He was dressed in impeccable old New Yorker style, summer version—poplin suit, linen tie—and gave the Philippe Starck décor and thin servers all in black the Updike once-over—that cool Museums and Women gaze, with a faint hint of Eustace Tilley. He was a cool customer. We talked about his early days as a writer, and he recalled with peculiar un-nostalgia his two years of living in Manhattan as a young Talk of the Town writer, in the mid ’50s, just before leaving New York permanently for Ipswich. “Salary was a hundred a week,” he told me. “Which seemed a princely wage. To give you an idea—the rent we paid on a floor-through on West 13th Street, which was a nice street, was $150 a month.”

Why did he leave? “I just felt, even those two years of working for The New Yorker, that it’s a sort of big machine for whittling you down to size, New York,” he said. “And in a town where so many people write, or are agents, or are in the book business, it would have been hard for me to develop the sense of privacy or the naïve self-exploitation that a fiction writer perhaps needs. … If you move away from New York, you achieve a certain—I wouldn’t say grandeur, but you become somewhat interesting to people who live here, because most of the people here can’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s like I came from Antarctica, you know—that I’d spent seven years in an igloo or something heroic by living anywhere outside of New York.”

Nobody recognized him—or, knowing the Royalton, maybe they did and pretended not to. But, knowing the Royalton, probably they just didn’t.

Which is … what? Our national championship, unlike those of Australia, France and England, has always been an ambivalent phenomenon, mustering nothing like the TV audiences that accrue to the World Series and the Super Bowl. The fault lies with the game itself. It must be said that with the exception of its single boom--from the mid-70’s till the early 80’s--tennis has always been suspect here, lacking a blue-collar fan base, too hard to learn for the average weekend duffer, too patrician or effeminate to catch the national imagination.

Things are changing. Fast. Tennis isn’t what it used to be. Wake most any sports fan up in the middle of the night and ask who the most exciting figures (no pun intended) in tennis today are, and you’ll get the instant, sleepy answer: Venus and Serena Williams, no contest. O.K., Anna Kournikova--who can help it? But this is where things stand today. Say what you will about Sampras and Agassi and Rafter; as the Open comes around again, the old stars are fading, and new stars are rising. And right now, the women’s game--the Williamses’ game--is where the show is.

For a long time, as far as America at large was concerned, there wasn’t much show at all. Tennis was all white--balls, clothes, people--and polite. The Open era, starting in 1968, at least injected real money into the sport (it was the first time professionals were allowed to enter the national championship), and then, for that magic decade of ’75 to ’85 or so, we had solid show business: the camera-ready fury of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe; the rock-star remove of Björn Borg; the poetry of Guillermo Vilas; the brief, Nijinsky-esque flare of Yannick Noah. And holding up the women’s side all by itself, the fierce, psychodramatic mano à mano between the infinitely neurotic and fascinating Martina Navratilova and the unflappable but never unsexual Chris Evert. They all transited through New York at the end of every August, like comets, shedding their light and heat on us, and the city’s electricity returned the favor, giving their star-charge a boost.

And then, somehow, it all went away. Mr. Borg walked; Mr. McEnroe faded. The Big Game came along, in the person of Boris “Boom-Boom” Becker, and all at once the old style of tennis, with which the recreational player could vaguely identify, went the way of the wooden racket. Mr. Connors--rooster-strutting, low-rent, obscene--lingered to electrify our Flushing Meadow evenings, unbelievably, into his 40th year. But suddenly nuclear tennis was the rule, and we could no longer quite follow. He’s doing what? The ball is going how fast? Mr. Becker was charming, mensch- y--a good German, Gott sei Dank--but somehow too nice to be electrifying. The same could certainly be said of Stefan Edberg. And Ivan Lendl, as great as he was, was just plain … well, kind of icky.

It was the 90’s, and the game was in bad shape. Jim Courier was the future of American tennis, and Mr. Courier, for all his athletic gifts, had all the electricity of a utility infielder for the Columbus Clippers. Then came Andre Agassi.

Mr. Agassi stirred some interest. He was small, cocky, and--best of all, somehow--he came from Las Vegas. He was related by marriage to another Vegas-ite, Pancho Gonzalez, the angriest great American player of all time. And while Mr. Agassi didn’t seem particularly angry himself, he was agreeably strange: His ostensibly ingratiating smile appeared to bespeak a conflicted soul. We wondered about him. His hair and clothes, agreeably wacky, changed from day to day. Not to mention the fact that--always important--he was an athletic genius. The marketing people perked up: Product placement could re-commence! The cool evening air of Flushing Meadows felt charged again.

Meanwhile, Pete Sampras was coming on, too, and his tennis genius was even greater than Mr. Agassi’s. His charisma, though, seemed more on the order of his idol, Rod Laver’s. Translation: nil--it was Mr. Laver’s game that was electrifying; we didn’t care diddly about his personal life. The same was true of Mr. Sampras, who seemed pleasant, smiley, cute if slightly simian, and who did his best theatrics in pantomime: He let his racket do the talking.

Tennis, the only single-combat spectator sport besides boxing, has always been a kind of theater. From Suzanne Lenglen and Bill Tilden to the present, the game’s brightest lights have been star performers. We come to watch tennis’ fight, its dance, but we must also see the faces. The great tournaments, the Grand Slams--the French Open, the Australian, the U.S., and Wimbledon--are, finally, great theater. And, of course, no theater is like New York theater. Patrick Rafter never looked comfortable in Wimbledon whites; he didn’t seem to truly come alive till he could wear his war paint, samurai ’do and mini-billboards at Flushing Meadows.

Yet even with his two U.S. Open titles, beneath the frippery Mr. Rafter was just a nice Australian boy, not the important transitional figure tennis needed until the Next Big Thing came to N.Y.C. While nobody was looking, the girls took over.

Ms. Navratilova had proved a woman could play like a man, but this wasn’t going to particularly impress anybody if, more and more, the woman grew to look like a man as well. But then along came the apple of Jerry Seinfeld’s eye, lissome Gabriela Sabatini; and then Steffi Graf and Monica Seles and Lindsay Davenport and--alley oop!--suddenly the days of endless moonball rallies and lacy tennis suits and polite little feminine grunts were dead as a doornail. Suddenly women could hit the living shit out of the ball.

And nobody hits it any harder than the Williamses, who are the present and future of tennis rolled into one. With their incredible bodies, superlative athleticism and sunny arrogance (not to mention that juicy, tragically conflicted sister-rivalry), they’re precisely the wake-up call the game needed if it is to attract a wider playership and audience. And Arthur Ashe Stadium is the stage upon which they were born to strut.

The U.S. Open’s center court couldn’t have been better renamed than for the man who galvanized and organized American tennis in the Open era. And the great secret about Arthur Ashe is that, for all his seeming quiet modesty, he had his own brand of kingly arrogance. He could never have traveled as far as he did, or accomplished as much--largely alone--without it.

The U.S. Open is a fiesta of arrogance, show business on a Big Apple scale, and Arthur Ashe Stadium, from the Deco Turf 2 surface of the court to the upper bleachers, is its ideal venue: stadium and studio and theater all in one. It feels big and intimate at once. Importance hovers in its molecules.

And it’s social theater, too. As befits a New York venue, the near seats are sewn up by the machers; you can’t buy or luck your way in. And the machers are our machers. The cameras may zoom in on movie stars or TV stars, but we know who really has the juice at Flushing Meadows. If Ashe is the place’s genius loci, Don Hewitt is something like its presiding spirit. Who outside of New York City knows or cares who Mr. Hewitt is? But here he’s the squinty, flinty top of the media heap, the guy who holds the wires, knows where the bodies are buried, and gets to sit wherever the hell he wants. He’s the big boss of the big show, and at the U.S. Open, the show is what it’s all about.

PETE SAMPRAS

What Alps remain for Mr. Sampras to climb, now that he’s broken Roy Emerson’s record of 12 Grand Slam wins and surpassed Mr. Borg’s modern-day string to conquer Wimbledon seven times? The case could be made that, at long last, the greatest tennis player of all time is out of gas. He was off the tour for three months last spring with a back injury. At Wimbledon this past July, fellow players thought he was dogging it when he complained about his sore shin--until they saw him limp up the steps. The truth is, at a geriatric 29, Mr. Sampras is starting to look his age. Tennis takes it out of you; just ask any weekend hacker. Then ask somebody, no matter how young and strong and talented, who guts it out six hours a day, seven days a week, week in and week out, through jet lag and bad hotel meals. And yet Mr. Sampras made it through Wimbledon on sheer heart and intestinal fortitude, and New York crowds can inject a huge adrenaline boost. Let us not forget, he’s the guy who puked, right on court, during a four-hour U.S. Open quarterfinal against Alex Corretja in 1996, and went on to win the match and the tournament. Now, that’s guts.

ANDRE AGASSI

And speaking of tennis’ great Sick Men, what of the top-seeded Mr. Agassi, who, Freudianly, wrenched his back in a Vegas fender-bender right after returning from a disappointing Wimbledon, and just in time to avoid being pressed into Davis Cup service by Kommandant McEnroe? There’s always been something smarmy about Mr. Agassi--that shit-eating grin, those blown kisses, that worn-on-his-sleeve religion--and yet he never fails to be compelling, whether he’s marrying then quickly unmarrying Brooke Shields, cavorting on the beach with Steffi Graf, hanging enigmatically with that mysterious trainer-guru, or coming back to tennis’ heights after a long season in the crapper, losing to journeymen in the qualifying rounds. He was the guy, after all, who lost his hair and ballooned on a Big Mac diet--then came back as a sculpted, shaven-headed Superman, the fittest man on the tour. It’s those wild transitions that have always kept us interested in him, and he’s bound to go through two or three at this year’s Open alone.

