he paints a portrait of a lifelong dissimulator. Of The Pale King, Wallace’s final, unfinished novel, Mr. Max writes:

The Pale King had so many ambitions. It had to show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to dramatize boredom without being too entertaining. And it had to sidestep the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was the opposite of Wallace’s own.

Did readers really come to Wallace for insulation and moral soundness? Did we expect him to “confer grace”? Mr. Max bases the myth of saintliness on the understanding that Wallace sought “a single-entendre writing that felt redemptive.” Wallace did call for a literary rebellion of “born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles,” but he hardly became a Paulo Coelho or Nicholas Sparks. Readers loved him for what he complicated rather than what he simplified, for work that did not bow before their understanding. As Zadie Smith remarked on Wallace’s writing, “all that can be said is that the difficult gift is its own defense, the deep rewarding pleasure of which is something you can only know by undergoing it.”

Wallace was born in 1962, in Ithaca. He spent his boyhood in Champaign-Urbana, an Illinois university town blessed with what Mr. Max calls “midwestern virtues of normality, kindness, and community.” In Mr. Max’s Midwest, ambition, intellectual acuity, and critical thinking arrive from without. Even Wallace’s beloved tennis “wasn’t a cool sport; in fact, for most midwesterners at the time, it existed only on television.” So too with Wallace’s ambitions as a writer: “midwestern boys might teach or read or make ironic fun of novels but they did not go to college to learn how to write them.” In fact, going to a “prestigious private college” in the first place “was one of the ways the Wallaces differed from some of their midwestern peers.”

The severance between the place where a writer is from and the place he ends up has produced, from the writers who experience it, one of the richest seams in American fiction. It’s the point in our literature where characters tend to crack up, so to speak—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and William Faulkner’s Quentin cannot feel they belong in the places where their intelligence and ambition landed them, but neither can they go home again. Mr. Franzen’s disaffected Midwesterners survive their geographical break by hating the place they came from. Wallace attended Amherst College, where he suffered his first psychological breakdown. Subsequent returns East resulted in other episodes of madness: a hospitalization when he began an unfinished graduate program in philosophy at Harvard, a destructive relationship with the writer Mary Karr in Syracuse. So Wallace went back to Illinois, until he went to the West Coast for a job at Pomona, where he died.

This pattern indicates that Wallace was at his most stable when he skirted places of concentrated ambition: publishing parties, Harvard, New York. Living outside such circles allowed him to socialize with people who were not of his class and educational background—it gave him something more interesting to write about. Mr. Max views it less kindly. If Wallace avoided friendships with other writers it was because “he was too competitive, judgmental, and self-absorbed.” If he could fit in back home, it was frequently an act. Wallace might have adopted his signature bandanna as “part of his rejection of midwestern conformity, a light shock to the bourgeoisie that also kept the sweat off his face,” but he could still charm the drones, deploying what Mr. Max calls his capacity to “turn on his ‘jus’ folks’ quality when he wanted to.”

Wallace once characterized himself as “the impotent unlucky sort whose beliefs inform his stomach’s daily state.” This might be what Mr. Franzen refers to as “laborious hyper-considerateness.” The other view of Wallace was one he described in his fiction.

“My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” states the narrator at the beginning of the short story “Good Old Neon.” “I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.” For Mr. Max, it’s the “Good Old Neon” side of Wallace we should remember. He writes that if Wallace made a liberal political argument it was “girlfriend-pleasing.” If Wallace joined the debate team it was because it would look good on a law school application. When Wallace collaborated on a book about rap music it was not because rap was the most vital cultural examination of race and class that America produced in the late 20th century, but instead was just the bored exertions of “a very smart kid slumming it.” As for Wallace’s attempts to write about porn, Mr. Max sees those as “a way to intellectualize an appetite a less guilt-ridden man might have just enjoyed.” Even Wallace’s interest in literary theory was in part a “compensatory element” that shielded him from supposed literary failures in the execution of “character development” and which served as “a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of mimic and engineer.”

Mr. Max has given us a portrait of Wallace as a manipulator, but this reader would prefer to maintain some memory of Wallace as the hyper-considerate guy who felt everything in his gut. Wallace’s life oscillated between periods of extreme avidity and regretful apology. His friends are right to begrudge his steady commitment to self-destruction—it’s hard to be friends with someone like that. But a biographer should at least consider the extent to which Wallace’s behavior was motivated not by what others thought of him, but by what they thought of his writing. If Wallace had really wanted to disguise the man who had been cruel to his little sister, showed off in class, voted for Reagan, hurt his mother’s feelings and had sex with groupies, he would not have given us the dysfunctional members of the Incandenza family, nor any hideous men.

