The Summer Guest is a melodrama, and I mean that in the most neutral, definitional sense. This second novel by Justin Cronin (his first, Mary and O'Neil , won the 2002 P.E.N./Hemingway Award) teems with big events-birth, death, illness, a harrowing escape-and Mr. Cronin delivers these up in unflinching scenes that last well past the point where we might expect him to tap a resonant note and sidle nimbly away. Even more intriguingly, The Summer Guest contains not one instant of the postmodern high jinks so popular among writers of Mr. Cronin's generation, especially its male contingent. I'm making the book sound old-fashioned, but Mr. Cronin's irony-free approach to dramatic event actually feels fresh, unburdened by the need to account for, and comment upon, its own existence, or to establish a separate, winking allegiance with the reader.

That being said, The Summer Guest is old-fashioned in other ways. Mr. Cronin employs a classic structure: A character's immanent death unifies other characters around him, and this heightened state of affairs peels away layers of their separate histories to reveal hidden connections among them. In this case, the year is 1994 and the almost-deceased is Harry Wainwright, a discount-drugstore mogul whose dying wish is to make a last visit to the rustic Maine fishing camp where he has vacationed for more than 30 summers. Awaiting his arrival are the camp's longtime owner, Joe, whose father founded the camp after being wounded in World War II; Joe's wife, Lucy, who's had a romantic involvement with Harry over the years; Joe and Lucy's daughter, Kate, a college student; and the club's manager and guide, Jordan, an elusive underachiever who hopes to marry Kate. All of these characters narrate sections of the book, and the world they collectively inhabit is fraught with old-fashioned hazards: Babies are stillborn or sicken and die; adult life spans are perilously brief, well below the national average.

Oddly enough, Mr. Cronin is a comic writer. Line by line, The Summer Guest is packed with funny stuff, like this description, by Joe, of why it pays to drive slowly in moose country: "Nearly all [the moose's] weight is suspended four feet in the air on legs skinny as pipe cleaners, so you catch one broadside, driving, let's say, a late-model Ford Taurus, and before you can say 'what the goddamn,' seven hundred pounds of permanently startled moose flops right over the hood and through your windshield-what the EMTs up here call 'a Maine lap dance.'" There are also plenty of amusing thumbnail sketches, like this one, again by Joe, of a Mafioso boat owner whose vessel he covets, "a tough-looking, squarish little man with a face like a piecrust and enough hair on his back to throw a shadow. He was wearing nothing but a Red Sox cap and a pair of aquamarine bikini briefs, and when I introduced myself and told him I was there to see the boat, he didn't offer me his hand to shake but simply grunted ….

"'Felicity,' I said, reading the name off the transom.

"'Means "pussy" in Latin,' he said."

Mr. Cronin's comic sensibility might seem an awkward conduit for the events of The Summer Guest , many of which fall on the spectrum somewhere between somber and tragic. (I have a yen to see what would happen if, in some future novel, he let his comic gifts rampage.) But Mr. Cronin more often than not makes the unlikely fusion of comic delivery and tragic content succeed-his playful eye is partly what keeps the melodrama of The Summer Guest from feeling, well, melodramatic. In a chapter narrated by Harry, Mr. Cronin describes his dawning awareness, after the birth of his second son, that his wife is profoundly ill: "[A]s Hal grew, the inkling that something was seriously wrong with Meredith grew beside him, like a dark flower in an adjacent pot." Later, Meredith receives an obscure diagnosis. "If we had never heard of it, how bad could it be?" Mr. Cronin writes. "Though of course the opposite was true: we'd never heard of it because it was rare, infinitesimally rare, and nothing you would want to know about if you didn't have to, like a brutal little war fought far away among people whose names you couldn't pronounce."

The triumph of The Summer Guest lies in the sheer aliveness of Mr. Cronin's language, which allows him to render up moments of devastating sadness with buoyant restraint. Here Harry recalls the illness and death of his infant first son, Sam: "[W]hen I remember that time, it's not the frantic nighttime dashes to the hospital I think of, or even the long, white hours of the hospital, but odd, unrelated moments when I found myself alone. Dusting off the car in the driveway after a sudden snowfall, in case Sam needed to go to the doctor; standing by the electric doors of the emergency room to wait for news and watching a haze of spring rain floating through the lighted cones of the street lamps; sitting in the kitchen of my quiet house on a morning in July-a morning when our baby was actually home and well-and feeling, for the first time, that Sam would truly die."