LLEYTON HEWITT

Australia’s Mr. Hewitt and America’s Jan-Michael Gambill are tennis’ two new blond Beauty Boys--except that they can both really play. Nineteen-year-old Mr. Hewitt’s the one with an electrifying record this past year, with four titles and victories over those hard-serving Greek guys, Philippoussis and Sampras. The white-hot Mr. Hewitt’s been able to beat just about anybody these days, except the even hotter Gustavo Kuerten, the current world No. 1, who took him out earlier this month in the semifinals of the hard-court RCA Open. A token of things to come?

GUSTAVO KUERTEN

The gangly, stubbly Mr. Kuerten--“Guga” to his zillions of Brazilian fans, so insanely devoted they’re apt to start chanting his name at the drop of a shot--is living proof that you don’t have to be a prime physical specimen to be the best tennis player in the world. With his thin arms and legs, and that funky kerchief on his head, he looks a little like Buster Poindexter at a costume party. He sure can play, though. He’s got a big serve. He’s got a Web site (www.gugakuerten.com.br, “Site Oficial do Guga”). And, seeded second here, he’s got a good chance of taking the Open from Mr. Sampras or Mr. Agassi.

THE WILLIAMSES

It’s a family affair: Serena beat Martina Hingis to win the Open last year, avenging Venus’ loss to Ms. Hingis in the semis. Then the sisters won at doubles. Venus beat Serena to take Wimbledon this year. Then they went out and won the doubles there, too. The third-seeded Venus has been trouncing everyone in sight over the past couple of months, but don’t count out fifth-seeded Serena in this year’s Open: Canny tournament organizers will no doubt put the most amazing siblings ever to dominate the game on opposite sides of the draw, thus setting up another possible finals showdown, and tear-jerker. And thriller. Pound for pound, ability for charisma, there’s never been anyone more exciting in the sport than Venus or Serena. Somewhere, Lenglen and Tilden are applauding madly.

MARTINA HINGIS

She was named after Ms. Navratilova, which certainly spoke to destiny but said nothing to character. Has there ever been a less-endearing champion than the Swiss Miss? Oh, all right, Ivan Lendl—to whom Ms. Hingis bears a weird physical resemblance, buckteeth and all. But it’s not just her looks (actually, she’s kind of cute, if you squint), it’s her all-around coldness and arrogance, her general uneagerness to please, that put one in mind of Orson Welles’ great line about cuckoo clocks in The Third Man.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT

Where are the words to tell you how I adore Lindsay Davenport? The fact that she looks a little like Grady Sutton is, in my mind, all in her favor: She’s living proof that cuteness is only skin deep, that the spirit (and skills) of a great champion can underlie a less-than-cosmetically-perfect exterior. To these eyes, she’s a magnificent woman. Her tears, her sheer grace and magnanimity after her 1998 U.S. Open victory made me cry.

ANNA KOURNIKOVA

Maxim! GQ! Down, boys! Rrowf! Back! I mean … what can you say? Except that, the slaverings of college boys and the carping of other women on the tour aside, Kournikova really can play tennis: She’s seeded 12th here, in a reasonably deep field. Something tells me, though, that she’s cannon fodder early on. Something else tells me, though, that CBS’ ratings will mysteriously spike when she plays, in any case.

JOHN MCENROE

And speaking of CBS’ ratings, how about a nice, tournament-long spike for one of sports’ greatest broadcasters ever, Captain Davis Cup himself, Mr. Loose Cannon, the fabulous, piratical Johnny Mac? Forget sports broadcasters: greatest broadcasters, period. Never predictable--thank God!--and always penetrating, Mr. McEnroe refuses to toe the company line on anything, whether it’s political correctness (he’s still a bit of a chauvinist when it comes to women’s tennis, though I’d pay big money to see him play Venus) or on-air deportment (he used salty language during the Wimbledon broadcast!). And his shrewd analyses of tennis strategy, personality and business go far beyond what any other former player has dared to say on the air. Now if only he’d ditch that annoying habit of referring to players by their nationalities (“That backhand cross-court was a little too much for the Swede”)

You can talk all you want about stats, break down the biomechanics till the cows come home. Sportswriters used to rhapsodize about Ted Williams’ extraordinary vision, as did Williams himself: He could, he claimed, see the spin on a breaking ball when it was halfway to the plate. He compared the motion of his swing to that of a metronome. This was all nice, but other players could see spin, others had sweet swings. It just didn’t quite explain how Williams could hit .400.

In the space of a couple of years, Roger Federer has claimed a unique place at the top of professional tennis. Arthur Ashe once said that the distance from No. 10 on the men’s tour to No. 1 was comparable to the distance from No. 50 to No. 10: The slope, in other words, gets steeper the higher you go. Mr. Federer hovers, balloon-like, somewhere over the game’s summit.

And yet his great gifts aren’t glaringly apparent. Andy Roddick hits a more crushing serve, Fernando Gonzalez a more thundering forehand. Marat Safin’s backhand is said to be the best in the game. When, a couple of years ago, the possessor of a far sharper eye for tennis than mine, John McEnroe, opined on TV that Mr. Federer had the wherewithal to become the greatest of all time, I was slightly stunned, not only at Mr. McEnroe’s modesty, but at the assertion itself. I frankly didn’t quite get it at first.

But the claim has borne up, as the 25-year-old Swiss has amassed enough winning streaks and Grand Slam titles to set him on a course toward posterity. What Mr. McEnroe saw was a game with many great strengths and no apparent weaknesses. This last is key: Even at the top levels of tennis, Achilles’ heels abound. Pete Sampras had perhaps the greatest serve ever (especially his second serve); he possessed an amazing running forehand and a beautiful volley. His backhand, though, broke down under pressure. Nothing much in Roger Federer’s gorgeous game ever breaks down.

Yet I think what Johnny Mac, as a tennis genius himself, was also appreciating about Mr. Federer were qualities subtler than beautiful strokes. I was once fortunate enough to spend an hour hitting tennis balls with Mr. McEnroe, and the thing that raised the little hairs on the back of my neck was his absolute ability to be—no matter where I happened to hit the ball, accidentally or on purpose—in precisely the right place at exactly the right time, and always in perfect balance. There was a musical quality to it, a Mozartean magic.

Mr. Federer has that, in spades. Watch him play the most powerful hitters, and he’s simply always there, perfectly poised to return the screamingest missiles. And his balance is more than physical. Watch his head—always poised and steady, the features placid—as he hits those glorious forehands and backhands. It’s human nature to glance up right after you’ve hit a tennis ball, to see how well you’ve done. Mr. Federer, knowing exactly how well he’s going to do, stays focused on the point of impact for what feels like seconds after impact has actually occurred.

The single chink in his armor is Rafael Nadal. For a while, it seemed that the cute, beefy, supernaturally peppy young Spaniard had Mr. Federer’s number: He actually ran off a streak of five matches in a row against the Swiss, climaxing in this year’s French Open final. But even as he was cleaning Mr. Federer’s clock, Mr. Nadal—the politest phenom in recent memory—kept deferring to him, saying how great Mr. Federer was. With a less ingenuous player, you might’ve suspected a head game. As it turned out, he was just stating the obvious. At Wimbledon this year, Mr. Nadal held serve an incredible 80 times in a row as he marched to the final. In the final’s first set, on his way to a thumpingly convincing four-set win, Mr. Federer didn’t allow Mr. Nadal a single game.

In these same pages three years ago, I compared Mr. Federer’s personality to a bowl of Cream of Wheat. In retrospect, I was mistaking equipoise for blandness. There’s an appealingly puckish quality to his beetle-browed face: He’s clearly relishing his success, amused by the dance the world does at his feet. He shows a healthy, non-arrogant respect for his own achievements. “I use my skills, my technique, my tactics and my mind to try to win matches,” he said after Wimbledon. “And it’s been working.”

Imagine that—a great athlete talking about his mind. In the end, balance is what it’s all about.

Instead, we got Ian McEwan.

The English novelist's 1,200-word eulogy was graceful, cogent and astonishingly fully formed, bearing no whiff of the lamp, no sign of haste or clotted emotion: It read, if the unforgivable may be suggested, as though (like major New York Times obituaries) it had been written months or years in advance, and carefully whittled and polished till not a trace of the sweat of composition remained. "It will be some time," Mr. McEwan wrote, "before we have the full measure of Saul Bellow's achievement, and there is no reason we should not start with a small thing, a phrase or sentence that has become part of our mental furniture, and a part of life's pleasures."

For that small thing, Ian McEwan chose "a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of The Dean's December, who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: 'For God's sake, open the universe a little more!' We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged."

Well! This is neat, and euphonious, and appropriately humble-one thinks of Nipper, the old white-and-black RCA Victor mascot, his head cocked expectantly as he listens to His Master's Voice ….

One also thinks of Uriah Heep.

A glance at Ian McEwan's cool and masterful mug, with hooded eyes squinting knowingly through circular spectacles, is enough to tell you that this guy-the author of nine highly acclaimed novels; winner of the Whitbread and the Booker; a literary god in one of the few countries that still appears to take books, and the eminences who produce them, seriously-doesn't think of himself as anyone's pooch.

Still, the literary world being what it is, Bellow's Nobel trumps Mr. McEwan's Booker and Whitbread, and proper respect-if not obeisance-must be observed. (In his new novel, Saturday, Mr. McEwan not only has an epigraph from Herzog, he lifts a damaged-Mercedes-vengeful-thug plot device right out of Humboldt's Gift.) And every working novelist feels like a dog from time to time, and anyone with any feeling for literature appreciates the existence of masters.