PERHAPS THE IMPULSE to temper exuberant Wallace enthusiasm comes from all the rampant merchandizing in the wake of his death. But rather than elevate the writer to sainthood, the mass agglomeration of Wallace ephemera on the internet is better seen as the futile grasping of bereft fans seeking scraps of what remains of their favorite author. In this spirit, Little, Brown has collaged together some of Wallace’s previously unpublished essays into yet another posthumous book, Both Flesh and Not (272 pp., $26.99).

The new collection is anchored by “Roger Federer, Both Flesh and Not,” the essay on the tennis player originally published in 2006 as “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” in The New York Times Magazine. This essay is not one of Wallace’s best; it’s not even his best about tennis. Certain observations feel lazy (“some of this stuff is interesting; some is just odd”; “there’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body”; “it was like something out of The Matrix”). But Wallace coasting is still better at descriptions than most writers gunning their engines. There are images of Ralph Lauren uniforms “like children’s navalwear”; of Rafael Nadal, “he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations”; and of the “moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition.” What really makes this essay special, though, is that it’s where Wallace finally succeeded in shattering the stylistic limitations of a conservative daily newspaper’s Sunday magazine (the piece included his signature footnotes). At the same time, it was like hearing your favorite band in a car commercial: you’re happy for their success, but the context is disheartening.

The best thing about Both Flesh and Not is that it places Wallace’s mature voice and rhetorical acrobatics alongside a zygotic version of himself. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” written in 1988, when Wallace was in his mid-20s, will be a pleasure for completists. His distinctive voice camouflaged in tame book review prose, Wallace engages in the generational rite of defining his generation. All of the concerns of the young Wallace, the ones that would continue to define him for the rest of his career, are laid out: his wary eye on his peers, his worries about television, his interest in poststructuralist theory, his disdain for writers who uncritically cling to mimesis, his disappointment that while “some good fiction has held up a mercilessly powder-smeared mirror to the obvious,” too many young novelists “seem content merely to have reduced interpretation to whining.” In another essay, “The Empty Plenum,” a review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, we see Wallace dissecting the very plots Mr. Max claims he disliked, identifying, for example, how a plot might progress with “concentric circularity” instead of “linear progression” but still compel the reader.

The editors of Both Flesh and Not have managed to graft in a few excrescences. My delight that Wallace had written an essay about a poet (“Mr. Cogito”), turned to ashes when I turned the first page and the “essay” was already over. A listicle of book recommendations (“Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels>1960”) is comforting only as proof that even Wallace had to write time-wasters for internet publication. And then there’s the selection of quoted American Heritage Dictionary definitions, lifted from vocabulary lists kept by Wallace and reprinted on the pages between the essays as “a reminder of Wallace’s love of words and the delight he took in deploying them.” As if we could forget that.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. Heti.

Imagine for a moment that an infant alien blob has oozed its way into the Columbus Circle subway station and through a miraculous process of osmosis managed to absorb the most important material from a rack of women’s magazines. The blob would have a lot of direction about how a person should be. It would have a repertoire of 10 Things to Do With Mason Jars and know how to “upcycle” things. It would know how to execute the “G Spot Jiggy” and have some useful suggestions about what to wear to a wedding. But then something terrible would happen: for the rest of its life, from having received an injection of Seventeen, Readymade and Elle in a formative moment, the abiogenetic marvel that was the alien blob would experience the constant assault of dubious information flitting through its organ of reasoning. As it blobbed about it would never be able to forget the minimum Sun Protection Factor to wear out of doors, even in winter. When it squeezed its pimples it would be forced to recall from the magazines that pimples should never be squeezed. Thus besieged with all it knew of how to be, and aware of its consistent failure to fulfill even the simple mandates of some listicles, the alien would despair.

Something similar can happen to women. In her new novel, How Should A Person Be?  (Henry Holt, 320 pp., $25) Sheila Heti tries to address this. In her title, the tyrannical confidence of women’s magazines and self-help guides is subverted in the interrogative form. Ms. Heti uses her novel to express her frustration with the female obsession with the question of the proper way to be. The literature of self-improvement, under the guise of offering instruction for happiness and overwhelmingly coded as female, instead serves too frequently as a reminder of ineptitude. “There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick,” writes a facetious Ms. Heti. She ponders the plight of the rest, with their appetite for more guidance and advice: How should a person pack her suitcase? What should a person eat? Who should a person marry?

