"Double down" is what you do when you're tired and desperate, in a casino, have got $3,000 on the next card and life is so absurd you double it to $6,000. Thus you lose the lot, cosmic joke on cosmic joke, and ought to go home. But over there by the slots your brother seems to be on a winning streak so you stay on and lose some more, and only when he's finally down as well do the two of you drive home together to your patient wives, through the Mississippi dawn. Thus, doubling down, and down, you throw away a tainted, confusing inheritance.

This is a book about gambling, written in tandem by the Barthelme brothers, Frederick and Steven, academics and writers, telling of actual events. It also, on the way, talks perceptively and sometimes brilliantly of life, death, family, hope and despair, and money as an expression of these things. It is extremely melancholy and very, very disturbing. What the Barthelme brothers do in excess, in casinos, we all do a little in our daily lives, testing fate, pushing luck: falling in love with the wrong person, walking out of a job, in denial of reality. Bound to lose, but what the hell? And all somehow linked to the necessary defiance of death. "In the first few years after the boats came to the coast … we gambled when we could. It was entertainment. We'd go in, wander round, play the slot machines, play video poker, tell jokes, go home.… Then, in 1995, after our mother died, the gambling got meaner." And after their father dies, a year later, meaner and more obsessive still.

First person singular, "I" narratives are common enough; first person plural "we" rather rare and rather wonderful. Writer and reader feel safe in the knowledge that an expert has been consulted. "Growing up, we were trained in restlessness and doubt." That doubled up, magical "we"! You feel the pair of them beavering away, searching through language for truth, arriving at a joint sentence, exulting in its exactitude, yet still as puzzled as we are. Why, why? When you have so much, why throw it away? But oh, oh, the relief of addiction.

Double Down in its punning way–they love words, these two–is what happens when the pair of you are cast down, you and your brother are indicted for fraud, for violating state gambling laws, by the very people you have bound so tightly into your joint lives. And you have been so trusting. "We started playing bigger money, harder money, and making friends at the casino. The hosts would greet us when we walked in; the dealers would stop what they were doing to say hello as we passed their tables." But those you love betray you. Not only have your parents been reduced to "ashes in two encyclopedia-size boxes sunk in a low artificial ridge just off the Dallas Freeway. "Now this! You'd assumed that because the casino masters were so close and in control, like family, they'd be on your side. But they're not. You love them, but all they want is to punish you. It's childhood all over again. You, once so rich in family, have not even illusion left.

The New York Times gets hold of the story–the reporter, like so many others, betrays you, offering a mean and condemning account of your predicament–and, before you know it, your disgrace is making headlines worldwide. Teachers of English literature, in the "awfully sweet" world of the Southern campus–as the brothers describe it–are not meant to frequent casinos, let alone get hauled up for fraud. The charges, filed in September 1997 just as Rick's novel Bob the Gambler was about to be published, are only dropped two years later, in August 1999. The Harrison County, Miss., District Attorney said publicly there was no evidence of impropriety on the brothers' part. Nor was there.

But why did the casino react like this? Weren't the brothers good customers? Didn't they turn up almost nightly to throw their dollars away? $250,000 worth? Yet here they suddenly were, on a night when they'd lost $10,000, charged with being in cahoots with a young woman blackjack dealer, carted off by the security guards, handed over to the police and thrown, shockingly and appallingly, into jail.

The allegation? That the dealer would let them see the card she was about to show so they could offer "insurance" on it–a move which, as they vainly pointed out, would never allow the gambler to win, only on occasion (28 percent of the time) not to lose. It is the opposite of doubling down. You only do this, the brothers explain, if you've been beaten badly already and are feeling especially doomed, or conversely, the dealer's been on a lucky run of dealing blackjack, and you think it might happen again. Either way, you're using instinct, not judgment. "We weren't pros, and we were subject to all the emotional pressures that prey on blackjack players, so we did the stupid thing and tried to protect our bets, telling ourselves that we were just reducing our bets by half, giving away odds." The problem was that the police, the District Attorney's office and even the casino management (who surely ought to know their clients better than this) can really only comprehend single-minded self-interest, the desire to acquire money, not the compulsion to throw it away. "It is as good to lose as to win," write the brothers. "Losing never feels like the worst part of gambling. Quitting often does."