The literary world being what it is, one understands the lack of immediate tributes from the great American phallocrats. (On a replayed NPR interview last week, Bellow told Terry Gross that Norman Mailer, with his cult of celebrity and politics, was one of the main reasons he left New York to return to Chicago in the early 60's. Nor should we forget that once upon a time, Bellow stole a girlfriend of Philip Roth's, Susan Glassman, and made her his third wife.) But where were the Americans?

More to the point, why have the English (Christopher Hitchens, on Slate.com, and James Wood, in The Guardian, also contributed to the postmortem scrum) appropriated Saul Bellow?

The trouble began some 20 years ago, when Martin Amis, still in his enfant terrible phase, did a lengthy interview with Bellow ("Saul Bellow in Chicago," collected in The Moronic Inferno). It was a piece so uncharacteristically deferential that when Bellow's agent read it to him over the phone, Bellow commanded the agent to read it again. Here was an acolyte with class: an acclaimed young English novelist with growing credibility as a critic and essayist, not to mention a literary pedigree. A paternal/filial friendship, if not a mutual-admiration society, ensued. Mr. Amis proceeded to write a half-dozen more pieces on Bellow; the two appeared on British TV together (Bellow warbled "Just a Gigolo" for his delighted interlocutor); the younger man began to visit the older on his Vermont farm every summer. Envious accusations of brown-nosing were inevitable, especially after Mr. Amis rapturously asserted, in another essay, that "Bellow's first name is a typo: that 'a' should be an 'o.'"

And the usually acidulous Bellow, who reportedly had thorny relationships with his three sons (by three different wives), himself exhibited an unwonted soft spot for his young devotee, letting no butter melt on his tongue when he spoke on the record of Mr. Amis. But the big payoff came in 1995, when Bellow allowed part of an interview with him to be excerpted as a blurb for Mr. Amis' novel The Information, to wit:

"Martin Amis certainly uses a charged language. Anyone with that much feeling for words is bound to be accused of putting words first. This was the case with Flaubert and Joyce …. The discovery is an overpowering one when it happens; you find a new way to write about modern life. And that's pretty heady.

"Q: [Do you] think that Martin Amis has the inventive genius of a Joyce or a Flaubert?

"Yes, I do. I see signs of a very large outline."

With all due respect for Martin Amis' impressive body of work, one also saw, inevitably, signs of some very large logs being rolled. Putting one's own feelings of envy aside (if possible) and giving the subject of friendship between writers a good, hard, Amis-esque squint (see The Information), one could posit an understandable but not altogether seemly scenario: An old artist, never renowned for being kind, and covered with glory but facing the certainty of diminishing returns, being circled adoringly by a younger artist, almost equally renowned for emotional sharpness, but still very much about the task of constructing a substantial career.

More cynically still, Bellow had nothing to lose by praising a writer who wasn't a threat to him. You'd never catch him doling out kudos to the other phallocrats.

But one could hardly be blamed for thinking cynically, given the players: For his part, Bellow, a master of the quick-draw put-down, had a famous and long-standing habit of scorching the landscape whenever people tried to get cozy with him. ("A difficult uncle" was the warmest thing James Atlas could come up with, by way of eulogy.) And Mr. Amis, who never let an opportunity pass to be called the Bad Boy of British Literature, or to be photographed wearing a sneer, had a novelistic oeuvre marked by vast tundras of cynicism, here and there relieved by patches of faintly moist sentimentality. A love fest between the two of them was all well and good, as long as they kept it to themselves.

But of course they didn't. That wasn't the point. The adulatory pieces flowed from Mr. Amis' pen, and Bellow never let slip (to the public, anyway) anything as sharp as a backhanded compliment where his young devotee was concerned. In the payback-intensive year of 1995, Mr. Amis wrote an extended essay in The Atlantic, making what could only be called an impassioned case for Bellow's breakthrough 1953 book, The Adventures of Augie March, as, of all things, the Great American Novel. "Search no further," he wrote. "All the trails went cold forty-two years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended."

Here, I have to tip my mitt: As an occasional American novelist myself, I was surprised and, I must admit, slightly offended by the diminutive Brit's big-footing proclamation. For one thing-fairly or not-I couldn't help thinking, What business was it of his?

For another, the proclamation seemed almost defiantly tin-eared. I had long ago taken it as an article of faith that the Great American Novel was a chimera, an empty shibboleth, something that dim but hopeful advertising men of the mid-1950's would dream of running off and writing, but not anything that ever could or should be thought about as a single, actual entity. There were so many great American novels-narrowing down the field to one was a vacant exercise for bored newspaper feature writers.

Or, apparently, for impassioned acolytes. In my sniffy state, I couldn't help thinking about those rolling logs, those dog-and-pony father-and-surrogate-son TV interviews, but most especially about British writing itself, and the hoary but reliable formula of two nations separated by a common language. My own prejudice-might as well blow off caution where wild generalizations are concerned!-is to find the British idiom itself pinched and withheld-feeling, fatally emotionally distanced, farbissener. Or, to try and put it more objectively: A gap of understanding seems inevitable between a nation (theirs) whose intelligentsia lives in mortal fear of being found "wet"-oversentimental-and a nation (ours) whose culture oozes wetness from every pore.

And as dry as I strive to be, this gap certainly applies to my own feelings about Martin Amis' fiction. I have grave doubts: I find his mannered toughness, his insistent yob-ism, tiresome and, at worst, emotionally dead; his quest for Great Ideas as arid and schematic as Saul Bellow's is thrilling. Yes, he can be funny, but I never feel very good about the laughter he stirs in me. When he amps up his wild comedic effects or dramatic conceits, he reminds me of a malevolent curry chef, pouring in shakers full of spices without a thought for nutritional value.

And this is strange, because whenever I see Mr. Amis interviewed on TV, or hear him on the radio, I find him delightful: extraordinarily thoughtful, intelligent and decent. The very soul of reason. The toughness recedes; the claws retract. Christ, he's smart! As is his critical writing. (In the divide between his fiction and his nonfiction, he reminds me of Gore Vidal.)

And Ian McEwan's Bellow eulogy was smart- of course it was smart. Messrs. McEwan and Amis, good friends in the face of all that's seemingly impossible about literary friendship, share not just the good fortune of equal success, but an affinity for concinnity. But both men are finally, inescapably English-and therefore, when it comes to putting together sentences about our greatest contemporary novelist, slightly but fatally off the mark.

"[Bellow's] heroes"-Mr. Amis writes in his essay "Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno"-"are well tricked out with faults, neuroses, spots of commonness: but not a jot of Bellow's intellectuality is withheld from their meditations. They represent the author at the full pitch of cerebral endeavour …. "

When Ian McEwan started rhapsodizing-in his cool and masterful way-about that barking dog in The Dean's December, all I could think of, for some reason, was a piece of herring: the herring snack that Charlie Citrine, in the incomparable Humboldt's Gift, eats at his kitchen counter as he reads the obituary of a Princeton professor who once interviewed him for a teaching job. In the novel, that herring, together with Charlie's afternoon whisky, becomes a Proustian device for stirring up memories of the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, the fictional stand-in for Saul Bellow's real-life friend, the doomed, dazzling Delmore Schwartz.

Yet that herring is more than a Proustian device. It's also an actual piece of herring-a quintessentially Jewish food, a nosh which I suspect is, in its homely Yiddishkeit, quite beneath the notice of the likes of Messrs. Amis and McEwan, who prefer metaphorical dogs and the full pitch of "cerebral endeavour."

There was something even nearer and dearer to Saul Bellow than herring, metaphorical or actual, something I surmise high-toned British writers also have trouble with: the human soul.

From his earliest writing, Bellow had a fixation on the existence of the soul-not as a vague idea or hazy metaphor, but as a real entity, one that he would discuss (or have his fictional characters meditate upon) at the drop of a hat, to the consternation and embarrassment of many colleagues and critics steeped in American materialism. For years, he involved himself seriously with theosophy and the Buddhist-tinged, reincarnation-obsessed teachings of Rudolf Steiner and Emanuel Swedenborg. Artur Sammler, the Bellow-like protagonist of Mr. Sammler's Planet, said, "Very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity." "God adumbrations," he called them-blissful visions that stood in tragic contrast to the world's mass butchery and moral and cultural unwinding.

Martin Amis has earnestly taken on, in all his writing, the subject of history's relentless violence and dissolution-except that for him, there are no cures. No God adumbrations. He's a nonbeliever, and his nonbelief seems to haunt his writing and the very fiber of his being, from his bleak worldview to his sour puss. He isn't smug about it. One senses he'd like to believe, but can't.

But for Bellow, as Mr. Amis acknowledged, the soul is "probably not just a metaphor. I think it is a real belief in his case. It's a rather weaker belief in my case. Not … a belief, but a kind of inkling, or suspicion."

If this feels half-hearted, it's because it is half-hearted. In yet another interview (almost nobody gets interviewed as much as Martin Amis), the Englishman opined, in a wistful, the-grass-is-always-greener way, "[My] sense is that America has had much more respect for its writers [than England] because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was …. And looked to its writers to say, 'Are we just a bunch of Italians and Greeks and Jews? Or are we a nation with a soul and a heart?'

"But England," Mr. Amis continued, "has never worried about what it was. Its identity goes so far back. And it doesn't look to anyone to tell it what it is, so they prefer that the writers just shut up."

These words are hard to read: There is a sadness to them, and a sourness, that feels so close to the bones of England, where the constant oscillation between one-up and one-down frequently leads to spiritual exhaustion and cynicism. No wonder the country's best literary minds want to appropriate Saul Bellow. He has something they don't have, and it isn't just genius.

