But this summer feels different, somehow. I leave the city the minute I can, streaming toward the George Washington Bridge along with all the other drivers telegraphing the Darwinian panic of escapees fleeing the alien-occupied metropolis in a science-fiction film. Though now, it seems, the aliens are us.

If these are the so-called dog days, they’re the dog days on steroids, with the Newfoundlands and St. Bernards panting and suffering with furry, mournful canine forbearance. But New York doesn’t do forbearance. Tempers are notably short, motorists are heavy on their horns, and last week alone I witnessed two unpleasant altercations between pedestrians accidentally colliding as they competed for their little bubbles of sidewalk breathing room.

The London bombings haven’t helped. But New Yorkers aren’t idiots, so it’s not as if we’ve only just this summer realized that the other shoe is going to drop not far from where the first one did--that is to say, on us. In my observation, people don’t seem particularly nervous about the specter of terrorists on public transportation--although, as always, the sight of machine guns in the hands of adolescent reservists in full camouflage drag inevitably makes the heart beat a little faster. In fact, there’s something oddly reassuring about the fact that New York’s Finest have begun to practice a quirky new brand of racial profiling, a triage based on the assumption that the backpacks and bags most likely to contain incendiary devices belong to young, blond white girls with big breasts and low-cut T-shirts.

If there were such a thing as an urban psychotherapist, the good doctor might diagnose our malaise as a citywide case of chronic, low-level depression. Sadness? The faces you see on an average day on the A train look as if they’re auditioning for cameos in a Walker Evans photo. Free-floating angst and rage? I’d bet that if the average household were bugged (which they very well may be, before too long, in the interests of national security), you’d hear a startling number of New Yorkers yelling at their unresponsive TV screens as the network anchormen intone the evening news.

Those nightly wig-outs may turn out to be the key to our diagnosis. Because my guess is that we’re not all simultaneously being flattened, through some miracle of synchronicity, by the recovered memories of our unhappy childhoods. It hardly requires a board-certified psychoanalyst to read the signs and manifestations and to conclude that our malaise is not about past history, but rather about the present historical moment.

Early in the summer, I had breakfast with a close friend, a well-known African-American activist and teacher who’s also the widow of an iconic Black Panther. Her son, in his early 30’s, has converted to Islam and is currently leading a quiet, religious and utterly apolitical life in Qatar. But lately, my friend has just learned, F.B.I. agents have begun contacting the families of her son’s expatriate buddies to inform them that their offspring have been consorting with a young man who, the agents claim, is “just like his father” and whom they have reason to suspect of having ties with Al Qaeda.

As we ate our blini in the pleasant East Village restaurant garden dappled by June sunshine, we discussed my friend’s serious and not at all unreasonable fear that her son could be “rendered” off the streets of his adopted home and wind up in some Egyptian jail or as a prisoner in Guantánamo. We talked about it calmly, though we noted with amazement how strange it was to be contemplating the very real possibility that an American citizen could be kidnapped, interrogated and imprisoned without anyone mentioning those precious but increasingly obsolete two words: due process. And perhaps it was the restaurant’s Eastern European cuisine that made me think that this is what it might have been like to have breakfast with Anna Ahkmatova in the anxious days before her son vanished into one of Stalin’s prisons.

One hallmark of the severely dysfunctional family, a symptom likely to inflict long-term damage on its members, is the insidious way in which the profoundly bizarre comes to seem not only routine but positively normal. Which, I’d suggest, describes the current state of affairs. What would we have concluded if, a mere five years ago, someone had told us that our society would demonstrate only passing outrage and no lasting curiosity about the fact that our soldiers had tortured prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba? How would we have greeted the suggestion that we might lose confidence in the electoral process, in the integrity and courage of our press, or in our own right to express our political opinions without being accused of treason? What would we have thought of the suggestion that the Constitution would be so widely ignored and devalued that a large percentage of the population believes that the separation of church and state is the nutty whim of a gang of godless liberals conspiring to subvert moral values? How would we have responded to hearing that we might find ourselves embroiled in a bloody, costly war waged for reasons that time has shown to be based on complete fabrications? Five years ago, we would have thought--naïvely--that none of these scenarios were likely, or even possible.

If we ask ourselves questions, they only lead to other questions. How did this happen so quickly? Weren’t we paying attention? And what can we do about it now? We e-mail each other and analyze the situation as if we were all on a plane going down with a cabin full of aeronautic engineers noting the succession of alarming engine noises. We preach to the converted and try to make our opinions heard. A few weeks ago, encouraged by a friend, I called my Senators to suggest that they might want to stay focused on getting to the bottom of Karl Rove’s involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. Whoever answered the phone at Senator Charles Schumer’s office politely, if somewhat coolly, took down my name and district and thanked me for calling. Senator Hillary Clinton’s people sounded considerably less interested than they might have if I’d called to complain about a dab of bird shit on the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park.

The chicken-and-egg question of depression--which are causes and which are symptoms?--tends to revolve around an overwhelming sense of powerlessness accompanied by the absence of hope. And who can blame us for feeling powerless about a seemingly endless war that’s simultaneously bankrupting our country and making us enemies all over the world? Any sentient person would start to feel a little disheartened after being told, day after day, that A plus B does not equal C, but rather X or Y; that the London bombings--as Donald Rumsfeld recently stated--had nothing to do with the war in Iraq? And who wouldn’t be moved to yell at the news broadcast that features the fresh, young faces of newly dead American soldiers and tolls the numbers of their dead without bothering to keep a running count of Iraqi civilian casualties?

Meanwhile, the weather makes us think about what we’d rather not consider at all--that is, the disastrous long-term effects of the government’s environmental policy.

Even here, in tough, resilient New York, we feel the heat, so to speak. And, increasingly marginalized on what Spalding Gray called our little island off the coast of America, we try to think of a way to affect what’s happening on the mainland. Or we try not to think at all; we just try to get through it and enjoy the consoling pleasures that our city still has to offer. In fact, if the ship of state is sinking, I’d just as soon go down here: let’s say on Delancey Street, with salsa music pumping, the whole sidewalk thumping from the bass of a passing car playing hip-hop, a Chinese guy selling animals woven of straw, a group of black-clad Hasidic boys scurrying past like a flock of wild turkeys--and all of it on one block, which is what I love best about this city.

In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon’s “atlas of depression,” a researcher is quoted as saying that the circumstances that most often trigger the illness “typically involve loss--of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself--and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped.” I can’t think of a more painfully accurate description of the way we live now, and of the reason why New York feels, as any victim of depression might, so “unlike itself.” The problem, this summer, is neither the heat nor the humidity. It’s the humiliation of finding ourselves despised by so much of the world for something so far out of our control.

Francine Prose’s new novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

My husband stole a long, sidelong glance at our neighbors. No, he said, we didn’t know them. But they were, he pointed out, the real-life counterparts of the main characters in Edward St. Aubyn’s extraordinary trilogy, Some Hope (2003), which we’d both finished a few months before, and which we’d spent the intervening time persuading our friends to read.