Ms. Heti decides the search for such models is a waste of time. As one character puts it, “The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.” Along with the endless consumption of instruction, female friendship is marred by the problem of mimicry. Sex is presented as something that can be carefully managed. When Ms. Heti’s narrator decides to work on perfecting her blowjob technique instead of her writing, the metaphor is clear: when the quest for instruction and expertise overtakes production,the result is merely “an age of some really great blowjob artists.” The premise of female uncertainty validates paternal advice; “just another man who wanted to teach me something,” is a frequent dismissal in this novel.

The narrator of How Should a Person Be? is a playwright named Sheila who married and then divorced while still young. Before she gets married, “Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true,” she writes. “So I thought about marriage day and night. And I went for it like a cripple goes for a cane.” Now that marriage has failed to make her the person she hoped she would be, Sheila has to find a new model.

During her marriage, a theater commissioned Sheila to write a play. The play did not have to be feminist, but it did have to be about women.  The imperative to describe a female experience is a problem for Sheila, who has always preferred male attention and never sought out female friends. “I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped that I could write it, being a woman myself,” she explains. Sheila takes the commission for the money and hopes for the best, but her divorce provokes a crisis. The first draft of her play, which she wrote while still married, no longer makes sense to her.

Beset by uncertainty, Sheila goes to work as a shampoo girl for a hair salon and tries not to think about the extent of her procrastination. She also befriends a painter named Margaux, who never has trouble working. Sheila, who worries about the vanity implicit in writing, admires Margaux’s work ethic and humility. Now that marriage has failed her, she decides that Margaux might present a new model of how to be.

Margaux worked harder at art and was more skeptical of its effects than any artist I knew. Though she was happier in her studio than anywhere else, I never heard her claim that painting mattered. She hoped it could be meaningful, but had her doubts, so worked doubly hard to make her choice of being a painter as meaningful as it could be.

To figure out how to be, and also to gather material for her play, Sheila begins tape-recording Margaux. “I thought maybe you could help me figure out why it isn’t working,” she says to Margaux about the play. “Then I can listen to what we say, and think it over at home, and figure out where I’m going wrong.”  Interstitial scenes of these conversations, as well as conversations Sheila has with other characters, are interspersed throughout the book in script form, along with stage directions that describe Sheila’s reactions—or that perhaps serve to tell her how to react, and how to be: “They laugh,” or “Sheila starts idly leafing through a pile of papers, junk, and books,” or “Margaux picks up a thing of jam.”

This self-conscious and neurotic depiction of the creative process will feel a little familiar to readers of contemporary fiction. Like the narrators of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Tao Lin’s Shoplifting at American Apparel and Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, Sheila wanders here and there, doing drugs, going to parties, thinking about the value of the work she and her friends produce and hoping for some kind of fame. Unlike those books, the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel is explicitly acknowledged here, with the subtitle “a novel from life.” In a further complication, Sheila Heti has published her own version of a self-help book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, co-written with her friend Misha Glouberman, whom Heti also tape-recorded in that book and who here appears as the character Misha Glouberman, Margaux’s boyfriend.

Ms. Heti’s prose is filled with exclamation points that do not always provide the ballast lacking in certain revelations. Adverbs like “old-fashionedly,” descriptions like the aforementioned “thing of jam” and “a fancy blue hotel” and “a bunch of people were at the airport,” give her voice a faux naïveté that betrays the strength of her observations and assures that her exploration of the lives of female artists falls short of a standard of description set by Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook or Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar.

But two things set this novel apart from the contemporary, male-dominated milieu: the first is the depiction of Sheila and Margaux’s friendship, with all its complication, insecurity and the positive things that result from mutual female discomfort. Margaux is like all of the characters in The Wizard of Oz wrapped up in one. “I admired her courage, her heart, and her brain,” writes Ms. Heti. But: “I envied the freedom I suspected in her, and wanted to know it better, and become that way too.”