Mr. Cronin is less adept at capturing the rhythms and cadences of individual voices. When I opened The Summer Guest at random and started to read, I found it nearly impossible to tell which character was speaking. All of them tend to use phrases like "fit as a fiddle" and "right as rain," a folksiness that meshes uneasily at times with their sophisticated wit. What distinguishes the characters from each other is the experiences they recount, and in the case of Joe and Lucy-and Harry most of all-these experiences are deeply involving. Only Jordan, the club manager and guide whose life is comparatively short on event, remains cypherlike despite the many pages we spend inside his head. On the most literal level, Jordan's blurred impression raises obvious questions about what exactly has made him the object of Harry's love and Kate's desire. But as Jordan's pivotal position in the book's design is revealed, his indeterminacy as a character becomes a bigger problem: As heir to the fishing camp and Kate's future husband, Jordan personifies the next generation in a novel that is, finally, a story of generational duty and love. Some of the cumulative power of The Summer Guest dissipates through Jordan, but plenty still remains to make this a wrenching, often harrowing read about people whose problems come from outside themselves rather than within.

Jennifer Egan is at work on her third novel.

To call Ray Finch, the protagonist of Mortals, "uxorious" is to understate the case. Here's a guy who comes home from work to his wife of many years and muses: "It never changed for him, seeing her again after a day's separation, or even less. He felt a flowing, objectless gratitude so strong it weakened him." At another point, he reflects: "He loved Iris. She was on his mind too much. It was a problem. Being obsessed with someone you had been married to for seventeen years was probably a first." The couple's febrile intertwinement is partly due to the fact that Ray and Iris are expatriates living in Botswana, and they have no children. Yet as the novel begins, Ray has come to suspect the unthinkable: His wife may be drifting away from him. It turns out he's right.

As he did in Mating , his superb first novel, which won the National Book Award in 1991, Norman Rush takes the most basic of human tales-in this case, the demise of a marriage-and nests it in a cluster of intellectual preoccupations whose very abstraction would seem the enemy of lively fiction. In the course of this absorbing and variegated novel, Mr. Rush invites the reader to consider the origins of Christianity, the function of the C.I.A. in the wake of the Cold War (the novel is set in 1992-93), the tension between rebellion and conformity in Milton's poetics, the nature of hell and the political future of postcolonial Africa. For readers hankering after a novel of ideas, it doesn't get much better than this.

Which is not to say that Mortals always works. Ray's overheated sensibility is less instantly engaging than the irreverent female voice that narrates Mating (she makes a brief, memorable appearance in Mortals , along with her love interest, the cult anthropologist Nelson Denoon). There's a curious loftiness to Ray's private world, expressed in constructions like, "This is fantasy, he thought, I am injured, literature is not life." Or: "He thought, She's wounding me, I could die … she doesn't know." His weird inner rhetoric mirrors the irresolution of his life, for Ray Finch is several contradictory things: a professor of English, a scholar of Milton, an erstwhile poet and an undercover C.I.A. agent, a vocation he justifies by describing himself as "a provider of truths that others would make use of," but that, paradoxically, requires him to lie a great deal, especially to his wife.

Early on in the novel, Ray asks permission of his C.I.A. boss, a zealot named Boyle, to spy on an African-American doctor, Davis Morel, who has recently moved to Botswana with the explicit goal of releasing its people from the grip of Christianity. But Boyle orders him instead to pursue Samuel Kerekang, a charismatic populist and Botswana native, a devotee of Tennyson with whom Ray feels an immediate affinity. In defiance of Boyle, he spies on both men, but his suspicions of the American doctor harden into animus when he learns that Morel has been conducting psychotherapy for several weeks on none other than Iris, Ray's wife. Iris admits she is attracted to the doctor.

Ray's investigations of Morel and Kerekang catalyze events that culminate in a prolonged, bloody conflict in the north of Botswana that comprises the book's middle section, a tour de force set-piece that manages to feel both effortless and riddled with surprises. By contrast, the book's first section consists almost entirely of conversation, much of it between Ray and Iris. "The fact was, he loved talking to her," Mr. Rush writes of Ray. "Her voice was a gift to him when it was aimed his way." Readers may not always agree; one of the couple's exchanges runs to almost 50 pages, and their voices tend to sound written rather than spoken. Complaining about his estranged brother, with whom Iris has begun a correspondence, Ray refers to him as "no respecter of persons" and "a breeder of disequilibrium."