One hallmark of first-rate fiction is that it reveals the world as being populated by its characters. Something similar occurs with Mr. St. Aubyn’s marvelous new novel, Mother’s Milk, though this time what you keep noticing are not the withholding, sadistic fathers, but rather the besotted mothers whose passion for their children is so intense that it verges on the adulterous, forcing their cuckolded husbands to watch and suffer in approving paternal silence.

At the center of the novel is Patrick Melrose, the hero of Some Hope, which it’s helpful but by no means necessary to have read in advance of this book. Some Hope begins in the South of France, where the Melrose family lives, and where Patrick’s father, David, is first seen methodically drowning a colony of ants and calculating precisely how long he must talk to the maid before her arms start to ache painfully from the load of laundry she’s carrying. As it turns out, David’s barbarous cruelty extends well beyond the insect kingdom and the lower classes. He brutally molests his young son, torments his wife, and serves his guests a heady recipe of charm and humiliation.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker domestic landscape, but what makes the trilogy so extraordinary and pleasurable to read is how beautifully Mr. St. Aubyn writes, his acidic humor, his stiletto-sharp observational skills, and his ability to alchemize these gifts into one quotable, Oscar Wildean bon mot after another. And what makes the book so moving, as a writer friend of mine said, is that you feel that its hero is trying at every moment, and with every cell of his being, not to turn into the asshole that he’s been programmed from birth to become.

That struggle is ongoing throughout Mother’s Milk, in which we catch up with Patrick some years after his marriage to the thoughtful and understandably disaffected Mary. He’s the father of two sons, and his slowly dying mother, Eleanor, has decided to leave his childhood home in Provence to a sleazy guru named Seamus and his sketchy New Age foundation. The book abounds in visions of motherhood gone hideously wrong, either through monumental self-interest (the sheer awfulness of Mary’s mother, Kettle, makes Eleanor seem almost beneficent) or through the sort of quasi-erotic attachment that makes Patrick feel progressively more alienated from that cozy trio composed of his wife and their two beautifully drawn little boys.

No contemporary writer writes more knowingly or eloquently from the point of view of the child who is smarter and more observant than the adults around him might wish to imagine. Mother’s Milk starts, nervily, with what I suppose is called a “birth memory”—in this case, that of Robert, Patrick’s older son, recalling his first experience of wrenching separation from his mother. The novel follows the family as the parents’ marriage unravels, as Patrick initiates a love affair with a witty and unhappy former girlfriend, and as he flirts with the sort of substance abuse that turned Bad News (the middle novel in Some Hope) into a dispatch from the private hell of a damned soul who simply couldn’t get high enough to lower the frequency of his own acute, self-lacerating awareness.

Near the end of Mother’s Milk, the Melrose family decides to cope with their exile from Patrick’s childhood paradise by taking a salutary, restorative trip to the United States. By now, the reader can pretty much predict how well this neat solution will work out, just as we can expect the vacation to provide Mr. St. Aubyn with yet another chance to display his gift for making us recognize a volley of hilariously barbed and enraged perceptions as the flailings of a character struggling not to drown in a sea of despair. Here, to take one example, are the anxious young Robert’s musings on the “hysterical softness” of his fellow passengers boarding the flight from Heathrow to New York, strangers displaying “a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who have decided to become their own airbag-systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?

“Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle.”

I’ve always hated the expression “writer’s writer,” with its implication of an audience even smaller and more narrowly limited than that of the “cult writer.” But Edward St. Aubyn allows the phrase its best possible interpretation. He’s the kind of writer who makes you notice the terrifying family at the next table, and who makes you want to write.

Francine Prose’s most recent novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

My husband stole a long, sidelong glance at our neighbors. No, he said, we didn’t know them. But they were, he pointed out, the real-life counterparts of the main characters in Edward St. Aubyn’s extraordinary trilogy, Some Hope (2003), which we’d both finished a few months before, and which we’d spent the intervening time persuading our friends to read.

One hallmark of first-rate fiction is that it reveals the world as being populated by its characters. Something similar occurs with Mr. St. Aubyn’s marvelous new novel, Mother’s Milk, though this time what you keep noticing are not the withholding, sadistic fathers, but rather the besotted mothers whose passion for their children is so intense that it verges on the adulterous, forcing their cuckolded husbands to watch and suffer in approving paternal silence.

At the center of the novel is Patrick Melrose, the hero of Some Hope, which it’s helpful but by no means necessary to have read in advance of this book. Some Hope begins in the South of France, where the Melrose family lives, and where Patrick’s father, David, is first seen methodically drowning a colony of ants and calculating precisely how long he must talk to the maid before her arms start to ache painfully from the load of laundry she’s carrying. As it turns out, David’s barbarous cruelty extends well beyond the insect kingdom and the lower classes. He brutally molests his young son, torments his wife, and serves his guests a heady recipe of charm and humiliation.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker domestic landscape, but what makes the trilogy so extraordinary and pleasurable to read is how beautifully Mr. St. Aubyn writes, his acidic humor, his stiletto-sharp observational skills, and his ability to alchemize these gifts into one quotable, Oscar Wildean bon mot after another. And what makes the book so moving, as a writer friend of mine said, is that you feel that its hero is trying at every moment, and with every cell of his being, not to turn into the asshole that he’s been programmed from birth to become.

That struggle is ongoing throughout Mother’s Milk, in which we catch up with Patrick some years after his marriage to the thoughtful and understandably disaffected Mary. He’s the father of two sons, and his slowly dying mother, Eleanor, has decided to leave his childhood home in Provence to a sleazy guru named Seamus and his sketchy New Age foundation. The book abounds in visions of motherhood gone hideously wrong, either through monumental self-interest (the sheer awfulness of Mary’s mother, Kettle, makes Eleanor seem almost beneficent) or through the sort of quasi-erotic attachment that makes Patrick feel progressively more alienated from that cozy trio composed of his wife and their two beautifully drawn little boys.

No contemporary writer writes more knowingly or eloquently from the point of view of the child who is smarter and more observant than the adults around him might wish to imagine. Mother’s Milk starts, nervily, with what I suppose is called a “birth memory”—in this case, that of Robert, Patrick’s older son, recalling his first experience of wrenching separation from his mother. The novel follows the family as the parents’ marriage unravels, as Patrick initiates a love affair with a witty and unhappy former girlfriend, and as he flirts with the sort of substance abuse that turned Bad News (the middle novel in Some Hope) into a dispatch from the private hell of a damned soul who simply couldn’t get high enough to lower the frequency of his own acute, self-lacerating awareness.

Near the end of Mother’s Milk, the Melrose family decides to cope with their exile from Patrick’s childhood paradise by taking a salutary, restorative trip to the United States. By now, the reader can pretty much predict how well this neat solution will work out, just as we can expect the vacation to provide Mr. St. Aubyn with yet another chance to display his gift for making us recognize a volley of hilariously barbed and enraged perceptions as the flailings of a character struggling not to drown in a sea of despair. Here, to take one example, are the anxious young Robert’s musings on the “hysterical softness” of his fellow passengers boarding the flight from Heathrow to New York, strangers displaying “a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who have decided to become their own airbag-systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?

“Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle.”

I’ve always hated the expression “writer’s writer,” with its implication of an audience even smaller and more narrowly limited than that of the “cult writer.” But Edward St. Aubyn allows the phrase its best possible interpretation. He’s the kind of writer who makes you notice the terrifying family at the next table, and who makes you want to write.

Francine Prose’s most recent novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

I’ve always loved summer in New York, ever since I was a child. I like the steam-bath intimacy, the bared expanses of strangers’ flesh, the tattoos blooming everywhere like exotic hothouse flowers. Some mildly thrill-seeking part of me even likes idly wondering if I’m going to pass out from heat exhaustion and crumple to the platform among my fellow martyrs being slowly roasted alive in the roaring furnace of the Union Square station.

But this summer feels different, somehow. I leave the city the minute I can, streaming toward the George Washington Bridge along with all the other drivers telegraphing the Darwinian panic of escapees fleeing the alien-occupied metropolis in a science-fiction film. Though now, it seems, the aliens are us.

If these are the so-called dog days, they’re the dog days on steroids, with the Newfoundlands and St. Bernards panting and suffering with furry, mournful canine forbearance. But New York doesn’t do forbearance. Tempers are notably short, motorists are heavy on their horns, and last week alone I witnessed two unpleasant altercations between pedestrians accidentally colliding as they competed for their little bubbles of sidewalk breathing room.

The London bombings haven’t helped. But New Yorkers aren’t idiots, so it’s not as if we’ve only just this summer realized that the other shoe is going to drop not far from where the first one did—that is to say, on us. In my observation, people don’t seem particularly nervous about the specter of terrorists on public transportation—although, as always, the sight of machine guns in the hands of adolescent reservists in full camouflage drag inevitably makes the heart beat a little faster. In fact, there’s something oddly reassuring about the fact that New York’s Finest have begun to practice a quirky new brand of racial profiling, a triage based on the assumption that the backpacks and bags most likely to contain incendiary devices belong to young, blond white girls with big breasts and low-cut T-shirts.

If there were such a thing as an urban psychotherapist, the good doctor might diagnose our malaise as a citywide case of chronic, low-level depression. Sadness? The faces you see on an average day on the A train look as if they’re auditioning for cameos in a Walker Evans photo. Free-floating angst and rage? I’d bet that if the average household were bugged (which they very well may be, before too long, in the interests of national security), you’d hear a startling number of New Yorkers yelling at their unresponsive TV screens as the network anchormen intone the evening news.

Those nightly wig-outs may turn out to be the key to our diagnosis. Because my guess is that we’re not all simultaneously being flattened, through some miracle of synchronicity, by the recovered memories of our unhappy childhoods. It hardly requires a board-certified psychoanalyst to read the signs and manifestations and to conclude that our malaise is not about past history, but rather about the present historical moment.

Early in the summer, I had breakfast with a close friend, a well-known African-American activist and teacher who’s also the widow of an iconic Black Panther. Her son, in his early 30’s, has converted to Islam and is currently leading a quiet, religious and utterly apolitical life in Qatar. But lately, my friend has just learned, F.B.I. agents have begun contacting the families of her son’s expatriate buddies to inform them that their offspring have been consorting with a young man who, the agents claim, is “just like his father” and whom they have reason to suspect of having ties with Al Qaeda.

As we ate our blini in the pleasant East Village restaurant garden dappled by June sunshine, we discussed my friend’s serious and not at all unreasonable fear that her son could be “rendered” off the streets of his adopted home and wind up in some Egyptian jail or as a prisoner in Guantánamo. We talked about it calmly, though we noted with amazement how strange it was to be contemplating the very real possibility that an American citizen could be kidnapped, interrogated and imprisoned without anyone mentioning those precious but increasingly obsolete two words: due process. And perhaps it was the restaurant’s Eastern European cuisine that made me think that this is what it might have been like to have breakfast with Anna Ahkmatova in the anxious days before her son vanished into one of Stalin’s prisons.

One hallmark of the severely dysfunctional family, a symptom likely to inflict long-term damage on its members, is the insidious way in which the profoundly bizarre comes to seem not only routine but positively normal. Which, I’d suggest, describes the current state of affairs. What would we have concluded if, a mere five years ago, someone had told us that our society would demonstrate only passing outrage and no lasting curiosity about the fact that our soldiers had tortured prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba? How would we have greeted the suggestion that we might lose confidence in the electoral process, in the integrity and courage of our press, or in our own right to express our political opinions without being accused of treason? What would we have thought of the suggestion that the Constitution would be so widely ignored and devalued that a large percentage of the population believes that the separation of church and state is the nutty whim of a gang of godless liberals conspiring to subvert moral values? How would we have responded to hearing that we might find ourselves embroiled in a bloody, costly war waged for reasons that time has shown to be based on complete fabrications? Five years ago, we would have thought—naïvely—that none of these scenarios were likely, or even possible.

If we ask ourselves questions, they only lead to other questions. How did this happen so quickly? Weren’t we paying attention? And what can we do about it now? We e-mail each other and analyze the situation as if we were all on a plane going down with a cabin full of aeronautic engineers noting the succession of alarming engine noises. We preach to the converted and try to make our opinions heard. A few weeks ago, encouraged by a friend, I called my Senators to suggest that they might want to stay focused on getting to the bottom of Karl Rove’s involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. Whoever answered the phone at Senator Charles Schumer’s office politely, if somewhat coolly, took down my name and district and thanked me for calling. Senator Hillary Clinton’s people sounded considerably less interested than they might have if I’d called to complain about a dab of bird shit on the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park.

The chicken-and-egg question of depression—which are causes and which are symptoms?—tends to revolve around an overwhelming sense of powerlessness accompanied by the absence of hope. And who can blame us for feeling powerless about a seemingly endless war that’s simultaneously bankrupting our country and making us enemies all over the world? Any sentient person would start to feel a little disheartened after being told, day after day, that A plus B does not equal C, but rather X or Y; that the London bombings—as Donald Rumsfeld recently stated—had nothing to do with the war in Iraq? And who wouldn’t be moved to yell at the news broadcast that features the fresh, young faces of newly dead American soldiers and tolls the numbers of their dead without bothering to keep a running count of Iraqi civilian casualties?

Meanwhile, the weather makes us think about what we’d rather not consider at all—that is, the disastrous long-term effects of the government’s environmental policy.

Even here, in tough, resilient New York, we feel the heat, so to speak. And, increasingly marginalized on what Spalding Gray called our little island off the coast of America, we try to think of a way to affect what’s happening on the mainland. Or we try not to think at all; we just try to get through it and enjoy the consoling pleasures that our city still has to offer. In fact, if the ship of state is sinking, I’d just as soon go down here: let’s say on Delancey Street, with salsa music pumping, the whole sidewalk thumping from the bass of a passing car playing hip-hop, a Chinese guy selling animals woven of straw, a group of black-clad Hasidic boys scurrying past like a flock of wild turkeys—and all of it on one block, which is what I love best about this city.