The second is the charged sex Sheila enjoys with a man named Israel. “I don’t know why all of you just sit in libraries when you could be fucked by Israel,” she writes, addressing her readers directly. “I don’t know why all of you are reading books when you could be getting reamed by Israel, spat on, beaten up against the headboard—with every jab, your head battered into the headboard. Why are you all reading?” Sheila mocks her readers’ illusions that the chaos and vulnerability of sex can be effectively avoided by following certain rules (or The Rules). How Should a Person Be? might be the book you give to a friend when she tells you she is going to “date myself” for six months, or announces her departure for Kripalu. Sometimes drastic recalibration of one’s life is necessary—if you’re an addict, say, or starting over after a physically abusive relationship—but too many campaigns of self-reinvention are rooted in unnecessary recrimination. After getting in a fight with Margaux, Sheila embarks on a doomed crusade to New York and leaves Israel. When she tells him that she is leaving town to focus on writing her play, he mocks the pretense they both know to be false: “I hope you write until your fucking fingers break,” he says. Their relationship concludes in a chapter called “Destiny is the Smashing of the Idols.”

The limitation of resolutions to be better, more organized or kinder is best demonstrated in the book when Margaux and another artist character, Sholem, hold a contest to see who can make the uglier painting. The male character, Sholem, successfully renders a painting so ugly it makes him want to die. But the female artist, Margaux, reveals that the intention toward beauty or ugliness can effectively change very little. “I thought, I’ll just do it instinctually, and the same thing came out!” she exclaims. A slightly glum Sholem agrees: “Even though you said you wanted to make this really awful thing, your strength is still in there.”

 editorial@observer.com

There’s good cause for the admiration: hired in 2007 to start an eponymous imprint at Putnam, Ms. Einhorn’s first fiction acquisition, published in early 2009, was a debut novel by an unknown writer about maids and housewives in Jackson, Miss. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is still at the top of the bestseller lists. Across all formats it has sold 10 million copies in the United States. And following this auspicious start, Ms. Einhorn has launched a bestselling novel every February. In 2010 it was Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress. In 2011 it was Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters. Her release for this year, Alex George’s The Good American, has already been named the top February pick by Indie Bound, the organization of independent booksellers.

“She has such a good sense of a book that a lot of people will like,” said Claire Zion, editorial director at NAL, who hired Ms. Einhorn as her assistant at the Simon & Schuster imprint Pocket Books in the 1990s. “She came with that—it’s like her curly hair and hazel eyes—it arrived with the package.”

To attribute all of Ms. Einhorn’s success to her uncanny good taste, however, is to overlook the ways in which her business strategies as a publisher have been shaped by coming of age in the publishing industry at a time of great change: her avoidance of big names for debut or little-known writers belies her commitment to starting small and growing big; her conservative approach to growing her list in a way that might result in a loss of control or excessive overhead shows a wariness about an industry that is as quick to kill new imprints as start them. All this focus on the ephemeral quality “good taste” also undermines those of Ms. Einhorn’s talents that have always been essential to successful publishing: a commitment to thorough editing and a lot of exuberant salesmanship.

Like the books she publishes, Ms. Einhorn’s career has spanned both the commercial and the literary. After graduating from Stanford, she  moved to New York in 1990 to start her first job in the industry, as Elisabeth Dyssegaard’s assistant at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Remembering it today, Ms. Einhorn does not have a particularly nostalgic view of her publishing past: on the day of her interview, she was dismayed to find there was no toilet paper in the office bathroom. Roger Straus, not in the habit of learning assistants’ names, would tug Ms. Einhorn’s ponytail to get her attention. To supplement her salary of $13,000 a year, she cleaned apartments on weekends, including that of FSG’s subsidiary rights director Judy Klein.

“If you needed a new pencil you’d have to go down to the supply room and there was this little woman Rose who was like four feet tall and you’d say you needed a new pencil,” Ms. Einhorn remembered. “She’d say, ‘Come show me your pencil.’ You’d show her and she’d say, ‘You still have two inches left. You can’t get a new one.’”

But Ms. Einhorn, who had majored in creative writing, still found some glamor in the industry. Jonathan Franzen was “the tall guy on the softball team,” Rick Moody was an associate editor and Jonathan Galassi was just publishing Michael Cunningham.

“You had a bunch of trust fund kids and then you had these other people who just sort of drank the Kool-Aid and worked at FSG,” she said.

After FSG, Ms. Einhorn ascended to positions at Villard and then Poseidon, the imprint Simon & Schuster had started for Ann Patty, the editor who had discovered V.C. Andrews.