No wonder anyone with a mind in America wants to claim him back. But do we deserve him? As James Atlas pointed out in these pages recently- and as Bellow himself had lamented to his biographer-the Jewish-American moment in our native literature was surprisingly brief. Other immigrant groups, other dispossessed voices, have scrambled to the forefront. Still, new arrival only guarantees newness; profundity is a different matter. There was only one Saul Bellow: He leaves no literary heirs, only a surrogate son-not a blood relation.

In the end, the thing to remember is that the Brits grabbed Bellow because he was up for grabs. His death made the front page in The Times, but in the New York Post it was on page 12, buried a little deeper than news about the domestic troubles of the actor who played Big Pussy on The Sopranos. On my Internet home page, the all too appropriately named Yahoo (see Gulliver's Travels), I looked in vain for any mention at all of the passing of our greatest living writer.

We have nothing over the British any longer: We've found our own ways of being soulless. Unfortunately, we're now also Saul-less.

James Kaplan is at work on his third novel.

In his new novel, The Master , the Irish writer Colm Tóibín has undertaken a triply difficult task. Historical fiction poses one set of challenges, fiction about fiction-writers poses another. To attempt a novel about no less a figure than Henry James might be seen as foolhardy. Yet Mr. Tóibín has stared the nearly impossible in the face and achieved a quiet tour de force: a work of deep seriousness and sympathy that gives us a genius in his full human dimensions.

James is an inconvenient colossus of American literature: essential, monumental, more respected than liked. This was true in his own time as now. At the turn of the century-the period in which Mr. Tóibín's novel finds him-James was an international celebrity of sorts, an American who had been living as an expatriate in Europe for 30 years, and a famously difficult man: arrogant, bloated, prickly and magisterial, his personal impenetrability of a piece with his infamously ornate prose. Early works like Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady , in which energetic and idealistic young Americans encountered and ultimately outshone cynical and devious Europeans, were clearly and forcefully written, and attracted a large audience. But as his style grew rococo, and his characters more ambivalent, James' books ceased to sell. Accordingly, he decided to become-as though such a thing were possible to decide-a successful playwright.

The memorably disastrous London premiere of his play Guy Domville , in January 1895 (taking the stage at the curtain call, James was booed), nearly destroyed him. Instead, it led him to the peak of his artistic career.

The Master covers five years in James' life, from Guy Domville to the fall of 1899, when, newly established in his beloved English-seacoast retreat Lamb House, James has just begun the first great novel of his major phase, The Ambassadors . The "arc" of The Master , then, is from failure to triumph, but true to its subject, nothing so vulgar as an arc is evident in the narrative, which closely follows the events of James' real life and, much like a Henry James novel (but strictly in the style of Colm Tóibín), is carried forward by the endlessly subtle play of human relations.

Early in the novel, James flees England and the Domville debacle to accept an invitation to a noblewoman's Irish estate-and, not surprisingly, finds himself surrounded by the boorishly rich and powerful. A wealthy woman shows up with her 10-year-old daughter, the only child on the premises. James takes acute notice of little Mona's elaborately concealed discomfort at her surroundings:

"He pulled himself back from the doorway just as Lady Wolseley let out another shrill laugh at some remark of Mr. Webster's. In his last glimpse of Mona she was smiling as though the joke had been a pleasantry to amuse her, everything about her an effort to disguise the fact that she was clearly in a place where she should not be, listening to words or insinuations she should not have to hear. He went back to his rooms."

There he speaks with a servant he has befriended, a handsome ex-military man named Hammond who, it turns out, has a sister just Mona's age. James asks:

"'Does Mona put her in your mind when you see her?'

"'My sister does not roam freely, sir, she is a real treasure.'

"'Surely Mona is protected by her nanny and, indeed, her mother?'

"'I'm sure she is, sir.'

"Hammond cast his eyes down, looking troubled as though he wished to say something and was being prevented. He turned his head towards the window and remained still. The light caught half his face while half stayed in shadow; the room was quiet enough for Henry to hear his breathing. Neither of them moved or spoke. Henry appreciated that if anyone could see them now, if others were to stand in the doorway as he had done earlier, or manage to see in through the window, they would presume that something momentous had occurred between them, that their silence had merely arisen because so much had been said. Suddenly, Hammond let out a quick breath and smiled at him softly and benignly before taking a tray from the table and leaving the room."

The Mona incident prefigures What Maisie Knew . But equally to the point, the scenes with Hammond are laden with sexual tension-tension which is, of course, never resolved.

Anyone who has even traipsed lightly through Leon Edel's magnificent biography of James knows that the novelist was a man of more than many parts-an infinitely fine sensibility, a wounded soul, a profound lifelong capacity for friendship, a sly and subtle sense of humor, and a tormented sexuality. It's all too easy to surmise that James' textual thickets are a metaphoric screen. By all evidence, he seems never to have had a heterosexual experience, though he had deep if conflicted relationships with a number of women, most notably his cousin Minny Temple and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, both of whom served him as models for fictional heroines (and both of whom we meet, in flashback, in The Master ). And while there's ample documentation that he had strong erotic feelings for men (including his doting and domineering older brother, the writer and philosopher William James), it appears doubtful he ever acted on his impulses-and in any case, in the end, it's impossible to know.

It's emblematic of the many generous pleasures of The Master that Mr. Tóibín, a gay man and a writer in whose fiction and nonfiction male homosexuality has figured strongly, has depicted with utter persuasiveness a genius who insistently, and to a certain extent tragically, sublimated his own sexuality. The great love of his life was a handsome Norwegian-American sculptor named Hendrik Andersen, 27 years old to the Master's 56 when they met. James lavished the young man with attention and affectionate letters, entertained him at Lamb House.

But in a scene of delicious ambivalence near the end of the novel, it becomes clear, as Andersen describes to James his great artistic dream, "a genuine world city, a place of great buildings and monuments," that though Andersen's form and youthful enthusiasm are magnetic, he's also a bit of a pompous bore:

"Henry's mind was half-filled with the work of the morning …. Compared to the city which Andersen was inventing, it was both nothing and everything. In its detail and its dialogue, its slow movement and its mystery, it stood against abstraction, against the grayness and foolishness of large concepts. But it stood singly and small and unprotected, barely present; it would take up a small space in a great and monumental library in a city where reading in solitude would not be part of his friend's magnificent dream."

This small space is precisely the space of literature, described by a writer who understands it deeply. And his quiet but profound novel is-dare one say it?-masterly.

James Kaplan, the author of Two Guys from Verona (Grove Press), is at work on a new novel.

"They will come no more, / The old men with beautiful manners." So said Ezra Pound in 1915, and history has brought us to a point where, one feels, it must really be true. And so-in a post-9/11, BlackBerry-handheld, 1,000-channel, Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri, Nicky and Paris Hilton world-what on earth are we to make of Louis Auchincloss?

The much-honored Mr. Auchincloss is 86, for much of his life a distinguished Wall Street attorney and, in his spare time, the author of no fewer than 59 books, 42 of which-including his latest, The Scarlet Letters -are works of fiction. As is the case with many a far less prolific author, Mr. Auchincloss' fiction is cut from a single piece of cloth-but in his case, what a long, thick and gorgeous bolt of brocade it is! For his subject is nothing less than America's Manhattan-based WASP ruling elite, an elite which Louis Auchincloss-himself the scion of distinguished Knickerbocker families, a living link to a pre–Gilded Age New York where oil and steel barons were parvenus-knows inside and out.

The Scarlet Letters is his latest meditation on a question he's been turning over and over at least since The Rector of Justin , in 1964: How can a class of people suckled on the sermons of Cotton Mather have fled so swiftly to the lessons of Jay Gould-not to mention those of T. Boone Pickens? Even if hellfire is no longer at issue-as one of the novel's characters notes, " … if God is dead, the devil must be, too"-Mr. Auchincloss remains stubbornly concerned with the souls of his buttoned-up characters.

The soul in question here is that of the piquantly named young attorney Rodman Jessup. In classic Auchinclossian fashion, Rod is well-born (but of modest means), boyishly handsome and preternaturally principled, a rock-ribbed moralist to the core. Having married the daughter of the senior partner of a white-shoe Wall Street law firm, Vollard, Kaye and Duer, Rod quickly rises to prominence by dint of a phenomenal grasp of the subtleties of corporate reorganization, and a character so immaculate that he threatens to quit when his father-in-law proposes to bring in as a client a raffish old Canadian distiller who may once have had some connection with organized crime (anyone come to mind?). Clearly, Rod is cruising for a cosmic bruising, and on this score Mr. Auchincloss doesn't disappoint. Cleverly, he presents us with Rod's fall-triggered by flagrant adultery with a society bimbo-in the book's prologue, and spins out and opens up the action by means of an ever-deepening series of flashbacks.

Is Rodman Jessup merely a star collapsing of its own gravity, "A puritan turned inside out," as his mother-in-law initially wonders? Nothing so simple could occur in Louis Auchincloss' elegantly layered world, where good manners inevitably mask bad ones, and bad ones mask worse. The snake in Rod's Eden is the equally piquantly named Harry Hammersly, an old prep-school classmate who oils his way into Vollard Kaye and hangs his shingle in trusts and estates, where he prospers mightily by sweet-talking credulous widows into making investments which-hey, presto!-help feather his own financial nest. Oh, and along the way, Harry also steals Rod's wife. And once Rod has left the firm in disgrace over his adultery, the villain sharp-elbows his way to the front of the line for senior partnership. And then takes over the whole damn shop.

Is it any wonder that in the scalded aftermath of his fall, Rod wanders into-and then quickly becomes the reigning expert in-the world of corporate takeovers? It's not that he's embraced damnation, but rather that his Manichaean world-view has been brought into the complicated present, a landscape of minutely graded grays. "You forget, my dear," his infinitely wise mother-in-law tells him, "that I grew up in a time when insider trading was a coveted privilege and not a crime. When the maneuvering of stock prices for the benefit of a favored few was considered good business and not a fraud on the public. And where monopoly was God and the Morgan partners his apostles. I learned that morals change with the weather."