But what Mr. Rush does beautifully, despite this slow start, is to render up a complex and utterly credible relationship between Ray and Iris: a mutual dependency so consuming that Iris' fledgling wish for some strand of independence can only take the form of betrayal. The inevitability of this betrayal, and the impact it will surely have on two people who have little more in the world than each other, is what powers the reader through a 32-page public discussion of whether Jesus was in fact a Christian, and a pause in the novel's gunplay during which Morel compares Milton's relationship with the British monarchy to Ray's with the C.I.A. Pushing up through all these debates is a question about the value of submitting to authority-even a benevolent one-as opposed to striving for independence. This opposition is central to the very human drama of mortals, and of course to colonialism and its aftermath.

Mr. Rush is astute at rendering women. Iris is a joyfully libidinous person who had virtually no sexual experience before her marriage, and whose infertility has left her childless. Now in her late 30's, she's forfeited what ambitions and social life she once had to accompany Ray to a country where she must depend on him completely-for intimacy, conversation, stimulation-despite the fact that he can't tell her most of what he's up to. At a memorial service she and Ray attend, Iris begins to cry, imagining her own memorial. "And what I was thinking was what a joke it's going to be," she says. "I have done nothing. There will be absolutely nothing to say. Nothing." We feel keenly Iris' desperation for some project to call her own, even as we dread the form that project will likely take.

Mr. Rush's literary lineage extends from Conrad via Graham Greene to his contemporary, Robert Stone-all writers intermittently preoccupied with the existential struggle of white people in the colonial, or postcolonial, Third World. (Stylistically, Mr. Rush is closest to Mr. Stone.) Yet Mr. Rush's vision departs from his predecessors' in its essential comedy. There's funny stuff in Mortals , thanks largely to the wacky play of Ray's mind. A description of his C.I.A. boss reads: "Boyle was a field of signs indicating that he probably thought of his physical emanations as very bad things …. He used a cologne and an aftershave. The two scents were separable …. His nostrils were hairless and scoured-looking." At another point, as Ray massages his wife's feet, she urges him to be gentle. "He didn't feel like being gentle," Mr. Rush writes. "He felt like ripping her feet off and cutting his cock off and starting life over as a eunuch someplace where there were no phones." In one of the novel's climactic scenes, Ray launches himself into battle wearing nothing but a 4,000-page manuscript taped to his chest.

Like Mating , Mortals is also comic in the broader sense: What transpires, however painful, usually turns out to be for the best. It helps that the novel concludes shortly before Nelson Mandela comes to power in South Africa, a time of almost unfathomable geopolitical optimism (or so it seems, from this sad distance). In the mind of Norman Rush, the personal and the political are intimately linked. And in both realms, change is good.

Jennifer Egan, who is at work on her third novel, reviews books regularly for The Observer .

Like two other youngish authors, JeffreyEugenidesandJonathan Franzen, who recently tossedmassivevolumes onto the literary playing field after remaining largely silent since the early 90's, Donna Tartt has her own big cleats to fill. The Secret History , published in 1992, was an international sensation: a sprawling neo-Gothic extravaganza that managed to be brainy, literary and impossible to put down. It's the only book I've ever been seriously tempted to read while driving.

So it was with anticipation verging on lust that I opened Ms. Tartt's new novel, The Little Friend , a sprawling Southern Gothic tale about a 12-year-old girl trying to solve her older brother's murder. The results are paradoxical: Though The Little Friend ratifies and even amplifies the range of Ms. Tartt's abilities; though it takes place in a fictional world that's far more complex than the cloistered confines of the small private college where The Secret History is set; and though it has emotional and sociopolitical dimensions that were completely absent from the earlier book, it's finally less satisfying.

The novel presents itself as a murder mystery: 9-year-old Robin Cleve Dusfresnes is found hanging from a tree in his yard in small-town Alexandria, Miss., on Mother's Day. The murder apparently happened in the presence of his two younger sisters, Allison, 4, and Harriet, 6 months, who were on the porch at the time. After describing the day of the murder in riveting detail ("The air smelled fresh and tight, like rain"), Ms. Tartt rejoins the family 12 years later, when we find Robin's mother still half-comatose with grief, rarely leaving her bedroom. Allison and Harriet, now 16 and 12, are being raised mostly by their beloved black housekeeper, along with their maternal grandmother and three quirky great-aunts.