In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon’s “atlas of depression,” a researcher is quoted as saying that the circumstances that most often trigger the illness “typically involve loss—of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself—and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped.” I can’t think of a more painfully accurate description of the way we live now, and of the reason why New York feels, as any victim of depression might, so “unlike itself.” The problem, this summer, is neither the heat nor the humidity. It’s the humiliation of finding ourselves despised by so much of the world for something so far out of our control.

Francine Prose’s new novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

Given the sorry state of so much current fiction, the appearance of a novel with a narrative style that seems fresh, accurate, clear and inventive-especially when combined with a gift for observation and the delineation of character-is truly an occasion for calling up one's friends to announce that the novel has once again survived the latest dire predictions of its demise. I felt that way about Jennifer Egan's second novel, Look at Me, which opens with the description of a fiery car wreck in an Illinois cornfield. The accident catapults the narrator, Charlotte Swenson, through the windshield, breaking the bones in her face but-after extensive plastic surgery-leaving her with no visible scars. What immediately catches one's attention, as much as the novel's arresting premise, is the manner in which it's presented: The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and, behind the consciousness a writer who knows what she's doing. "I might have been decapitated, adding insult to injury, you might say …. I owe my life to what is known as a 'Good Samaritan' … who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision, and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away rather than take credit for these sterling deeds." Ms. Egan's painstaking construction of an individual voice builds sentence by sentence, as certain words ("un-American," "sterling") and phrases ("adding insult to injury, you might say") give off a slightly harsh, metallic light that illuminates the smart, world-weary, reflexively arch quality of Charlotte's personality.

Back in New York after her auto wreck, Charlotte discovers that having a new face is not doing much to revive a modeling career that was half-dead even before the accident: Although she can't quite pinpoint how her looks have changed, former acquaintances now look right through her. She flirts with depression, alcoholism and a private detective on the trail of a suspected terrorist. Meanwhile, back in Illinois, a teenage girl named Charlotte (the daughter of the older Charlotte's former best friend) initiates a scary romance of quasi-religious intensity with a mysterious foreigner who blows into town and winds up teaching math. As one might expect in a novel about a fashion model with a reconstructed face and a teenage girl in love with an enigmatic stranger, this one has a lively interest in the world of appearances, in the confusions between substance and surface, between publicity and privacy, and the ways in which our culture exploits those confusions for cash.

Ms. Egan's characters are painfully conscious of euphemism, propaganda and the fakery that the misuse of language both promotes and conceals. The New York Charlotte listens to the doctors who attend to her after her accident describe "a golden time" before "the grotesque swelling would set in" and warn of an "angry healing phase." And Charlotte's successful modeling agent, Oscar, deals with the requisite disloyalties of the fashion business by affecting a leisurely shorthand in which he customarily speaks of himself in the third person. "'Twenty-three is too old,' Oscar said, exhaling smoke. 'And you don't look twenty-three, dear, much as Oscar loves you.'" But what's even more unusual than Ms. Egan's unsettling reports from the frontiers of jargon is the extent to which this linguistic slippage-the murkiness of thought that follows from murkiness of language, the smooth-talking seductions of our increasingly inauthentic culture-becomes the novel's subject matter.

After her return to New York, Charlotte's precarious financial situation makes her realize that every player has a gimmick, an impeccably well-rehearsed method of persuading us that the latest idea is the best one, and that the attempt to hang on to some core of conviction, dignity or even simple good taste is old-fashioned and self-defeating. In one of the novel's most hilarious scenes, Charlotte thinks she's gotten her big break-a fashion job for Italian Vogue-but suddenly realizes that the photographer plans to achieve his effects by cutting the models with razor blades. When Charlotte suggests using fake blood instead: "The word 'fake' induced a collective flinch, as if I'd used a racial slur." The idea of authenticity has itself become a marketing tool: "'Fake is fake,' Spiro said dismissively. 'I'm trying to get at some kind of truth, here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world. Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It's the most real thing there is.'" It's a measure of Ms. Egan's skill and control that she can allow us to see past Charlotte's sensible reservations to register the insidious persuasiveness of invitations to participate in our own debasement. Even when our heroine walks off the shoot, we feel a little shudder of misgiving, a premonition of the danger of leaving the warm lights behind.

The scope of Look at Me is wide enough to include those who see themselves as forever shut out of the bright, hot center of things-who, in fact, define themselves against it, feeding on their hatred of its symbols. The young Charlotte's beloved math teacher is, in fact, a Middle Easterner named Aziz, a terrorist stranded in the heartland, testing his resolve against such quotidian seductions as a Big Mac: "His first thought was that it didn't look big enough, it was squashed, pelletlike, the meat gray and incidental; was this really a Big Mac or had they given him something inferior? Then his own thoughts sickened him-greed, individualism-and he lifted the thing to his mouth and jammed it half inside." Though isolation has intensified Aziz's struggle, its terms were established the minute he set foot on our shores and came to live with a group of fellow immigrants in an overcrowded apartment in New Jersey. "At night, Aziz and his gaunt compatriots would gather on the foam-rubber couch to watch TV: They huddled like pigeons, craving the anesthesia that issued from that screen, the tranquilizing rays: cars animate as human faces; breakfast cereals adrift in the whitest milk Aziz had ever seen; juice erupting from phosphorescent oranges …. And even as the anesthesia worked upon Aziz, even as his mouth fell open, eyelids splayed helplessly to admit these sights, hands curled like an infant's, he was aware of the rage waving like a flag near his heart, reminding him that this hypnosis was a conspiracy at work, whereby a seed of longing was implanted forever in one's mind …. If fighting the conspiracy had reduced him, that loss merely strengthened his grim and patient will to destroy it." (Ms. Egan felt the need, after the Sept. 11 attack, to explain herself in Slate: "I didn't see anything coming. I made it up.")

Ms. Egan's America has its share of cynics and sinister visionaries, but for most of her Americans, the world is more sympathetic, nuanced and complex. Both Charlottes suffer, and are made to suffer, because they see too much, think too clearly, ask too many questions. Worse, they are unable or unwilling to conceal what, Ms. Egan suggests, people in general and women in particular would be wiser to keep hidden: their sexuality, their brains, their integrity. In the end, Ms. Egan refuses to let us off the hook by suggesting that the authentic and intelligent will ultimately triumph over the fraudulent and the fanatical. The bleakness of the landscape she depicts seems scarily like our own: a culture that finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the fresh and the tired, between incisiveness and obfuscation, and which seems to prefer the simulacrum to the real thing. Happily, Look at Me is the real thing-brave, honest, unflinching. Jennifer Egan's novel, so concerned with accurate and false reflections, is itself a mirror in which we can clearly see the true face of the times in which we live.

Francine Prose's most recent novel is Blue Angel (HarperCollins).