Lest this all sound too schematic, let it be known that over the brief (177 pages) and fast-moving course of The Scarlet Letters , the distinguished Mr. A. gives us a rollicking good time. True, as always his characters-even in the heat of unseemly passion-deliver themselves of grammatically perfect utterances, sentences with which Samuel Johnson himself would have no quibble. As ever, the narrative is a veritable raisin pudding of distinguished references-to the Ring Cycle, to Kipling and Shakespeare and Milton and Euripides.

Yet a playful light flickers around the serious proceedings. For starters, there are a couple of dollops of quite hot sex, both hetero and homo, along the way. (Not that his characters have ever shied from their innermost urges, but both the novel's historical period-the early to late 1950's-and Mr. Auchincloss' high-toned authorial nimbus give the naughty bits an extra zing.)

And there are touches that hint at an Olympian chuckle behind the aristocratic deadpan of the novelist's features. What else would possess him to name the firm's senior partner Ambrose Vollard, a clear nod to the legendary Parisian art dealer whose name differs by but a single letter? What else would cause him to introduce a secondary character named Newbold Armstrong, a patent reference to the novelist of New York manners whose middle name was Newbold and who called her protagonist in The Age of Innocence Newland Archer?

Edith Wharton, of course, is the writer to whom Louis Auchincloss has been most consistently compared. Yet Wharton's most poignant plots revolved around outsiders whom society rejected or destroyed, while it's possible to go through any number of Mr. Auchincloss' novels without ever encountering an outsider. He's that rarest of tightrope walkers, a certified member of a closed class who has elected both to ennoble it-by chronicling its rich outer life and exquisite manners in loving detail-and to betray it, by revealing its innermost secrets and desires. The betrayal is to our benefit. The sorrow is that when he's gone, all we'll have left is the people he wrote about.

James Kaplan, the author of Two Guys from Verona , is at work on a new novel.

Why would L. Jon Wertheim write a book about the women's tennis tour, a group top-heavy with brilliant and fascinating players, and give it the sexy but ultimately misleading title Venus Envy ? I must begin my answer with a personal tale of professional debacle.

Last December, the very thin editor of a very fat fashion magazine hired me to cover the most prestigious tournament in women's tennis, the season-ending Chase Championships at Madison Square Garden. My job, I was told, was to see the tournament as a window into the state of the sport.

It seemed like a great gig. Women's sports are hot everywhere these days, but as everyone knows, women's professional tennis is in the ascendant. Rich with personalities, loaded with cash, the game far outdraws women's golf, basketball and soccer, and–as a bonus–has simply stolen the thunder of men's tennis, which once held the world's attention but has now dimmed to a sad pallor.

Thanks to the fat fashion magazine, I had nearly total access to areas off-limits to the other media, from the players' party the night before the event to the tunnels and back rooms under the stands of the Garden. I saw amazing things–Jennifer Capriati standing all alone at the opening party, looking with disappointed greed at the little silver Tiffany's bracelet the tournament had included in her gift package; the affable Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario turned game-faced before a match, dancing in place like a boxer; the callipygous Anna Kournikova practicing in a tight black Adidas warm-up suit, showing how beautifully she can actually play tennis, despite all the hype and her zero-tournament-wins record (and surprisingly prettier in motion than in repose, in which she bears a passing facial resemblance to Boris Yeltsin). I talked to amazing people. I interviewed players, trainers and commentators, and they opened up to me. Ms. Capriati and Nathalie Tauziat spoke movingly of their fears about the emptiness of life after tennis. Martina Hingis told me about the loneliness of evenings in hotel rooms on the road. Pam Shriver and Bud Collins talked candidly and incisively about the corrosive effects of big money on the game. All of it–every word–wound up on the cutting-room floor.

One problem was that the Williams sisters were not in the Chase tournament. Both claimed to be injured, though the truth may have been more complicated. Their absence seemed a minor enough setback for my story at first, what with Ms. Kournikova, Ms. Hingis, Monica Seles and Lindsay Davenport all in attendance. But Ms. Kournikova and Ms. Davenport both lost early and went home, and–rendering moot the slightly worrying question of whether the players could be made to look beautiful enough to command feature-well attention in a beauty magazine–tour officials proved surprisingly powerless to convince any of its stars to pose for the magazine's photographer.

Then the magazine hired Bruce Weber to shoot the Williamses. That clinched the deal. Suddenly my very thin editor had the Picture, and the Chase Championships, and all the other players, could go take a flying leap. Lo and behold, my thoughtful 3,000-word piece about the women's tour became a 1,000-word caption to Weber's arresting, teasingly Sapphic photo of Venus and Serena.

All this is less to complain about my tragic ordeal than to say something about the power of image in women's tennis. In a game that has more depth of skill among its top 20 players than ever before, three women–the winless Kournikova and the frequently absent Williams sisters, who play fewer tournaments than any of the other stars–are simply the straws that stir the drink. The other top women may win more events, may play tennis just as beautifully, but do they sell magazines? Tickets? TV commercials? Does their Q-rating extend outside the game's narrow world? The poignant contrast, at the Chase Championships, between the glittery electricity of a not-very-competitive Kournikova night match (Ms. Capriati cleaned her clock) and the big patches of empty seats at the dramatic, hard-fought Hingis-Seles final could not have told the story more starkly or graphically.

But the Williamses, of course, are the biggest news of all, not least for the controversy that continues to wreathe these two very young women (Serena is 19; Venus, 21) and their off-the-wall father, Richard, a cross between Svengali and a Mark Twain character–a man who, according to Mr. Wertheim, has claimed that "he studied law at Yale [and] played for the Lakers," who "says with a straight face that his father-in-law was once the CEO of General Motors," who asserted with an equally straight face to an acquaintance of mine that he made $531 million–outside tennis–last year.

Richard Williams is also many things besides amusing. Mr. Wertheim tells us that "he has an ugly habit of making virulently anti-Semitic remarks," that his answering-machine message once said, "There are those that ask me what I think of intermarriage. Anyone that's marrying outside of this race that's black should be hung by their necks at sundown. Please leave a message." He also has been suspected of beating his wife, Oracene, and "eagerly and unapologetically tells of giving his daughters 'ass-whippings' when they disobeyed him."

And then there was the time, a few years ago, that "Richard accompanied his daughters to [a tennis] event. When he met the tournament director, Richard draped an arm around him. 'So,' Richard said. 'How does it feel to have a couple of niggers in your draw?'"

Shocking, maybe; but not irrelevant. The triumphs of Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe and the Williamses notwithstanding, tennis has long been a lily-white game. And so when Richard Williams accuses the women's tour, tournament directors, fans and players of racism with regard to his daughters, he accomplishes several things simultaneously: He pushes everyone's buttons; he keeps the publicity machine churning in slow moments; and he brings up troubling but pertinent issues. Were fans really, as Mr. Williams charged, yelling racial epithets at him and Venus last March at a California tournament after Venus pulled out of her semifinal match against Serena? Mr. Williams has been known to tell a tall tale or two–but then, even one racial epithet is more than enough.

Subtler questions are more to the point. God knows the cameras, both still and video, love Venus and Serena, yet there's something disturbing around the edges, a whiff of Leni Riefenstahl-ish condescension, about our (and fashion-magazine editors') objectification of the sisters as beautiful physical specimens. It speaks to white discomfort about black dominance in certain sports, and to black discomfort about white perceptions of black intelligence. Stir these questions up, and they don't die down easily. Simplest to sweep them under the rug.

And focus on the astonishing ascendancy of Venus Williams. With back-to-back Wimbledon titles bracketing her conquest of the U.S. Open last year, she has more than justified the reported $40 million endorsement deal she signed with Reebok last December. And this is a young woman who does not live for tennis, who doesn't especially like to practice, whose priorities, Mr. Wertheim tells us, "are God, Family, and Education. If tennis is fourth, it's a distant fourth." Yet where most tennis fans are concerned, she's clearly Numero Uno.

Why, then, is Venus Envy a misleading title? Because what Mr. Wertheim has done at book length is precisely what I was attempting to do on a much smaller scale: give a thoughtful, colorful, insidery look at a rich but troubled little world, narrow but deep, and full of players and stories far beyond the Williamses. At least as amazing as Venus' rise over the past year has been the triumphant second act of Jennifer Capriati, the former teenage phenom who descended into drug use and petty theft, then emerged phoenix-like to take the 2001 Australian and French Opens.

How much time does Ms. Capriati spend envying Venus? Zero, I promise. And the same could be said of Ms. Hingis, Ms. Davenport or any of the tour's top players, or even the up-and-coming 19-year-old Justine Henin, who gave that big Williams sister a jolting second set in the Wimbledon final. Mr. Wertheim covers almost all the bases in his lively, quickly readable book. (Alas, Venus Envy also appears to have been quickly written; it's speckled with flagrant repetitions and solecisms. And if I never see the phrase "served notice" used again–ever–in any tennis writing, it'll be much too soon.)

Mr. Wertheim is excellent on the Williamses–and everyone else. His writing, when he gets away from a fitful and unfortunate need to jerk the prose into colorfulness, is sensitive and psychologically acute. His chapter on the tour's wistful, sharp-witted almost-martyr Monica Seles (stabbed by a demented German fan in 1993, she's been struggling to come back ever since) playing a low-paying tournament in Oklahoma City just for the love of the game is itself worth the price of admission.

And, oddly enough, it has nothing at all to do with Venus Williams.

James Kaplan is working with John McEnroe on Mr. McEnroe's autobiography.