In passages evocative of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms , Ms. Tartt conjures up a sultry atmosphere of extravagant Southern decay. "The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell," she writes. In this moribund milieu, dead Robin remains a vital part of his family's collective imagination. "His old aunts recalled mountains of trivia: toys he'd had, clothes he'd worn, teachers he'd liked or hated, games he'd played …. Some of this was accurate; some of it was not … but when the Cleves chose to agree on some subjective matter it became-automatically and quite irrevocably-the truth, without any of them being aware of the collective alchemy which had made it so." But the family's myth-making apparatus is helpless to impose structure or meaning on Robin's unsolved murder. That job falls to Robin's youngest sister, Harriet, the sort of no-nonsense young female who's often described (though not by Ms. Tartt) as a spitfire. The Little Friend is the story of Harriet's compulsion to create a narrative, true or not, that can contain the vast mystery of her brother's death. It's also, in some loose sense, the literary artifact of her efforts.

Harriet's wish to avenge Robin's murder (which neither she nor her sister can remember) leads her immediately and rather arbitrarily to a suspect: Danny Ratliff, a onetime classmate of her brother's and now a member of Alexandria's demimonde. Recently released from prison, Danny is one of several scions of a poor and notoriously troubled family, and is presently helping his older brother make and sell (as well as consume, in increasing quantities) crystal methamphetamine. Harriet's pursuit of Danny and her attempts to punish him, carried out with the help of her admirer and sidekick, a boy named Hely, entangle her with the Ratliff clan, whose other members include an evangelical preacher with an interest in snake-handling, a retarded boy, and a long-suffering and marvelously rendered grandmother.

The sections describing the Ratliffs are some of the novel's strongest-far more engrossing than the sometimes tedious Hardy Boy machinations of Harriet and Hely. Ms. Tartt's descriptions of the ratcheting paranoia between the two crank-addled brothers are worthy of Robert Stone. Of Danny's older brother, Farish, she writes, "Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he'd figured something out and-with a great big smile on his face-said, 'You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch .' … [Danny] endured Farish's accusations … answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head." Later, when drug use has rendered both virtually psychotic, Ms. Tartt writes, "Sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; it rolled in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death."

Harriet's pursuit of Danny plays directly into the brothers' paranoia, with disastrous results. In this sense, The Little Friend is the story of two families of opposing social ranks whose destinies become linked through a spate of blind, childish conviction. A thematically linked subplot concerns the relationship between Harriet's family and two devoted black servants, and contains some of the novel's most wrenching and socially conscious moments. Yet as the question of Robin's death recedes further into irrelevance, the reader can't help but feel cheated; The Little Friend has the feel of a shaggy dog story, a series of twists and turns and lateral moves that gets us further from-not closer to-the destination we've been so eagerly awaiting.

Some of this is due to the writing, which ranges from inspired and precise to blandly familiar. This is a book in which silence is deafening and hearts sink, over and over again. Ms. Tartt also has a habit of lavishing meticulous detail indiscriminately, rather than using it as a way of distinguishing important moments from incidental ones. A description of Harriet and Hely lugging a wagon from under a house to a railroad overpass lasts eight pages; at another point, Ms. Tartt tells us that Hely has drunk five Coca-Colas and then, parenthetically, specifies when and where he drank them. It's more than we need to know, and at times the pileup of qualifiers and digressions taxes the reader's attention.

There are disappointing books that make you lose faith in a writer. The Little Friend had the opposite effect on me; though it's an uneven performance, the novel displays such a big talent-for dialogue, for description, for quiet personal moments and broad, ambitious tableaux-that I find myself even more convinced than before that Donna Tartt is the real thing.

Jennifer Egan is the author of the novel Look at Me (Anchor) .

In the last chapter of The Art of Travel , Alain de Botton invokes two late-18th-century works by the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre: Journey Around My Bedroom and Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom . As the titles suggest, these volumes chronicle, first, de Maistre's sightseeing expeditions to his couch and bed, then a pajama-clad visit to his window, through which he gazes at the starry sky and laments that its extraordinary beauty is too seldom appreciated in the course of daily life.