“She was very bright and had just the most lovely manners,” said Ms. Patty, who now has her own business as an editorial consultant and book doctor. “She was bubbly without being obnoxious, she was energetic and she was clearly very bright without being snobby.” Ms. Einhorn also had what Ms. Patty called a “roll up your sleeves and do what you need to do” quality.

Poseidon’s list was a mix of commercial and literary titles, including books by writers like Siri Hustvedt, Mary Gaitskill and Steven Millhauser. Typing up Ms. Patty’s editorial notes, which the publisher recorded on a Dictaphone to save her assistants the task of deciphering her handwriting, proved to be Ms. Einhorn’s first education in editing. Then came her first lesson in corporate fickleness.

“I came home from vacation and my dad was in the hospital with complications from open heart surgery and Ann left me a message saying ‘I’m not going to be at work because I was fired, call me,’” said Ms. Einhorn.

In 1993, Simon & Schuster shuttered Poseidon.

“Everyone was fired except for me,” said Ms. Einhorn. “Not because I was great, but because they forgot I existed, literally.”

A spare wheel in the midst of a company-wide hiring freeze, she survived to transfer to another S&S imprint, Pocket Books. There, under the tutelage of Claire Zion, her indoctrination into the commercial side of the business began in earnest.

“The first time I was in Claire’s office, she explained to me the difference between a romance novel and a shopping-and-fucking novel...and then she started talking about Regency romances,” Ms. Einhorn said. While she had worked on commercial books before, her reading preferences still tended towards the literary—both Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp and Ms. Einhorn’s husband, Matthew Futterman, recalled that when they first met Ms. Einhorn, she was, as Mr. Karp put it, “under the spell of Norman Rush’s Mating.”

“It was really good to go to Pocket but it was really weird because it was crazy commercial and I just didn’t know anything about it,” Ms. Einhorn said.

She quickly adapted. Her first ever acquisition was the autobiography of QVC infomercial host Kathy Levine. The project was Ms. Einhorn’s idea. The book, It’s Better to Laugh... Life, Good Luck, Bad Hair Days and QVC, sold 150,000 copies. She was soon promoted to editorial director of another S&S imprint, Washington Square Press.

In 1997, Ms. Einhorn, still just 29, moved to then-Warner Books to assume the position of executive editor of its trade paperback program. She soon began acquiring hardcover titles—and bestsellers—including Amy Sedaris’s I Like You, Robert Hicks’s The Widow of the South, Lolly Winston’s Good Grief and Susan Jane Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress—and rose to the position of hardcover editor-in-chief at Grand Central Publishing (the company changed names after Warner Books was acquired by the Hachette Livre in 2006). But in 2007, when Putnam president Ivan Held approached her about the possibility of starting an imprint, Ms. Einhorn was ready to go.

“I’d been there ten years, I love the people there, I still have many friends and I learned a lot but this was just a great opportunity to do something new and to have something where I could be more in control and have my hand in every aspect on the process in the way I couldn’t overseeing such a huge list,” she said.

Meeting for an interview in her office at Penguin, with its framed copies of past bestseller lists on the wall and shelves full of various editions of The Help and other books from her imprint, Ms. Einhorn was as jovial and good-humored as her colleagues had described her. (“Her curls bounce!” said the literary agent Stephanie Cabot.) For Ms. Einhorn, involving herself in every aspect of the process is not just talk. She paused the interview to approve a new cover for a forthcoming novel, The Gods of Gotham, by a writer named Lyndsay Faye—Ms. Einhorn had requested a last-minute redesign to add an enthusiastic blurb from Michael Connelly. And while The Help is a publishing phenomenon, its success was not without coaxing: Ms. Einhorn carefully cultivated relationships with booksellers and, unusually for a hardcover release, book clubs. She points out that the book took six weeks to hit bestseller lists.

“We usually don’t have a relationship or even know who the heck the editor is,” said Jake Reiss, owner of The Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, Ala., where Kathryn Stockett did her first reading of The Help. With Ms. Einhorn, he said, it was different.

Ms. Einhorn, who said she applies the publishing equivalent of Tip O’Neill’s aphorism that “all politics is local,” includes a special note to booksellers in galley editions of books with her phone number and e-mail address. She collects and circulates bookseller quotes (The Help amassed 40 of them). She is big on handwritten thank you notes and hounds her writers to send them. Booksellers, like New York publishing executives, have come to trust her taste, and at least one book blogger has issued a challenge to read all of the books her imprint publishes.