Writers' lives are boring, the axiom goes. Maybe someone should have come up with a corollary about great writers, whose lives often are a little too interesting for comfort.

Why should this be? There is a kind of monstrosity to literary greatness. Talent, of course, is only part of the equation: Talent unfulfilled is as common as dirt. What supplies the titanic energy required not just to keep writing–a sizable enough feat in itself–but to push forward and complete important works of the imagination, again and again? The answer would appear to be, in almost every case, a grievous early wound to the writer's psyche, an injury so deep that the writer spends every waking hour (and, one suspects, the sleeping ones, too) trying to redress it, in art and in life.

No one is a better illustration of this than Saul Bellow, the subject of James Atlas' magnificent (and legendarily long-awaited) new biography. According to Mr. Atlas, our greatest living novelist was the victim of not just one but multiple early wounds: an impoverished childhood in Quebec and Chicago; the neglect of a ne'er-do-well father who dreamed of better days in St. Petersburg; the distance and seductiveness of a mother who died when the writer-to-be was 17, leaving him with the sense of a vast hole in the world.

Saul (né Solomon) Bellow was the youngest of four children, the baby of the family, small and slight, timorous and arrogant, belittled and indulged. His two older brothers would grow into beefy, assertive types, changing their last name to the more American-sounding Bellows and becoming Chicago tycoons in real estate and the iron business: substantial things, the opposite of words. They mocked young Saul's aspirations to be a writer, made fun of his fecklessness. In self-defense and vanity, he put on airs. He also continued to borrow money from them into middle age.

Mr. Bellow seems, according to Mr. Atlas' big, exuberantly well-documented book, never to have had a boring day in his life. In fact, lives of this Balzac-ian (or Bellowesque) a sweep don't even appear to be possible anymore. From his slum childhood, sleeping two in a bed with one or another of his brothers and pasting labels on his father's bootleg whisky, to his fervently intellectual, Trotskyite schoolboy days in Chicago during the Depression, to a brief stint riding the rails as a hobo, to postwar Paris, where he socialized with the likes of Sartre and de Beauvoir and Camus, to Greenwich Village in the early 50's, amid the Partisan Review crowd, to literary lionization (which followed the publication of his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March , in 1953, when he was 38), to international celebrity, to the Pulitzer and the Nobel, to ever-higher levels of fame and acclaim, Mr. Bellow appears–career-wise–never to have made a wrong step on the path to Parnassus. Along the way, he married five times, sired four children (the latest, his only daughter, was born just last December, when the author was 84), and–it helps give loft to a doorstop of a biography–he seems to have had, in the immortal words of the Band, as much pussy as Frank Sinatra.

Persistence and energy. Yet the catch with those energizing early life-injuries is that they enable and disable at once: The very engine that provides the creative steam tends to make great writers disasters at living. Art may be hard, but it is infinitely more tractable than life; hence the tendency for the truly driven literary artist to throw everything–energy, attention, love–into the work, and to give life itself the short end of the stick. In the art, transformation and redemption; in the life, acting out and chaos. Bridges singed and burned, scars, scenes best forgotten.

Or remembered, with helpless clarity, and used in the work. It is one thing for a writer to put all his energy into his writing. It is something else again for a novelist to throw his life, intact, right into the burner, like deck furniture. Yet the miracle (and the paradox) of Mr. Bellow's writing is that, on the evidence–and Mr. Atlas provides very extensive evidence, indeed–he has been able to work closer to the bone of reality than any great writer who comes to mind, never failing to produce the most sublime fictive alchemy. The strange impression left is of a life not just helplessly lived, but also constantly, carefully monitored for material–at times even consciously manipulated to provide it.

"Bellow got to a point in every book … at which he had to 'tear up his life,'" Mr. Atlas writes. "The opposite of Flaubert, he cultivated chaos at home." In the summer of 1957, Mr. Bellow, 42, was living with his second wife, the princessly Alexandra (Sondra) Tschacbasov and their 6-month-old son, Adam, in a white elephant of a country house into which he had sunk his father's legacy, and writing Henderson the Rain King . Mr. Bellow's closest friend and fervent admirer was a fellow professor named Jack Ludwig. And unbeknownst–apparently–to Mr. Bellow, Mr. Ludwig and Sondra were having an affair. The thorny situation would become the crux of Mr. Bellow's greatest novel, Herzog . But Mr. Atlas makes the unsettling point that Mr. Bellow, who spent most of his life embroiled in innumerable extramarital amours of his own, may have actually engineered his wife's infidelity in order to create literary grist.

Herzog is a masterpiece pitched perfectly in a key of high victimhood. The protagonist, failed academic Moses Herzog, undone by his ex-wife's affair, wanders in a fugue state from Manhattan to Martha's Vineyard to Chicago to the Berkshires, all the while composing imaginary letters to philosophers, politicians, friends and enemies, living and dead, and conducting a brilliantly cracked interior monologue on the spiritual state of the world and his own disintegration. He is coming apart, gorgeously. He is constantly pursued by slavish women, whom he flees, claiming to have become enslaved by them.

The novel is a piercingly persuasive cry of the heart; one's own heart goes out to the super-perceptive but nebbishy hero, who feels like a precise doppelgänger of the author. Indeed, the biography gives extensive clues about the closeness of Herzog to Saul Bellow's disheveled life in the late 1950's. Still, those who have felt convinced that in Mr. Bellow's sublime authorial voice they have heard the music of the spheres will be disappointed (but not surprised) by the evidence that the endlessly wise, witty and self-lacerating narrators of his most autobiographical-feeling works–including also Augie March , Seize the Day , Humboldt's Gift , The Dean's December –are far too easy on themselves.

"Bellow was a master of self-exculpation," the biographer writes. "[H]e was never to blame for the breakups of his marriages or friendships, the books that found disfavor with the critics, the plans that went awry. He could always find an explanation–one that revolved around the notion of himself as a victim. It was important for Bellow to see his life this way: He lacked the reserves of self-esteem needed to engage in rigorous self-criticism."

This does not mean that Mr. Bellow (or any of his narrator-protagonists) has ever been unaware of his own importance. Far from it. What other writer would have the sheer sand to proclaim himself, ventriloquistically (through Charlie Citrine in Humboldt ) but utterly convincingly, "a world-historical individual"? Saul Bellow is a world-historical individual. He is also–by Mr. Atlas' evidence and the novels' confessions–a world-class fuck-up: a failure as a father, an inconstant lover, a serial husband. He is, by his own description, "a noticer," whose biggest blind spot is other people. He has a legendarily wounding acid tongue. "What did I know?" Mr. Bellow said to friends, referring to the failure of one of his marriages. "I was in the middle of a book."

But it is this very combination of strength and weakness, of clarity and nuttiness, that makes both Saul Bellow and his novelistic stand-ins such endlessly fascinating characters. He is an intellectual who embraced Wilhelm Reich's psychology (he sat in an orgone box) and Rudolph Steiner's theosophy; a formidable cultural mandarin who could appear weak, even cowardly, when push came to shove; a ladies' man who, both by his own account and those of his inamoratas, was often a dud in the sack. Much of the book's energy comes from the tension between James Atlas' exhilaration at, and occasional repulsion for, his subject. "The [biographer-subject] relationship isn't always smooth," he tells us, in the book's introduction. "[T]o disapprove, to feel exasperation, resentment, even hatred, are all parts of it. But to feel a lack of engagement is fatal."

Mr. Atlas is thoroughly engaged here. It's no knock on his wonderful 1977 biography of Delmore Schwartz to say that this is the book he was born to write. In a masterly feat of name-dropping–it makes the project feel like manifest destiny, or divine ordination–he says Philip Roth suggested the idea to him. Mr. Atlas writes, "Bellow was a natural choice for me … I had grown up in Chicago; my parents were from the same Northwest Side Jewish milieu that Bellow had rendered so vividly in a succession of books.… To write a biography of Saul Bellow would be, in a sense, to write my own autobiography, a generation removed."

James Atlas is, quite simply, the right guy for the (very big) job. His writing has the perfect touch of Kosher salt. And when he speaks of Herzog 's anthropological rightness–"[t]he vulgar, tart-tongued lawyers in their wood-paneled clubs; the Yiddish-speaking old aunts in their Northwest Side bungalows and suburban homes equipped with new Westinghouses and French provincial furniture"–you know he knows this territory cold.

He is also a sharp enough literary critic to appreciate the genius of the prose without being dazzled by it: He is unfailingly tough on Mr. Bellow for the shallowness of his female characters. He is clear-eyed about the "Amos 'n' Andy" excesses of Henderson the Rain King . And in a feat of bravery bordering on recklessness, he takes on the Master's most intimidating tic: his incessant philosophizing. "Philosophy … was one of the unfortunate legacies of Bellow's immersion in the University of Chicago Great Books culture," Mr. Atlas writes. "His heroes shared a penchant for belaboring ideas. They were the products of a provincial Chicago boy's effort to show that he wasn't provincial, that he was at home with the whole of Western thought; unconsciously, perhaps, they expressed an impulse to distance himself from his true and more painful material–a flight into abstraction."

Mr. Atlas was also lucky in having, if not Mr. Bellow's authorization, his permission, as well as his (sometimes fitful) cooperation in releasing materials. And what materials! This biographer is the beneficiary of a last-chance bonanza: Unlike so many modern authors, and unlike any author who will ever come again, Mr. Bellow has been an obsessive, prodigious, unfailingly witty letter-writer, his epistolary flow not, as might be expected, a distraction from literary effort, but a tributary of the mighty river.