Plenty of bizarre conversations took place in the back room of Max's Kansas City, but probably few more unlikely–or more touching–than the scene Kathleen Norris describes in her new memoir, The Virgin of Bennington . A hundred or so pages into this understated, admirably restrained account of its author's coming of age in Vermont and New York City, Ms. Norris describes the night in the early 1970's when she met her friend Gerard Malanga–the poet and Andy Warhol familiar–in the nether recesses of the legendary bar and, surrounded by its eccentric patrons (artists, musicians, writers, celebrity glam transvestites), seized the perfect opportunity to read aloud from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress . "I loved the names: Great-Heart, Madame Bubble. And my favorite, Feeble-Mind, who never thinks he has the fortitude to complete his pilgrimage, but keeps going nonetheless. Finally, on the shores of the River Jordan, having willed his mind to a dunghill, he calls out to his friends, 'Hold out, Faith and Patience!' as he crosses over."

Have you ever heard anything more adorable in your life? No wonder the scene ends with a "beautiful young man" named Eric Emerson approaching Ms. Norris and asking her to bear his child! But what Eric Emerson clearly failed to guess–and what the reader of Ms. Norris' book will by this point have intuited–is that Ms. Norris might as well have been reading from her dear diary. In fact, The Virgin of Bennington is an updated Pilgrim's Progress , with Ms. Norris herself as the modern-day Pilgrim, navigating the perilous landscape of Gotham (The Doubting Castle! The Slough of Despond!) on her way to her own version of the River Jordan.

But I'm jumping ahead of our story–that is, Kathleen Norris' story–which begins with its shy, insecure but good-hearted heroine leaving Hawaii (where her father was a cellist in the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra) to enroll in Bennington College, about which she seems to have been seriously misinformed. What she apparently had in mind (a school with neither a math requirement nor the distraction of male students) was something more like … Smith. The harsh realities of college life (classmates taking tons of speed and having sex with strangers) threw Ms. Norris into culture shock, which she weathered long enough to graduate and to land a job in Manhattan as a secretary, gofer and general amanuensis at the Academy of American Poets.

Her work at the Academy–and her encounters with the distinguished writers who gave readings under its auspices–provide the book with its most engaging moments. Her very first week on the job, she managed to accidentally hang up on W.H. Auden. During a long car ride with James Merrill, she listened to the poet muse on the notion that cats watch people closely because "they were intent on learning how to behave should they ever reincarnate as human beings. How to use a can opener, hang a painting, or bone a chicken." On the subway en route to Queens, she watched James Wright startle fellow passengers by loudly declaiming the verses of Walt Whitman.

Even as she was learning about the poetry world, Ms. Norris was receiving a parallel education about the worldlier world. After the appearance of her first book of poems, she discovered that the toxic envy of one's peers and a crushing writer's block can be among the unexpected perks of publication. When her affair with a married Bennington professor tanked, she learned about the drawbacks of teacher-student romance. And in the aftermath of a disastrous mescaline trip, she resolved to follow Mr. Malanga's advice about psychedelics: "If you can't handle drugs, you have no business taking them."

Indeed, Ms. Norris portrays her younger self as something of an advice sponge; luckily for her (and her readers), much of it came from her beloved friend and mentor, Betty Kray, her boss at the Academy. Kray's wise counsel included fashion tips, reading suggestions, observations on matters of the heart, ruminations on poetry in general and Ms. Norris' work in particular: "I think of Betty as my first reader, of both my life and my art. She knew what to make of the poems I was writing in my twenties, poems so inward, so masked, that thirty years after having written them, I no longer know what I was trying to say." Most importantly, Kray was teaching Ms. Norris how to be an adult, a moral human being–in short, how to live.

In her efforts to make something out of her pliable, unformed assistant, Kray, it should be said, had solid material to work with. What consistently comes through all this is Ms. Norris' essential decency, her humility, her refusal to pass facile judgments or to indulge in the acidic, score-settling gossip that poisons so many memoirs. Thus she tactfully conceals the identity of the married academic lover and of the ambitious young female poet who briefly courted Ms. Norris' friendship and then abruptly dropped her when it turned out that she had no power to confer favors or influence the Academy's prize competitions. Ms. Norris' openness allowed her to maintain a–to put it mildly–wide acquaintance; her close friends included Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries , and radical feminist Andrea Dworkin.

Indeed, Kathleen Norris is so modest that she readily moves to the wings of her own book and lets Betty Kray occupy center stage for so much of the time that The Virgin of Bennington often seems less like a memoir than a mini-biography of a dear friend. And her moving account of Kray's death suggests that one of the things Ms. Norris learned from her mentor was the ability to step out of the spotlight, to redirect attention away from the subject of her own fascinating self.

Eventually, Ms. Norris met the man she would marry, and after she inherited a family farm, they moved to South Dakota, where she wrote her immensely popular spiritual autobiographies, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk . Fans of these volumes will doubtless admire the pious note on which this new work concludes: "I know now that God works with us as we are, and through other people becomes incarnate to us." Some of us may find ourselves wishing we were still overdoing it with all the junkies and trannies in the back of Max's. In any case, it's clear, even to us sinners, that South Dakota is the River Jordan to which Kathleen Norris was heading–and taking us with her–all along. Hold out, Faith and Patience!

Francine Prose's latest novel, Blue Angel , is out in paperback from HarperPerennial.

All of us have times when we feel the need of sage advice, of that steadying hand gently guiding us toward the light at the end of the tunnel. My own dark several years of the soul spanned my early 20's, when I'd lived long enough to make all the wrong major decisions but not quite long enough to imagine alternatives, or escape routes. There was no one I could turn to, for-thanks to another giant mistake-I was living in Cambridge, Mass., a community which, with rare exceptions, seemed notably lacking in that sexy, inspirational joie de vivre you want in a personal consiglière, therapist or guru.

So I did what any rational person would: I consulted the I Ching. Forget all that time-consuming hoodoo with the yarrow stalks! My case was an emergency! I tossed the coins so obsessively that I could usually buy lunch with divinatory pennies retrieved from the crevices of my couch. And what did I get, exactly? Metaphors, poetry, a soothing dose of Confucian philosophy. How unsatisfactory: The last thing in the world I needed to hear was that perseverance furthers!

But that was another era: Before Elizabeth Wurtzel. Alas, I was born too early to avail myself (either in hard copy or in e-book form) of the breezy counsel Ms. Wurtzel dispenses in Radical Sanity. This slim volume of "commonsense advice for uncommon women" is divided into brief sections, each titled with a crisp directive: "Have Pets" and "Think Productively." Topics range from the practical ("Travel Light") to the metaphysical ("When All Else Fails, Talk to God"), from the sensible ("Enjoy Your Single Years") to the suspect ("The Only Way to Get One Person Off Your Mind Is To Get Another One On Your Body"). And each chapter is headed with an inspirational quote culled from a list of sources sufficiently ecumenical to embrace Ecclesiastes and Alanis Morissette.