The brothers are at a loss to understand why the casino would fail to offer, as they tactfully put it, "a full and unbiased report" to the Gaming Commission. The reason to me is fairly obvious. The Barthelme brothers just got up the casino's nose. "At the table, losing our money, we were all smiles, as if it were nothing. In fact, it felt like nothing … it was a family thing." Class snobbery is a two-way street. The brothers had got out of line. Gambling, along with eating hamburgers, getting fat, smoking, watching TV, going on The Jerry Springer Show , is a blue-collar occupation. Those Barthelme collars were whiter than white, intellectual, literary. Jesus, they were college professors. They had no business using the casino to throw away money and then acting as if it didn't matter. The blow falls just as Frederick's Bob the Gambler is being published. Of course it does. Resentment grows to the breaking point. The casino is being used. The brothers are not liked, though they believe they are. Let them enter the true lower depths, the cinder-block holding cells: "The room crawled with cops, popping out of their uniforms, buttons bursting, seams swollen. "The noises are infernal: "'Get back there, nigger,' the blond cop shouted." Let them see what it's really like. That'll soon wipe the smile from their faces. It did.

Perhaps Rick and Steve–who, now it's all over, gamble not habitually but on occasion–should go north to Connecticut and the Foxwoods Casino, run by the Mashantucket Pequot Indians on reservation land. Gambling tax is not paid, so the return to the customer is among the highest in the land. It is a calm and respectable place, more blue-haired than blue-collar, less fantastical than Atlantic City or Las Vegas, not so steamy or vengeful as the Southern riverboats seem to be, and with an excellent English department, surely, in neighboring University of Connecticut at Storrs, where I dare say jobs can be found. The parental ashes, in their encyclopedia-size boxes, responsible for so much, can come, too. Family can continue.

Maggie Paley has taken the source of human greatness, power and passion, our capacity for nobility and forbearance, our sense of beauty, our capacity for art, our longing for the poetic, our connection with the infinite, the inspiration for voyages to the stars and the depths of inner space, and reduced it all to a pretty little volume called The Book of the Penis , flesh-colored with a fig leaf on the cover. Fragile and tasteful.

Call me a Freudian if you will, but I was brought up to believe that the tumescence and detumescence of the male sex organ was at the secret heart of human activity, from the rise of patriarchy to the birth of feminism, to the territorial imperative and the wars that follow it (I'm right, No, you're wrong, Mine's bigger than yours, I'll prove it, Bang, bang, you're dead)–in fact to all male enterprise and female opposition to that enterprise, that you could scarcely say the word "penis" aloud. To name the god is to weaken him. And now here's Ms. Paley blithely throwing the name around, lightly entertaining us. "To see a penis enlarge and stiffen is to witness a miracle of nature; it's like watching time-lapse photography of a week in the life of a vegetable–seeing it go from wilted flower to big zucchini in a matter of moments." Her sense of awe is muted–for man read vegetable–but at least she seems to quite like vegetables and find them interesting. The same book, in the hands of a radical feminist, would have had those vegetables cut, scraped and down the waste disposal in seconds flat.

Ms. Paley's book is divided into easy segments: the Size Question, the Penis in Fashion, Penises in Art, Circumcision and Castration, Famous for Their Dicks, and so on. It is stuffed with the kind of little facts that come in so useful toward the end of a dinner party. Did you know that Errol Flynn used to take his out and slap it on the table at the slightest excuse? Did you hear that Dillinger's dick was so large it's kept pickled at the Smithsonian? But as for Freud, and all that, forget it. Freud, Ms. Paley tells us, "was perhaps a bit penis-obsessed." That's him out of the way.

Find in this cute volume everything you wanted to know or didn't want to know about the penis. I quite want to know that the Japanese mafia insert pearls into their penises when they do time in prison–one for each year. What a way of subverting authority! The longer you're in, the better lover they make of you (a penis made rubbly by pearls, in the opinion of the Japanese mafia, being the cat's whiskers). I find I don't want to know about a recipe by one Mr. Bigelow for uncircumcising the resentfully circumcised by stretching and pulling down the foreskin, and hanging it with weights. I can't quite just say, ho-hum, how strange and interesting the world is, and leave it at that: I suspect nature gave us reticence and squeamishness for some good reason.