One could niggle. There are a few odd malapropisms along the way–jarring to find in such a hyper-literate text. Mr. Bellow's great friendship with Ralph Ellison, and his longtime enmity to John Updike, are barely touched upon. But the book's most serious problem is that by 1968 or so–around page 400 of the 600-plus–the life, as rich as it is, starts to feel cloying, like a gourmet smorgasbord: too many honors, too many women, too much incisive wit. When the inevitable wearying and mellowing of age sets in, the narrative loses energy as well. And, taking the long view, it's possible to find something oddly half-baked about writing biography on the fly, painting in wet plaster the still-alive subject's portrait, instead of letting it all marinate for a while, waiting for the inevitable broadening and settling of facts that follow a subject's death.

At the same time, there is something to be said for freshness, for speaking to the subject and sources while they're still alive and memories (and animosities) are sharp. And no matter how tuckered-out Saul Bellow may be in his mid-80's, he hasn't lost his edge. Toward the end of his immense project, when Mr. Atlas remarked to his subject what an interesting life he'd had, Mr. Bellow responded dryly, "I'm glad I haven't lived in vain."

James Kaplan, the author of Two Guys From Verona (Atlantic Monthly) , is at work on a new novel .

Which is … what? Our national championship, unlike those of Australia, France and England, has always been an ambivalent phenomenon, mustering nothing like the TV audiences that accrue to the World Series and the Super Bowl. The fault lies with the game itself. It must be said that with the exception of its single boom-from the mid-70's till the early 80's-tennis has always been suspect here, lacking a blue-collar fan base, too hard to learn for the average weekend duffer, too patrician or effeminate to catch the national imagination.

Things are changing. Fast. Tennis isn't what it used to be. Wake most any sports fan up in the middle of the night and ask who the most exciting figures (no pun intended) in tennis today are, and you'll get the instant, sleepy answer: Venus and Serena Williams, no contest. O.K., Anna Kournikova-who can help it? But this is where things stand today. Say what you will about Sampras and Agassi and Rafter; as the Open comes around again, the old stars are fading, and new stars are rising. And right now, the women's game-the Williamses' game-is where the show is.

For a long time, as far as America at large was concerned, there wasn't much show at all. Tennis was all white-balls, clothes, people-and polite. The Open era, starting in 1968, at least injected real money into the sport (it was the first time professionals were allowed to enter the national championship), and then, for that magic decade of '75 to '85 or so, we had solid show business: the camera-ready fury of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe; the rock-star remove of Bjorn Borg; the poetry of Guillermo Vilas; the brief, Nijinsky-esque flare of Yannick Noah. And holding up the women's side all by itself, the fierce, psychodramatic mano à mano between the infinitely neurotic and fascinating Martina Navratilova and the unflappable but never unsexual Chris Evert. They all transited through New York at the end of every August, like comets, shedding their light and heat on us, and the city's electricity returned the favor, giving their star-charge a boost.

And then, somehow, it all went away. Mr. Borg walked; Mr. McEnroefaded. The Big Game came along, in the person of Boris "Boom-Boom" Becker, and all at once the old style of tennis, with which the recreational player could vaguely identify, went the way of the wooden racket. Mr. Connors-rooster-strutting, low-rent, obscene-lingered to electrify our Flushing Meadow evenings, unbelievably, into his 40th year. But suddenly nuclear tennis was the rule, and we could no longer quite follow. He's doing what ? The ball is going how fast ? Mr. Becker was charming, mensch- y-a good German, Gott sei Dank -but somehow too nice to be electrifying. The same could certainly be said of Stefan Edberg. And Ivan Lendl, as great as he was, was just plain … well, kind of icky.

It was the 90's, and the game was in bad shape. Jim Courier was the future of American tennis, and Mr. Courier, for all his athletic gifts, had all the electricity of a utility infielder for the Columbus Clippers. Then came Andre Agassi.

Mr. Agassi stirred some interest. He was small, cocky, and-best of all, somehow-he came from Las Vegas. He was related by marriage to another Vegas-ite, Pancho Gonzalez, the angriest great American player of all time. And while Agassi didn't seem particularly angry himself, he was agreeably strange: His ostensibly ingratiating smile appeared to bespeak a conflicted soul. We wondered about him. His hair and clothes, agreeably wacky, changed from day to day. Not to mention the fact that-always important-he was an athletic genius. The marketing people perked up: Product placement could re-commence! The cool evening air of Flushing Meadows felt charged again.

Meanwhile, Pete Sampras was coming on, too, and his tennis genius was even greater than Mr. Agassi's. His charisma, though, seemed more on the order of his idol, Rod Laver's. Translation: nil-it was Mr. Laver's game that was electrifying; we didn't care diddly about his personal life. The same was true of Mr. Sampras, who seemed pleasant, smiley, cute if slightly simian, and who did his best theatrics in pantomime: He let his racket do the talking.

Tennis, the only single-combat spectator sport besides boxing, has always been a kind of theater. From Suzanne Lenglen and Bill Tilden to the present, the game's brightest lights have been star performers. We come to watch tennis' fight, its dance, but we must also see the faces. The great tournaments, the Grand Slams-the French Open, the Australian, the U.S., and Wimbledon-are, finally, great theater. And, of course, no theater is like New York theater. Patrick Rafter never looked comfortable in Wimbledon whites; he didn't seem to truly come alive till he could wear his war paint, samurai 'do and mini-billboards at Flushing Meadows.

Yet even with his two U.S. Open titles, beneath the frippery Mr. Rafter was just a nice Australian boy, not the important transitional figure tennis needed until the Next Big Thing came to N.Y.C. While nobody was looking, the girls took over.

Ms. Navratilova had proved a woman could play like a man, but this wasn't going to particularly impress anybody if, more and more, the woman grew to look like a man as well. But then along came the apple of Jerry Seinfeld's eye, lissome Gabriela Sabatini; and then Steffi Graf and Monica Seles and Lindsay Davenport and-alley oop!-suddenly the days of endless moonball rallies and lacy tennis suits and polite little feminine grunts were dead as a doornail. Suddenly women could hit the living shit out of the ball.

And nobody hits it any harder than the Williamses, who are the present and future of tennis rolled into one. With their incredible bodies, superlative athleticism and sunny arrogance (not to mention that juicy, tragically conflicted sister-rivalry), they're precisely the wake-up call the game needed if it is to attract a wider playership and audience. And Arthur Ashe Stadium is the stage upon which they were born to strut.

The U.S. Open's center court couldn't have been better renamed than for the man who galvanized and organized American tennis in the Open era. And the great secret about Arthur Ashe is that, for all his seeming quiet modesty, he had his own brand of kingly arrogance. He could never have traveled as far as he did, or accomplished as much-largely alone-without it.

The U.S. Open is a fiesta of arrogance, show business on a Big Apple scale, and Arthur Ashe Stadium, from the Deco Turf 2 surface of the court to the upper bleachers, is its ideal venue: stadium and studio and theater all in one. It feels big and intimate at once. Importance hovers in its molecules.

And it's social theater, too. As befits a New York venue, the near seats are sewn up by the machers ; you can't buy or luck your way in. And the machers are our machers . The cameras may zoom in on movie stars or TV stars, but we know who really has the juice at Flushing Meadows. If Ashe is the place's genius loci, Don Hewitt is something like its presiding spirit. Who outside of New York City knows or cares who Mr. Hewitt is? But here he's the squinty, flinty top of the media heap, the guy who holds the wires, knows where the bodies are buried, and gets to sit wherever the hell he wants. He's the big boss of the big show, and at the U.S. Open, the show is what it's all about.

PETE SAMPRAS

What Alps remain for Mr. Sampras to climb, now that he's broken Roy Emerson's record of 12 Grand Slam wins and surpassed Mr. Borg's modern-day string to conquer Wimbledon seven times? The case could be made that, at long last, the greatest tennis player of all time is out of gas. He was off the tour for three months last spring with a back injury. At Wimbledon this past July, fellow players thought he was dogging it when he complained about his sore shin-until they saw him limp up the steps. The truth is, at a geriatric 29, Mr. Sampras is starting to look his age. Tennis takes it out of you; just ask any weekend hacker. Then ask somebody, no matter how young and strong and talented, who guts it out six hours a day, seven days a week, week in and week out, through jet lag and bad hotel meals. And yet Mr. Sampras made it through Wimbledon on sheer heart and intestinal fortitude, and New York crowds can inject a huge adrenaline boost. Let us not forget, he's the guy who puked, right on court, during a four-hour U.S. Open quarter-final against Alex Corretja in 1996, and went on to win the match and the tournament. Now, that's guts.

ANDRE AGASSI

And speaking of tennis' great Sick Men, what of the top-seeded Mr. Agassi, who, Freudianly, wrenched his back in a Vegas fender-bender right after returning from a disappointing Wimbledon, and just in time to avoid being pressed into Davis Cup service by Kommandant McEnroe? There's always been something smarmy about Mr. Agassi-that shit-eating grin, those blown kisses, that worn-on-his-sleeve religion-and yet he never fails to be compelling, whether he's marrying then quickly unmarrying Brooke Shields, cavorting on the beach with Steffi Graf, hanging enigmatically with that mysterious trainer-guru, or coming back to tennis' heights after a long season in the crapper, losing to journeymen in the qualifying rounds. He was the guy, after all, who lost his hair and ballooned on a Big Mac diet-then came back as a sculpted, shaven-headed Superman, the fittest man on the tour. It's those wild transitions that have always kept us interested in him, and he's bound to go through two or three at this year's Open alone.

LLEYTON HEWITT

Australia's Mr. Hewitt and America's Jan-Michael Gambill are tennis' two new blond Beauty Boys-except that they can both really play. Nineteen-year-old Mr. Hewitt's the one with an electrifying record this past year, with four titles and victories over those hard-serving Greek guys, Philippoussis and Sampras. The white-hot Mr. Hewitt's been able to beat just about anybody these days, except the even hotter Gustavo Kuerten, the current world Number One, who took him out earlier this month in the semi-finals of the hard-court RCA Open. A token of things to come?