As most established religions, televangelists and self-help swamis know, telling people how to live is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel: Offer enough advice, and sooner or later you're bound to come up with something useful. A few of Ms. Wurtzel's suggestions and warnings will brighten her readers' moods-and keep them out of trouble. I second her opinion about braving the open seas with strangers: "Don't get on a sailboat with people you don't know all that well, lest you find yourself stuck in someone else's nautical fantasy." And some of her instructions for attitude adjustment will hearten the anxious and lovelorn: "Every time you find yourself wondering how he feels about you, if he likes you, if he loves you, if he wants you desperately, try instead to start asking yourself how you feel about him."

But a good deal of what she says seems, well, not completely thought through. The quasi-Buddhist ruminations in the "Do Nothing" chapter ("Doing nothing is the opposite of, say, shagging some guy so that you can stop thinking about some other guy") will hardly serve as a substitute for that private audience with the Dalai Lama. As a small, symbolic offensive in the gender war, refusing to clear the table unless the male guests help may sound like a good idea. ("Do you want to know how you can change the world, one dinner table at a time? … Stay in your chair, savor a few more sips of your Merlot … and simply refuse to participate in a process that maintains the status quo of women serving men.") But the probable result of the dinner-party "sit-in" is that your hostess will wind up bussing all the dishes after the guests have gone home.

In any case, this surge of feminist feistiness seems faintly disingenuous when so much of Radical Sanity seems aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of snagging male approval. I want to believe that Ms. Wurtzel is correct in claiming that guys prefer women who tuck into hefty slices of banana cream pie. ("Men, by the way, find this trait very attractive, in contrast to vomitatious eating disorders, which no one finds appealing.") But I'm pretty sure she's wrong in mapping the way to a man's heart via a detour through the Balkans: "If, at a dinner party, you can very quietly explain to some vulgar, outspoken man exactly why he has not a clue about what is going on in the Balkan states … all the men at the table will be completely besotted with you." And it's simply depressing to be urged to get a pet because "men in particular, but people in general, think a woman who can handle a dog is pretty damn cool."

You start to sense where all this is heading, despite the wacky mini-disquisition on the history of feminism: "Here is how feminism got its start: There were many bright and bored women living in suburbs, playing mah jongg to pass the time … many of them went crazy and got addicted to Valium and Librium, and some of them joined up with the nascent women's movement …. Feminism saved these women's lives." Follow Ms. Wurtzel's essentially conservative program and-after a few years of enjoying the single life and outgrowing "your little-girl days of being a whiny, needy pain in the ass"-you'll pretty quickly find yourself back at the mah-jongg table. "There are exceptions to this rule, but I have never met any of them. Most of us need the conventions of coupledom, family, and stability to be happy." But don't despair: "Coupledom" need not confine us to the prison of suburbia. A different sort of middle-class life can be ours if we are brave enough to demand it: "We can stay in the city, and raise kids who are urban and urbane, who think chewing gum is bovine and disgusting, who enjoy Saturday afternoons at Cubism exhibits and evenings at art-house cinemas."

In one of the book's more chilling moments, Ms. Wurtzel reminds her hapless readers: "If you are doing something worthy with your life, like helping to end hunger in the Sudan or trying to resettle ethnic Albanians, you are probably not reading this book."

This sounds like the voice of her unruly id, drowning out all that big-sisterly advice, telling us what she really and truly thinks of the "uncommon women" desperate enough to buy what she's purveying. In fact, your heart goes out to young women so in need of assurance and direction that they're willing to seek spiritual guidance from the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch-from a writer who pays lip service to feminist ideals while promoting the sorts of "conventions" designed to produce the perfect woman, the new-model Stepford wife, for the Dubya years.

Francine Prose is the author of Blue Angel (HarperCollins).

The Gucci family, as everyone knows, accomplished something far more magical than turning the proverbial sow's ear into the proverbial silk purse. They transformed the sow's ear–or presumably some more tender part of the pig epidermis–into the leather handbag, and subsequently converted the handbag (with help from some loafers and flowered scarves) into a global retailing gold mine.

But, as everyone also knows, the humbly porcine origins of even the most stylish fashion accessory can be tough to eradicate. And so, while the passing years enhanced the splendor of the Gucci reputation and its fabulous real estate, penthouses, showrooms and boutiques, you could hear the faint echo of a disquieting sound: an initially plaintive and progressively more enraged and greedy … oinking. Eventually, the Guccis allowed their animal passions to trump their business acumen. Profits plummeted, family infighting escalated into accusations and cabals, lawsuits and physical violence. The family lost control of the empire that still bears its name, and–on a more personal note–Patrizia Gucci was accused and convicted of masterminding the 1995 Milan murder of her husband, Maurizio.

The story of this rise and fall–this metamorphosis and reversion–is entertainingly told in The House of Gucci . Sara Gay Forden's "sensational story of murder, madness, glamour, and greed" provides all the guilty pleasures and none of the usual drawbacks of the sex-and-shopping novel. For one thing, it's more lucidly written than your average Judith Krantz or Jackie Collins heavy-breather. For another, it happens to be nonfiction, so you can't blame the writer for the sort of melodramatic, unlikely plot turns that might make you suspect a novelist of having learned to write by watching reruns of Dynasty and Dallas . You can only chalk up the wildly improbable characters and events (for instance, the exorcist summoned to cleanse the bad vibes from the Creole , the newly purchased yacht on which Stavros Niarchos' first and second wives had committed suicide; or the "coincidence" of the silver handcuffs that appeared in Gucci shop windows worldwide after Patrizia was convicted) to the mysterious workings of Destiny, and to the fact that truth is way stranger than fiction.

Ms. Forden, former Milan bureau chief for Women's Wear Daily and editor of the magazine L'Una , has two intertwined stories to tell, and she manages to cover them both with an admirable, if at times dutiful, thoroughness. Underneath everything is the spiking, plummeting fever chart of an international mega-business with loads more glamour and cachet than most multinational concerns–a family company that began in 1921 with Guccio Gucci's leather-goods shop in Florence. His sons Aldo and (to a lesser extent) Rodolfo kicked things up a few notches: "By the 1970's, Gucci had come to symbolize status on three continents." Aldo opened a store on Rodeo Drive; Japanese shoppers had to be restrained from buying dozens of Gucci bags at once. Gucci loafers paced the corridors of high-level Hollywood and Washington power, and–in this democratic society–anyone with the money could order a Gucci interior for that new Cadillac or Chrysler LeBaron. Meanwhile, crowds of New Yorkers were lining up to catch some major attitude from the famously snooty and dismissive Eurotrash sales help at the East Side boutique.

But Aldo's and Rodolfo's sons didn't agree on a lot of issues, principally power and money, and a struggle ensued which led to a bloody scuffle (well, someone's face got scratched) at a board meeting in Florence in 1982. Rodolfo's son Maurizio gained control of the business, and–according to Ms. Forden–ran it into the ground. There was trouble with the tax authorities and with the law, some of it involving that ill-fated yacht, the Creole . ( Mi amore , did that exorcist give us a money-back guarantee?) Backers (a company known as Investcorp) kept Maurizio afloat for years, but eventually had to dump him, and the new corporation–Gucci minus the Guccis–was finally free to restructure. Wisely, the new management gave creative control to designer Tom Ford, who understood the brave new fashion world in ways Maurizio never could. Mr. Ford and chief executive Domenico De Sole put Gucci back on the map and together forestalled a takeover attempt by LVMH.