But each to his own. And what I do miss in a book that hungers for them is illustration. If this book were about legs or toes or noses, we would have pictures. Being the penis, there are none. We may know the details, but not look at the actuality. We are not as broad-minded or unterrified as we suppose. To contemplate the god is still to be stirred to impossible passion, and governments won't allow it. The only illustration in this neat Grove-Atlantic volume is a tape measure running down the edge of a page. Since the book is only nine inches long, a whole lot of white American men will find that inadequate, anyway, when measuring. And according to popular myth, or so Ms. Paley assures us, if they are African-Americans even more inadequate, not to mention Jamaicans, and as for Arabs–wow! When it comes to penis size, it seems, we are allowed to make comparisons that in other contexts would be deemed racist: What we are still not allowed is what we want, pictures of penises, erect or otherwise. (I had always thought the plural was penes, by the way, from the Latin, but never mind. Let us take our lead from Ms. Paley, now the once-forbidden word is on everyone's lips.)

But why is it left to women to write the book men should write for each other? Why can't they write their own? For the last 30 years, ever since the feminists insisted women get mirrors and study their private parts and name them and see them as beautiful (I had some trouble with this, I must admit) women's lives have been blessed and cursed by books about vulvas and vaginas, about menstrual cycles, and life passages, and pregnancies and otherwise, until there's not a thing a woman doesn't know about the way she works and the relationship between her self, her ego and her body, not to mention her hormones. And look how her self-esteem has risen in the intervening decades. Men seem to know not a thing about their own bodies, other than locker-room gossip. Yet men are the gender who ought to know, if they don't want women to occupy the moral high ground forever, if they don't want to see their good opinion of themselves plummeting. "Oh men!" the young women begin to say. "Who wants 'em? Why bother with 'em?" Down to the sperm bank for the babies, off with the girlfriends for the wild night out, unwilling to tell the difference between a dildo and a loving guy; testosterone begins to get a bad name, and most men couldn't even tell you what it is, let alone defend it.

True, there was something to be said for the glorious ignorance in which both men and women were once reared, when sexual parts didn't have names, and who'd ever heard of the clitoris, and female orgasms were incidental, and what was happening happened in the dark and was mysterious and wonderful, all sensation and no information, when sex was so closely linked with procreation it couldn't help being sacramental, but there's no going back. I'd just like the next book about the penis to be written by a man so we get not Maggie Paley's sense of amused neutrality, but the determined self-love and approval you find in books about women's physiology written by women.

Last year, a British publisher commissioned a series of erotic novellas by women writers. The best and brightest were invited to contribute. The series did not go ahead; the delivered work was "not erotic enough."

Not erotic enough for what, one wonders? To stir the loins of the (mostly male) marketing department, or the (mostly female) editorial department? Probably neither: It is difficult to write effective erotica in a politically and emotionally correct climate, when women must be on top and in charge of their own sexuality, or at least perceived to be. Since, in general, male sadism and female masochism seems to be what works in erotic terms for women (just as female sadism and male masochism works for men), women writers will be struggling against the grain of their own desires.

But in France, of course, it's different: nothing correct, just sexual uproar. Lila Says , by Chimo (the most sensational foreign novel in recent years, according to its U.S. publishers, "raw, sensual and devastating"), becomes a wild best seller. This brief book, set in a Parisian ghetto, tells the story of Chimo's growing love for Lila. Chimo, who is alleged to have scribbled down the story in ball-point pen, filling two notebooks, and left it on the publisher's doorstep like a baby, presents himself as a 19-year-old Arab boy. Lila is 16, a Catholic, and looks like an angel. Lila, however, talks dirty to Chimo, using the most graceful and eloquent language, and shows him her most private parts, waxing lyrical upon the detail of their appearance.

As it happens, the gender dilemma is just about solved by having a non-human ravish Lila–the devil himself, he of the foul breath and hairy member. Once on this fabulous plane, the reconditioned, right-thinking man can safely identify, yet not identify; and the conscientiously correct woman can share Lila's pleasure-pain without too much guilt. Good Lord, who could control the devil! Besides, it all turns out to be just a good-humored tale, told by naughty Lila to give her chaste and elderly aunt a thrill.