In The Art of Travel , Mr. de Botton enlivens a subject that has become nearly as familiar as our own bedrooms. Fans of this young and prolific author, whose previous books include How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel and The Consolations of Philosophy , will be unsurprised to learn that his goal has nothing in common with the standard travelogue formula, Here's Where I Went and Here's What I Saw. "If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness," Mr. de Botton writes, "then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest-in all its ardor and paradoxes-than our travels …. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go." It's the whys and hows of travel that Mr. de Botton tackles in this series of essays, assembled in the form of a mock travel guide under headings like "On Anticipation," "On Curiosity," "On the Sublime."

Mr. de Botton's preferred method is triangulation: He goes somewhere, then summons up one or more writers or artists from the past three centuries-all of them male-to address some question posed by his trip. Wordsworth accompanies him to England's Lake District; Baudelaire and Edward Hopper illustrate the topic of traveling spaces; Edmund Burke guides him through the Sinai Desert. In each case, Mr. de Botton eventually arrives at a synthesis, some truth about the nature of travel that often manages the tricky and desirable feat of being both familiar and surprising.

He brings his usual assemblage of talents to this enterprise: breathtaking erudition, a crisp, often beautiful prose style, and a willingness not so much to play with traditional genres as simply to ignore them.

In the first chapter, "On Anticipation," he visits Barbados with his girlfriend, a trip he has fantasized about during the sodden onset of a London winter. His own anticipation leads him to a discussion of A Rebours , an 1884 novel by J.K. Huysmans that tells the story of a reclusive, bookish aristocrat who's seized, while reading Dickens, by an urge to visit London. The aristocrat goes first to Paris, where he shops in an English bookstore and dines at an English tavern, only to find that by the time his train is scheduled to leave for England, his craving for London has been satisfied. "So [he] paid the bill, left the tavern and took the first train back to his villa, along with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks-and never left home again."

From the moment he arrives in Barbados, Mr. de Botton is nettled by the gap between his mental picture of the place and the reality of what he finds there. "In my anticipation, there had simply been a vacuum between the airport and my hotel," he writes. "I had not envisioned, and now protested inwardly the appearance of, a luggage carousel with a frayed rubber mat; two flies dancing above an overflowing ashtray." The next morning, he rises early and visits the beach, where he caps off a lush description of his surroundings with this confession: "[M]y attention was in truth far more fractured and confused than the foregoing paragraphs suggest. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among them a sore throat I had developed during the flight, worry over not having informed a colleague that I would be away, a pressure across both temples and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island."

If you've traveled at all, these observations are as instantly recognizable as they are hilarious: a vivid acknowledgment of the guilt and tension that can dog us even in the pursuit of pleasure. But this opening chapter, "On Anticipation," creates an anticipation problem of its own: Nowhere else in The Art of Travel is Mr. de Botton nearly as revealing of his intimate experience, and no subsequent chapter feels quite as funny or alive.

This is not to say that there isn't plenty else of interest. Mr. de Botton's account of Flaubert's travels in Egypt is fascinating, as are his discussions of Wordsworth's belief in the salutary powers of nature and Ruskin's in the imperative of drawing one's surroundings in order to truly see them. But for much of the book, Mr. de Botton's own travels serve as little more than jumping-off points for discussions of those earlier writers and artists, and the result can feel a bit abstract. In his chapter on Ruskin and drawing, Mr. de Botton begins one section, "Another benefit we may derive from drawing is a conscious understanding of the reasons behind our attraction to certain landscapes and buildings." All very true, but that collective "we" has a distancing effect. The most powerful moments in The Art of Travel are nearly always the ones where Mr. de Botton himself is present. For all the intelligence of his discussion of Wordsworth's beliefs about the restorative powers of nature, I felt those powers most strongly when Mr. de Botton describes leaving a London party feeling envious and lousy; he looks up and is rescued from his funk by the sight of a cloud.

De Maistre's volumes of room travel begin well but are finally unsuccessful, according to Mr. de Botton: "He becomes mired in long and wearing digressions about his dog, Rosinne, his sweetheart, Jenny, and his faithful servant, Joannetti. Prospective travelers in search of specific guidance on room travel risk coming away … feeling a little betrayed." Readers of The Art of Travel , on the other hand, may come away wishing for more autobiographical digressions: The book is most irresistible when its cogitation and erudition are transformed by the alchemy of the author's own experience.