In fact, there's a lot of financial stuff, and how sexy you think all this is may depend on your ability to stay with a passage like the following: "On September 5, Investcorp announced plans to take Gucci public, offering 30 percent of the company on international stock markets–which would still leave Investcorp with majority control at 70 percent … The S.E.C. unexpectedly asked Investcorp to rewrite part of the Gucci prospectus and then the Milan stock commission refused to list Gucci, citing its recent losses." For some people, I realize, this is sex and shopping. Others may find it rather like watching a bunch of European guys in handmade shirts and beautiful suits trying to balance their checkbooks.

Happily for the fiscally challenged, The House of Gucci has great characters and high drama: part opera, part soap opera. First, of course, there's Patrizia, who came from Maurizio's own class–serious new money–and wanted something better: What she called for was nothing less than "the era of Maurizio," an era that peaked in international disco glory and ended with a bang after a public, low-rent (Patrizia and their two daughters arriving at the ski house to find that Maurizio had changed the locks) divorce. Even more compelling is the romantic Rodolfo, Maurizio's father, who ran away from home to become a movie star, got parts in silent films until the advent of sound ended his career, and then went back into the leather business with his brother Aldo. His beloved actress-wife died young and left the widower in a high-strung relationship with his son, an intense closeness that ended abruptly when Rodolfo–correctly, as it turned out–opposed Maurizio's marriage to Patrizia.

Obviously, Ms. Forden knows what the truly attention-grabbing elements of her narrative are–the murder and the trial–and deploys them at the book's beginning and end. These chapters may remind you of one of Claude Chabrol's lesser films: the blare of sirens screeching around the misty corner where Dottor Gucci had just been shot. And the investigation–how the Italian detectives caught the small-time wannabe criminals who got suckered into the murder plot, and then suckered into revealing it–is terrific. I could have read a whole book just about that. But The House of Gucci has larger ambitions and offers something to readers who want a detailed business lesson (short version: it's easier to wreck an empire than to build one) mixed in with their sex-and-shopping celebrity murder scandal.

Francine Prose's most recent novel is Blue Angel (HarperCollins).

It's a familiar scenario: You're trying to watch a film, but all you keep hearing in your head is the pitch that got the movie made. Well, it's sort of like Titanic crossed with Thelma and Louise , these two chicks hijack an ocean liner, see, and then there's this iceberg .… Until now, there's been no equivalent literary experience, perhaps because the book proposal lacks the same sexy je ne sais quoi , the thrilling, seductive promise of terrifying sums of money about to be flushed down the toilet. So it seems only fitting that American Rhapsody , a book you can hardly read above the distracting background buzz of its own high concept, was written by a Hollywood screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, the talent that brought us Basic Instinct , Showgirls and Sliver , among other memorable productions. The book … well, it's sort of like Dutch crossed with the Starr Report crossed with The Executioner's Song , except that it's by this guy who, like, totally identified with Bill Clinton, so .…

The rhapsody is all Eszterhas, you may be sure, and what he's rhapsodizing about is (ready for the shock of the new?) Bill and Monica's White House amour . At least that's the jumping-off point for more than 400 pages of watching the author of Flashdance think about how our nation got where it is and where it seems to be going. On the way, there's lots of mildly interesting Hollywood and Washington gossip, much of it fairly nasty–stories which, at their best (an anecdote about Mr. Eszterhas calling Glenn Close to tell her that his beloved friend, a director, had died, and hearing her tell him how the director never did anything for her except make her ass look big), seem like passages Bruce Wagner might have edited out of one of his smart, funny novels.

Essentially, it's all celebrity dish–gossip about Bill and Hillary, Monica, Bob Dole, Matt Drudge, James Carville, Linda Tripp, Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Sharon Stone and Joe Eszterhas. And you do have to wonder: How does this guy hear so much dirt? Does everybody in the world know that Jimmy Carter's sister was having "sudsy, lederhosen romps with married German chancellor Willy Brandt"? Does everybody know the facts about the mother of Jean Houston, the New Age guru who helped Hillary Clinton channel the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt? Readers who consider themselves plugged in will be positively ill to discover how out of the loop they are.

But Mr. Eszterhas is no mere gossip–he's also a political pundit, capable of speculating, dazzlingly, on the extent to which greater honesty from the President could have liberated a nation of guilty closet masturbators. "By saying, Yes, I masturbate, like most of you, and, like most of you, I love it! Bill Clinton could have freed men and women everywhere from the disdain and prejudice they were victims of.… Lincoln had freed a couple hundred thousand blacks–what was that compared to freeing hundreds of millions of blacks, whites, browns, yellows, reds, albinos, and so on? Bill Clinton could have been Mandela, Walesa, Gandhi, and Yeltsin combined."

As the jacket copy informs us, Mr. Eszterhas has done his research. He knows where to find the absolute dirtiest bits in the Starr Report (hint: check the footnotes), what Monica's lawyer said at dinner, what sort of childhood Matt Drudge had. And like many screenwriters, he's capable of really getting into a character with positively Chekhovian (or is Tolstoyan?) compassion and understanding. Consequently, for whole sections of the book, he leaves (however regretfully) the confines of Joe Eszterhas' richly complex psyche and becomes his characters, riffing in the voices of Monica, Bill, Bob Dole and John McCain, musing about Chelsea from Hillary's perspective ("Hillary was proud of Chelsea. She wasn't a brat like Amy Carter"); and letting us hear "Al Gorf's" ( sic ) fond memories of falling in love with Tipper ("She liked me. I couldn't believe that I was with the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen and that she liked Al Gorf"). Most astonishingly, the book's final chapter (forgive me for spoiling the surprise) is written from the point of view of the presidential penis, a sentient, articulate being with a marked aversion for the First Lady (it calls her "Hilla the Hun"): "I knew in my capillaries that Hilla didn't like me. She was full of hostility toward me."

Okay. We get where he's going with this. But why (and what's a pitch meeting without at least one skeptic who insists on being convinced?), after everything we've seen and read and heard about the Bill Clinton sex scandal, why would we want to watch this particular dead horse being beaten all over again–by Joe Eszterhas?