So far so erotic, and on the safe side of pornographic–if I am to take the American Heritage definition, in which the latter is the former plus overtones of power and violence. Lila Says might well have been one of those rejected English novellas searching for a new home overseas. But then powerful and violent things happen, and in its final chapter the book becomes shocking and repulsive, a good deal more so to my mind than, say, American Psycho . (At least Bret Easton Ellis stood up to be counted. Both the writer of Lila Says and its translator remain anonymous, which must incidentally be very annoying for the latter, this being a translation to be proud of.) Just when we have come to know and like Lila in her absurdities, she is bloodily raped by Chimo's friends and tumbles out of a window and is killed. A snuff novel. I make no apology for giving away the end–if publishers can concoct such a tale, normal fair reviewing play does not apply. It is true that real life does sometimes turn into a snuff movie, but literature should be making sense of distress, not gratuitously adding to it.

The publishers claim that the success of Lila Says has set off an intense debate in France–hoax or not hoax? Naïve or faux-naïve? Faux-naïve, say I, hoax. For one thing I have found Chimo out. On page 102, he has this to say: "Definitely it was Lila who got me to write in the end, although I don't know who I'd show it all to, never been in a bookstore, could be what she says is disgusting and no one could read it" and on page 92 he says, of exorcisms, "None of us've ever heard that word, I had to go find it in a dictionary in a bookstore to write it down." There! Hoax exposed. (How I hate it when readers do this kind of thing to me: Jung observed that the greatest vice of the 20th century is literalism. But then I don't go round pretending to be someone I'm not, or worse still, no one.)

My own view is that Lila Says was written by three writers; the first an English lady writer of exquisite sensibility. She's the one responsible for passages such as these: "Her aunt makes up poems about Lila's pussy all day long. About how a little jewel of ruffledy silk like that, with its hidden bud and swollen leaves stuck on tight, it'll never get crumpled … about how it's so blond it could be a lantern when you've lost your way in life."

The second is a gay Parisian male in his middle years, of considerable literary sophistication, who knows what life in the ghetto is like if only because he's been told. The story reads like something well researched and well appreciated, but not exactly lived through. Here's how to bring in a little cash, for example: "Sell blood at the clinic, once a month no more, I already said that, but blood brings in almost nothing. Help clean up graves in the cemetery just before All Saints, an idea that came from Marseilles but it's strictly seasonal. Convince girls short hair is in, so they cut theirs and you sell it for wigs." This fellow has some interesting things to say about the craft of writing: "Here the locals, girls and guys, white or not, they're happy with their piss-poor language … me naturally I sweat myself silly trying not to write like they talk, then I rewrite it all here but I'm not sure I know what I'm doing. The same words aren't given out to everybody everywhere. You always feel you're sailing right by a green island you can't get close to, better guarded than the Bank of France, an island stuffed with wonderful fruits."

Well, as you do.

And the third writer is the calculating hack who knows about 16-year-old convent girls being a turn-on, and how pornography depends on cold passionless detail, and can't think of a way to end this novella better than having Lila raped and dropped out the window to die. These three writers may I suppose reside in one body but if so I'd rather not sit next to him at dinner. (It probably is a "him": Henry Miller rather than Anaïs Nin.)

The publishers claim Lila Says is "in the tradition of" Pauline Réage's The Story of O and Marguerite Duras' The Lover . These actually came out of two very different traditions, the first underground and only later (and still doubtfully) attributed to Pauline Réage, the second published mainstream–but never mind. Lila Says attempts to get the best of both worlds: to have the lure of the forbidden, and yet be accepted in polite society.

And why not? As Chimo himself remarks, "all sorts of trash gets published now, since people can't go dipping their dicks here and there on account of the virus." At least Lila Says is far from trash. And if literature wants to survive, it had better make itself useful. If we're to believe the scientists who tell us that masturbation is not after all a distasteful and pathetic perversion, but rather nature's way of getting rid of men's old and worn-out sperm in preparation for congress with the female; and in women to keep the orgasmic muscles, so helpful to that lively sperm, in good fettle, why then pornography can be useful indeed. Pornography is good for the coming generation! Hooray for its publishers! Debasement is in the eye of the beholder! I can't think why the pornographers don't use these arguments more often.