Jennifer Egan, whose most recent novel is Look at Me (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), reviews regularly for The Observer.

Mr. Stilles particular focus is the paradoxical way that modernity has both fueled and thwarted our efforts to preserve the past. Conservation of the past is a peculiarly modern preoccupation he writes, born out of a vain hope that we can freeze time and the vain notion that what we are trying to freeze is the past In a profile of the Italian anthropologist Giancarlo Scoditti (which, like most of the chapters in this book, originally appeared in The New Yorker ), Mr. Stille recounts the scholars arrival on Kitawa, an extremely remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, as a dreamy, solitary young man in 1972. Mr. Scoditti spent two years learning the Kitawanslanguage, cataloging their oral traditions and pursuing his research. Eventually he married a Kitawan woman, and she conceived a child before young Scoditti returned to Italy.

Mr. Scoditti has visited Kitawa repeatedly in subsequent years, continuing his research and spending time with his son (his wife remarried in his absence). In that time, the Kitawans have acquired a taste for Western manufactured goods and have traded much of their food surplus to acquire them. Theft has emerged as a problem, and many young people including Mr. Scodittis own sonnow refuse to partake of the island's traditional rituals. As older members of the community die off, Kitawans with questions about their history often turn to Mr. Scoditti for answers. Mr. Stille writes, Thus Giancarlo Scoditti, bespectacled Italian professor at the University of Urbino, has become the repository of an entire culture, a small but rich, vital, and ancient civilization undergoing dramatic and irreversible changes."

The lone figure as cultural repository appears more than once in The Future of the Past (perhaps because the lone figure works well in magazine profiles). The most powerful of these is Father Reginald Foster, a Milwaukee-born Carmelite monk who is senior Latinist to Pope John Paul II. In addition to his substantial Vatican duties, Father Foster spends an enormous amount of time teaching Latin at all levels to virtually anyone who wants to learn at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Mr. Stille, who took his introductory course in 1991, beautifully captures the monk's zealous, quasi-heroic effort to keep Latin alive as a written and spoken language. Clad in his characteristic blue perma-press J.C. Penney jumpsuit, Father Foster bellows at Mr. Stille's class after translating a passage of Cicero, "LATIN IS SIMPLY THE GREATEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED! DON'T LET YOURSELF GO BECAUSE YOU MIGHT JUST FALL IN LOVE WITH IT!" But Father Foster, like Giancarlo Scoditti, is a man in his 60's, and a whiff of the tragic clings to his prodigious and unpromising struggle to make Latin relevant to our image-saturated information age.

Though the inevitability of change acts as a kind of undertow in The Future of the Past- in other chapters, Mr. Stille turns to the deterioration of the Great Sphinx of Giza, the looting of precious artifacts from Greek tombs in Sicily and the pollution of the Ganges River in Indiahe pays affectionate due to the enormous diversity that still exists. A chapter profiling the Somali poet Mohammed Ibrahim Warsame, known by his nickname Hadrawi, is less striking for the poet's ruminations over the eventual eclipse of poetry in Somaliland than for the staggering degree of influence poetry presently wields there: Poets like Hadrawi are credited with inspiring armed opposition to the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre that ultimately unseated him in 1991. Because the Somali language has existed in written form only since the 1970's, poetry is transmitted orally; in an odd alliance of ancient tradition with modern technology, the tape recorder has become the indispensable tool of its wide dissemination. "The poetry was more important to us than guns and cannons," Mr. Stille quotes a freedom fighter for the Somali National Movement, who led the resistance against the Barre regime. To an American, the notion of poetry inspiring political (not to speak of military) action is so alien as to read almost as parodya bit like the Martin Amis story "Career Move," in which poets are paid vast sums to take meetings with Hollywood magnates, while screenwriters toil in penurious obscurity.

The most disturbing chapter in the book is an all-American fiasco. It concerns the Department of Special Media Preservation at the National Archives, a place where engineers try to re-create technology that can decipher records stored by outmoded devicesin many cases, hardware and software combinations that are now obsolete. "One of the great ironies of the information age," Mr. Stille writes, "is that, while the late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost more information than any previous era." In other words, the Information Age is contributing to the erosion not only of cultural traditions throughout the world, but also ofwell, information. While the laws of ancient Sumer remain pristinely legible after 5,000 years, the results of the U.S. Census of 1960 are rumored to have been lost. "In fact," Mr. Stille writes, "there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness of technology and its fragility."