GUSTAVO KUERTEN

The gangly, stubbly Mr. Kuerten-"Guga" to his zillions of Brazilian fans, so insanely devoted they're apt to start chanting his name at the drop of a shot-is living proof that you don't have to be a prime physical specimen to be the best tennis player in the world. With his thin arms and legs, and that funky kerchief on his head, he looks a little like Buster Poindexter at a costume party. He sure can play, though. He's got a big serve. He's got a Web site (www.gugakuerten.com.br., "Site Oficial do Guga"). And, seeded second here, he's got a good chance of taking the Open from Mr. Sampras or Mr. Agassi.

THE WILLIAMSES

It's a family affair: Serena beat Martina Hingis to win the Open last year, avenging Venus' loss to Ms. Hingis in the semis. Then the sisters won at doubles. Venus beat Serena to take Wimbledon this year. Then they went out and won the doubles there, too. The third-seeded Venus has been trouncing everyone in sight over the past couple of months, but don't count out fifth-seeded Serena in this year's Open: Canny tournament organizers will no doubt put the most amazing siblings ever to dominate the game on opposite sides of the draw, thus setting up another possible finals showdown, and tear-jerker. And thriller. Pound for pound, ability for charisma, there's never been anyone more exciting in the sport than Venus or Serena. Somewhere, Lenglen and Tilden are applauding madly.

MARTINA HINGIS

She was named after Ms. Navratilova, which certainly spoke to destiny but said nothing to character. Has there ever been a less-endearing champion than the Swiss Miss? Oh, all right, Ivan Lendl-to whom Ms. Hingis bears a weird physical resemblance, buck teeth and all. But it's not just her looks (actually, she's kind of cute, if you squint), it's her all-around coldness and arrogance, her general uneagerness to please, that put one in mind of Orson Welles' great line about cuckoo clocks in The Third Man .

LINDSAY DAVENPORT

Where are the words to tell you how I adore Lindsay Davenport? The fact that she looks a little like Grady Sutton is, in my mind, all in her favor: She's living proof that cuteness is only skin deep, that the spirit (and skills) of a great champion can underlie a less-than-cosmetically-perfect exterior. To these eyes, she's a magnificent woman. Her tears, her sheer grace and magnanimity after her 1998 U.S. Open victory made me cry.

ANNA KOURNIKOVA

Maxim ! GQ ! Down, boys! Rrowf! Back! I mean … what can you say? Except that, the slaverings of college boys and the carping of other women on the tour aside, Kournikova really can play tennis: She's seeded 12th here, in a reasonably deep field. Something tells me, though, that she's cannon fodder early on. Something else tells me, though, that CBS's ratings will mysteriously spike when she plays, in any case.

JOHN MCENROE

And speaking of CBS's ratings, how about a nice, tournament-long spike for one of sports' greatest broadcasters ever, Captain Davis Cup himself, Mr. Loose Cannon, the fabulous, piratical Johnny Mac? Forget sports broadcasters: greatest broadcasters, period. Never predictable-thank God!-and always penetrating, Mr. McEnroe refuses to toe the company line on anything, whether it's political correctness (he's still a bit of a chauvinist when it comes to women's tennis, though I'd pay big money to see him play Venus) or on-air deportment (he used salty language during the Wimbledon broadcast!). And his shrewd analyses of tennis strategy, personality and business go far beyond what any other former player has dared to say on the air. Now if only he'd ditch that annoying habit of referring to players by their nationalities ("That backhand cross-court was a little too much for the Swede").…

Once, over a staticky radio in a bouncing taxi on a back road in Egypt, I heard what I could only guess to be a concert by one of the country's star vocalists. On and on, the man yodeled and keened, winding gorgeous passages without taking a breath. And as the passages got longer and longer–they seemed to surpass human endurance–the audience went wild, then wilder. How could any mortal sustain, let alone keep topping, such glory?

This is what Philip Roth's writing reminds me of. The passages get more and more brilliant–so brilliant you can't stand it anymore–and then he goes himself one better. Whether he's giving you America's bygone glove-making industry down to its most minute particular (which works like gangbusters on both concrete and metaphorical levels), or parsing to a fare-thee-well the vagaries of the human heart, he is, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, Mozartean, simply unsurpassable.

Why, then, does his latest novel leave me so cold? Unfortunately titled, The Human Stain is the close of the trilogy whose first two installments were American Pastoral and I Married a Communist . The common thread is American turmoil over the last 50 years, as witnessed by Mr. Roth's eternal stand-in, novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Now in his mid-60's, after a long and turbulent life of sex-craziness, Zuckerman is self-exiled to a monastic two-room shack somewhere in the Berkshires. Poor Zuckerman, we soon learn, is a survivor not only of a quintuple bypass but of prostate-cancer surgery that has left him both impotent and incontinent. He wears a plastic diaper with disposable cotton pads. So much for sex.

And, in a very real way, so much for Zuckerman. Long gone is the naughty bouncing brio that informed My Life as a Man ; what we have in late Roth is a narrator who, like a tale-teller out of Conrad, exists more as a receptacle for others' stories than an onstage actor. In the somewhat awkwardly structured American Pastoral , Zuckerman does a quick fade a quarter of the way into the book, smack in the middle of his 45th high school reunion, after ushering on his hero, the godlike Weequahic High School jock Seymour Swede Levov. In I Married a Communist , the setup is simpler, if more far-fetched: At Tanglewood, Nathan encounters Murray Ringold, his old Weequahic English teacher, and invites him back to the shack, where, Scheherezade-like, Murray unfolds over six nights the tale of his late brother, the giant, doomed, left-wing 40's radio star Iron Rinn.

Both Levov and Rinn (né Ira Ringold) are golems: outsized Jersey Jews–6-foot-3 and 6-foot-6, respectively–whom Mr. Roth tries mightily to animate, but who ultimately feel more like myths than men. Alex Portnoy and the early Zuckerman were Leopold Bloom-ish in their messy humanity: We could feel for them right down to the kishkas . So strongly did their furies and demons and lusts seem to be Mr. Roth's own that we identified and stayed tuned. Swede and Iron, the big guys, stagger through their crises living statue-fashion, then topple with a mighty crash. Their monumentality is both the power and the weakness of the trilogy's first two books.

In The Human Stain , Mr. Roth has (more prudently but less successfully) chosen a life-size protagonist, wiry 71-year-old college professor Coleman Silk: "a neat, attractive package of a man even at his age, the small-nosed Jewish type with the facial heft in the jaw, one of those crimped-haired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation who possess something of the ambiguous aura of the pale blacks who are sometimes taken for white."

This last phrase, we quickly learn, is a signal flare. For we soon discover that Silk–who has been forced out of his position as dean of students at the Bennington-like Athena College for making an offhand comment in class which, in the tinder-like politically correct atmosphere of modern American academia, is absurdly interpreted as racist– is in fact black: His whole life has been a lie and a masquerade. But neither his ouster nor his deception dooms him. Sex does. Thanks to the magic of Viagra, about which Mr. Roth has piercingly funny things to say ("Without Viagra ... I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I've come to understand Zeus's amorous transformations. That's what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus"), Silk is engaged in an ill-starred, ill-advised affair with a 34-year-old college custodian named, Perelmanically, Faunia Farley. Faunia is a kind of caricatured culmination of a long line of blond Roth shiksas: spectacularly hapless, mentally acute but functionally illiterate and (it goes almost without saying) genius in bed.

The couple's nemesis is Faunia's ex-husband, Les Farley, a Vietnam vet so badly screwed up by his time in-country that the neat rubric of post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't begin to hint at the snake pit of his consciousness. Les' internal ravings give the book its most bravura passages, as Mr. Roth's lingering anger over the national damage wrought by the undeclared war attains a white heat.

It's difficult to know what to make of all this. American Pastoral and I Married a Communist were essentially monochrome canvases, keenly capturing the respective madnesses of the Vietnam and McCarthy eras. The Human Stain starts pungently enough, with a crisp pencil sketch of the weird summer of '98: "[I]n America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism–which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security–was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten 21-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion … the ecstasy of sanctimony." But while the dust-jacket copy huffs importantly about "public denunciation and rituals of purification," Mr. Roth doesn't manage to give Coleman Silk's story the epic weight of the rest of the trilogy. Maybe it's because the Clinton saga is too recent and insufficiently jelled to serve as a template. Maybe it's that Monicagate hasn't really produced anything like actual casualties. Least of all the President himself. It is Bill Clinton's very survival, that weird, obstinate resilience (symbolized, somehow, by his own facial heft in the jaw), that militates against a Nixonian depth of tragedy.

Another problem is that the as-told-to style points up Roth's chilliness as a writer. There are only two scenes in The Human Stain that have what feels like real, high-stakes human contact–a nicely strange one in the beginning, where Zuckerman dances with Silk, and a nicely scary one at the end, where the narrator confronts the dangerous Les Farley. The rest is seen through a glass, coolly.

Many years ago, J. D. Salinger's most famous character, Holden Caulfield, delivered himself of a naïve but appealing rule of thumb: "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." I've always been in awe of Mr. Roth's gifts, but have never had the slightest inclination to call him up. His books lack sweetness and enchantment; and lately, more critically, they lack love. It's terribly unfair of me, I know, but his real-life childlessness seems to contribute to a certain aridity. Zuckerman's withdrawal from the world feels a bit too close to home.

Piercingly, defiantly heavy-browed, Philip Roth glares out from his dust-jacket photos like an Old Testament prophet, super-serious, admonishing. He is a colossus. But as he himself has shown us about giants, the air gets thin up there.