Funny you should ask. Mr. Eszterhas spends many pages establishing his credentials, which go beyond being a successful Rolling Stone journalist, screenwriter and friend to the stars. "I had helicoptered into a crowd of 100,000 drunken, naked kids in Darlington, North Carolina, with Alice Cooper and Three Dog Night and watched as Alice guillotined chickens onstage, spraying blood over these sunburned and sweaty, naked kids, who'd rub the blood into one another's privates." The point is: He is speaking for a whole Woodstock nation of baby boomers who imagined that Bill Clinton was "one of us." Mr. Eszterhas is qualified to write American Rhapsody because he and Bill and their entire generation share a passion for sex, drugs and rock and roll. Mr. Eszterhas' account of the experiences that made him sympathetic to Mr. Clinton give sexual boasting a bad name: "The women at Rolling Stone were young, nubile, attractive, and liked the phrase 'I really want to ball you.' And they did . Goodness knows, I did, too … with Deborah and Kathy and Shauna and Sunny and Robin and Leyla and Janet and Deborah again.… As I watched Bill Clinton with Hillary … I remembered that during those years at Rolling Stone , I was married.… My wife wasn't one of the hot and willing young sweetmeats at Rolling Stone . She was, in fact, sort of like Hillary: smart, poised, responsible, a partner in most ways, except the sexual ones."

Distasteful as this is, it begins to seem rather sweet, really, compared to the book's most appalling chapter: a meditation on why African-Americans supported the President, how Mr. Eszterhas (who refers to Vernon Jordan as the "Ace of Spades") and Mr. Clinton share a similar desire to be black, and how much the President has done for racial harmony: "Bill Clinton, thanks to his special relationship with black people, had accomplished the tentative beginnings of a racial peace in America.… We didn't have to worry about driving down certain streets after certain hours. We could walk by a group of black people on a street corner without hearing trash. Bill Clinton, the first black president of the United States, had done that."

Were the book's editors asleep at their desks? Was no one paying attention? The strangest thing is that, after a while, American Rhapsody makes you long to have actually witnessed the pitch, to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting when the folks at Alfred A. Knopf (of all places) were convinced that this book would be, as the jacket copy promises, "brilliant, unnerving ... devastating and penetrating"–a book the American reading public wanted, needed and deserved.

Francine Prose's most recent novel is Blue Angel (HarperCollins) .

Not long ago I asked a friend if he happened to have the address of a writer we both know. My friend didn't, but said he could probably locate our mutual acquaintance with some help from the Internet. In fact, he reported a short time later, the search engine he'd used had offered to provide us with a detailed map to the writer's house. For a small fee, we could also obtain the phone numbers of his neighbors; for a slightly higher fee (but still extremely reasonable, considering the value of what was being offered), we could obtain information about the writer's assets, and any judgments or liens against him. Well, thanks, but no thanks–hey, listen, all I'd wanted was to invite the guy to a party!

Any reader who can't help feeling a teensy frisson of paranoia and dread whenever he clicks onto his favorite shopping Web site and the home page greets him by name, or when she gets junk mail from a business or charity that seems to have some particular (and creepily well-informed) reason for having targeted her–to say nothing of those readers who have had their phones tapped, their hard drives seized and their private files subpoenaed–will cheer the lucid common sense of Jeffrey Rosen's The Unwanted Gaze . An associate professor at George Washington University Law School who is also the legal affairs editor of The New Republic , Mr. Rosen has given us a measured and bracingly sane examination of how Americans are losing control over how much every debt collector, marketer and amateur busybody is entitled to know about what they'd foolishly considered to be their private lives, and about the general "erosion of privacy, at home, at work and in cyberspace, so that intimate personal information–from diaries, e-mail and computer files to records of the books we read and the Web sites we browse–is increasingly vulnerable to being wrenched out of context and exposed to the world."

Mr. Rosen focuses on the loss of privacy in the home now that a determined special prosecutor or just your local district attorney can requisition your junior high school diaries, your Rolodex, your love letters and, worst of all, that embarrassing "note to self." He examines the pall that began to creep over the workplace when employees realized that the boss knew exactly who'd spent that slow lunch hour surfing the Internet porn sites, and the way that new laws such as the 1994 Molinari amendment (which allows the past misdeeds of accused sex offenders to be introduced as criminal evidence) have subverted the most basic aims of our judicial protections.

At the center of this, of course, is the question of how our society reached the point at which it was widely assumed that every citizen had the inalienable right to know about the stains on Monica's dress. But wisely, Mr. Rosen lets the murky shadows of the Starr Investigation and the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit merely linger over his argument and moves on to fresher, brighter and less shopworn evidence. He cites landmark cases and relevant historical precedents, notes the distance between the case of John Wilkes (the British editor of a "kind of eighteenth-century Drudge Report") and the Senate investigation of the sexual harassment charges against Bob Packwood. Arrested for having attacked one of King George III's speeches, Wilkes became a popular hero and was set free when he protested that his home had been ransacked, his papers seized and his privacy invaded; by contrast, the invasive, legally and socially sanctioned search of Mr. Packwood's diaries uncovered (and published) information concerning not only the senator's romantic gropings and fumblings but also his "musings on his favorite recipe for baked apples." Mr. Rosen's book is littered with the bodies of martyrs to the war on privacy, from Oliver Sipple (the ex-marine who was "outed" by the press after he saved President Gerald Ford's life) to the staff of Spin magazine–editors and writers who had their time eaten up and their wallets emptied by a former employee who blamed her career stagnation on the fact that she (unlike the rest of the office, it seemed) hadn't slept with Spin 's editor in chief. And the book has its heroes, such as Chief Justice Louis D. Brandeis, whose landmark essay and subsequent rulings on privacy sound (compared to the current rhetoric) as beautiful, reasonable and lofty as the Sermon on the Mount.

Just as we're gloomily noting that Brandeis is long dead and that what we have today in his place is Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Mr. Rosen comes to our rescue and actually offers solutions–temporary sandbagging and larger engineering projects that might prevent what's left of our privacy from being washed away. He suggests that Congress list the crimes "serious enough to justify the search of private papers," that courts prevent prosecutors from divulging certain information to the media, and he examines the various sorts of encryption software that allow ordinary people to keep their hard drives and e-mail safe from prying eyes.

The Unwanted Gaze reminds you that it is possible to read and think at the same time–a formerly common experience that now, I suppose, qualifies as "multi-tasking." And you may find yourself moved to pause and mull about whether and how much you concur with what Mr. Rosen is saying. I couldn't agree more with his concerns about the excesses and follies of the current sexual harassment laws, which he sees, rightly, as measures directed more often at invasions of privacy than bona fide harassment. But I worry about his fond hope that the guys in the office have learned their lesson by now, that we can rely on social norms and peer pressure to remind a naughty C.E.O. to keep his hands off his secretary's ass. And one might wish that Mr. Rosen had said a bit more about privacy issues affecting the blue-collar workplace (maybe I'm funny that way, but I'd rather have my corporate e-mail read than be ordered, on random occasions, to piss in a paper cup) and about the way mass culture has shifted our notions of the personal and the public: Not only do we know a sex criminal's prior history, but when the verdict is read, we can catch his reactions–close-up, live and personal–on Court TV.

What Jeffrey Rosen's book does have is the virtue of brevity and concision, of thoughtfulness, as well as the willingness and the ability to imagine alternatives. His clear voice speaks directly to those of us who still wish to claim a few private moments when Big Brother isn't watching like some hideous cyber homunculus lurking inside our computer and monitoring each spasmodic little dance that our fingers perform on the keyboard.