Which leads, quite naturally, to the question of what purpose our information technology is actually serving. Mr. Stille doesn't ask this question directly; his book functions prismatically rather than by building to a dénouement. But one is struck, reading his eloquent account of the ever-increasing masses of paper and computer records our culture currently generates, by the sense of a system outside anyone's control, a system designed to insure nothing more than its own perpetuation. In his chapter on Giancarlo Scoditti, Mr. Stille describes how the Kitawans have managed to preserve their traditions over hundreds of years without recourse even to handwriting: "The transmission of important myths or stories is not left to chance: they are considered the 'property' and responsibility of specific individuals, who pass them on to their heirs." Information technology, with its implied assurance of exactitude and perfection, has allowed us to abdicate that responsibility, Alexander Stille suggests, and his artful book points to some of the consequences.

Jennifer Egan's most recent novel, Look at Me (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese), was nominated for the National Book Award.

Erik Jonsson's Inner Navigation achieves within its first few pages something that few books manage to do at all: It isolates a subtle but universal strand of human experience-physical disorientation-and holds it up to scrutiny.

The author, who is Swedish, begins with an anecdote from his own life. He recalls arriving in Cologne in 1948 by overnight train and becoming confused about east and west to such an extent that the sun seemed to rise in the west and the Rhine to flow in the wrong direction. After several failed attempts to reorient himself, his discomfort was so acute that he left Cologne on the next train. "Our minds have a directional reference frame that we rely on to orient ourselves," Mr. Jonsson writes, introducing his concept of cognitive mapping. "It is the mainstay of our spatial system. We know in which direction to go, but if we were asked how we know, we would have no answer . It is automatic … but when something goes wrong with it, we get in big trouble."

For me, the effect of these opening remarks was galvanic: I felt like I'd slid open a forgotten drawer and found it stuffed with perfectly preserved memories-or perhaps they were merely refreshed by the new category in which Mr. Jonsson had induced me to place them. In the earliest, I'm 5 or 6 years old, playing with my stepsisters Marcia and Laura in the Wisconsin woods. A group of older boys careens onto the scene whooping threateningly; I have no idea who they are or what they want, but I'm filled with panic-I have no idea where I am. My surroundings are a mush of indecipherable green. As I stand paralyzed, I hear Marcia urging us to follow her, and we do, clambering over fallen logs, shoving aside skeins of ivy, blindly trailing her feints and leaps, the boys' crashing pursuit some distance behind us until it fades away and we're back on the road or trail, whatever it was, leading us to my mother, their father and our rented house. There's a moral to the story, which I remember absorbing quite gravely even at the time: Marcia has a good sense of direction.

Another one: Summer again and I'm 15, wandering in Chicago with my friend Naomi, who has come to visit during the month I spend each summer with my father and his family. After hanging around in the Loop, we decide to walk to my father's apartment building on North State Parkway. We begin on South State, presuming that south will eventually become north, and we walk and walk and walk, talking so avidly that we don't notice for a very long time that the neighborhood surrounding us bears no resemblance to the one where my father lives. We pass abandoned buildings, pawn shops, the dregs of a building fire. I remember the slow, strange arrival of my confusion: There I was, having nearly reached my father's exact address, but where was the building? Where was I? Had I been placed in another city? Eventually we approached a policeman, and he drove us in his squad car from deep in the flank of Chicago's South Side to the North Side we'd been trying to reach.

There's something inherently symbolic about being lost, which is why it can be so scary. Likewise, finding one's way always brings greater relief than you'd expect from simply turning a corner to spy a familiar landmark. Though Mr. Jonsson doesn't ask directly why this should be, he does supply an answer: "[W]e do not function in the real world when we move about in a familiar area," he writes. "We function in the cognitive map we have made of it." Losing and finding one's bearings are metaphorical experiences, then, because they take place in a landscape that is itself pure metaphor.

In New York City, where I've spent nearly all of my adult life, I'm often troubled by a guilty, clandestine sense of not knowing where the hell I am. I'm O.K. inside the city itself, but when I imagine places beyond it- Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Illinois-I have no concept of where they might be. Nor can I shake my belief that the Atlantic Ocean lies just beyond the Hudson River. As I read Mr. Jonsson's account of his trip to Cologne, I abruptly understood the reason for these many years of dislocation: Because I grew up in San Francisco, my internal compass assumes that the ocean is to the west and the rest of the nation to the east. My cognitive map has been reversed.