“She’s made a believer out of us,” said Mr. Reiss. “You don’t have to hold a hot pot very long to believe it’s hot.”

No publisher has a perfect track record -- Ms. Einhorn calls her first two acquisitions for the imprint, both memoirs about family tragedies, “rookie mistakes”: good reads but tough sells.

“I need to be able to convince you in thirty seconds of speaking to make you want to read the book,” she said. She said she received around 1,000 submissions in her first year at the imprint, and does not spend much time on manuscripts that do not draw her in from the first page. “I’d worked at places where we’d published some incredibly beautiful line-by-line novels but there was this sort of MFA navel-gazing aspect to them and they didn’t sell, so I knew I didn’t want to do that.”

But The Help was also an unlikely pick. By her count, Kathryn Stockett had already been rejected by 60 agents over three years before she was picked up by Susan Ramer. Ms. Einhorn bought the book as a pre-empt, after being drawn in, she said, by a line in the first paragraph where one of the black maids, speaking in a dialect that has raised objections from some readers, says she is raising her seventeenth white child.

“Her first round of edits were so thorough and she wasn’t editing electronically,” said Ms. Stockett by phone from her home in Atlanta. “She said, ‘There will be some sticky notes attached.’ I got this manuscript back—I even thanked her in the acknowledgements—there were so many sticky notes! Four or five on a page, times 500. She was saving the sticky note business from bankruptcy.”

Ms. Einhorn is known for such extensive editing—and even for rejecting manuscripts that she later buys, including The Good American and the Times bestseller The Postmistress. To both authors she sent unusually detailed rejection letters with editing suggestions.

“Her rejection letter got me thinking of ways to cut and refigure,” said Sarah Blake, who wrote The Postmistress. Six weeks after turning Ms. Blake’s book down, Ms. Einhorn reconsidered and bought it. Alex George resubmitted his manuscript a year after his rejection, after following Ms. Einhorn’s suggestions.

So much for the lamentations that nobody in New York edits anymore. “I kind of get bummed when people say that,” she said. “I just think it’s an easy thing to say.”

Ziemacki retires.

The Americas division of Cambridge University Press has a new managing director: Michael Peluse comes to New York from managing Cambridge University Press's Iberia office. He replaces the most recent president of the Americas division, Dr. Richard Ziemacki, who worked at the Press for 37 years.

Cambridge University Press, which has been publishing books since 1534, has published writers ranging from John Milton and Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking and Noam Chomsky.

Lethem.

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and a newly published essay collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, granted an interview with Bloomberg News. Asked to comment on his native borough from his new home in sunny California, Mr. Lethem gave the following response:

It's been made blander, a little more accessible and it's taken over the world. For me as a writer, I was reading Henry Miller's "Black Spring" when I was 15, and thinking of him running around in Williamsburg.

It gave me permission to talk about what I knew, what I felt in my bones about growing up there and being from this very complicated, marvelous place, because other people had laid some tracks for me.

According to the WSJ, "Barnes & Noble is recasting itself as a technology company with emphasis on digital books and its Nook e-reading devices and Nook Tablet." Barnes & Noble has had a self-publishing platform, PubIt!, since 2010.

Ward.

Will Bois Sauvage, the fictional Mississippi town created by the novelist Jesmyn Ward, one day reach the status of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County? Time will tell, but Ms. Ward has signed a deal with Bloomsbury for a third novel set in the Gulf Coast hamlet of her invention. Her most recent book, Salvage the Bones, won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction.

The new novel is still untitled and will be about an interracial couple living in Bois Sauvage. Ms. Ward is also working on a memoir called The Men We Reaped, described on Publishers Marketplace as "exploring race, rural poverty, and the impact both have had on the men in Ward's life." In her speech at the National Book Awards, Ms. Ward revealed that she began writing in her 20s, following the death of her brother.

In his announcement, book review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote:

In 2005 David joined our team of preview editors, handling a broad range of subjects from sports to culture (high and low) to politics and developing a marquee roster of reviewers (Toni Bentley, David Carr, Frank Rich, Paul Simon, Deborah Solomon, among many others). It's not surprising that so skilled an editor should also be a witty and amusing writer (see, for example, David's reviews of memoirs by Barbara Walters and James Wolcott and his wry essay on The Sopranos and cultural studies). No one in our shop commands more respect, and no one is better liked. Please join me in congratulating David on his new job.