Mr. Jonsson's publisher likens Inner Navigation to the best-selling Longitude , but despite their shared preoccupation with location and mapping, the books are nearly opposite in method. Where Longitude is a scientific adventure story, Inner Navigation is a taxonomy of disorientation. Mr. Jonsson presents anecdotes from his own or someone else's life in which a person either moves through a landscape with preternatural skill or becomes inexplicably lost. Then he uses his theory of cognitive mapping to explain what went right or wrong, often including a diagram of the site in question to illustrate the divergence between the route intended and the one taken. Some of Mr. Jonsson's observations are illuminating; he offers an inspired explanation of the Swedish legend of the Skogsnuva, or female wood nymph, who punishes travelers by forcing them to walk in circles. And he makes salient points about the challenges modern life poses to our spatial abilities, with its dislocations and paucity of context.

But there's a maddening sameness to this book; nearly 300 pages in, we still encounter headings like "Misorientation in St. Anne's College, Oxford" and "Reversal in El Centro Rest Area," as if we ourselves had been seduced by the Skogsnuva and forced to walk in circles. Mr. Jonsson's method is so exhaustive as to be exhausting. Still, he achieves precisely what he sets out to do: He examines every possible variant of cognitive mapping and codifies it all. The author himself is an antic, shadowy presence throughout the book, a man glimpsed as he takes wrong turns and searches for things he cannot find. I wish I could hear less about his thwarted itineraries and more about Erik Jonsson himself, but he's chary with his personal history. I was stuck with bits of my own, revealed to me with odd, refreshing clarity.

Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese).

What meaning clings to a collection of images of New York-320 photographs from the Daily News -all taken between 1920 and New Year's Eve, 2000? I put off looking at it, suspecting that the stories it had to tell would seem naïvely irrelevant now-worse, would reinforce the catastrophic sense that our city has broken with its past.

But this turns out to be an excellent time to lose yourself in a photographic history of New York. Despite our endless recycling of 70's fashions, the present era has been marked by a nearly pathological reluctance to look back. The physical past still permeates New York: in the old cobblestones winking up through layers of street tar; in faded advertisements steeped into brick buildings; in hitching posts and coal doors and moldering piers on the Hudson. The pleasure of a splendid 1926 photograph of traffic stalled in snowy mud on Orchard Street-automobiles cheek by jowl with horse-and-buggies; signs hung aloft reading "2 rooms to let / electric lights / inquire janitor"-comes only partly from the curiosity of observing outmoded habits of life and dress. It's the satisfaction of finding a visual corollary for the shadowy anterior New York whose presence we feel, consciously or not, every day in this city.

Looking through New York Exposed chronologically, it's striking how many strands of New York life have remained constant: preoccupation with celebrity and baseball and crime, with acts of daring and tableaux of destruction. The 1930's photos of John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich deliquesce into shots of Kate Moss and J. Lo. Mobster killings of the 30's and 40's yield to Chinese-Vietnamese gang slayings in the 90's. By coincidence, one of the first images in the book, taken on Sept. 16, 1920, depicts the frenzied aftermath of an explosion on Wall Street outside J.P. Morgan (the bomb was concealed inside a horse-and-buggy) that killed 30 and injured more than 400, an unsolved crime presumed to be the work of anarchists.

To the extent that New York Exposed has a narrative, it's an impressionistic history of newspaper photography as practiced by a daily that devoted itself to the camera from the first (at its inception in 1919, the paper was called the Illustrated Daily News , and its logo even now is an old-fashioned camera). Still, aspects of the city's evolution reveal themselves. Some of the most powerful images in the book depict individual deaths: in 1935, a man holding his head as he stands near the body of his wife, who has just been hit by a car; in 1961, a woman holding the bloody head of her dying lover, whom her husband has just shot; in 1954, a man slipping and falling from a roof. Pete Hamill points out in his eloquent preface that the influx of guns and drugs in the 1960's and the resulting jump in murder rates made single deaths less newsworthy. He writes, "It gradually became difficult to get an ordinary crime of passion into the newspaper, or a death in a simple holdup; by the Eighties, reported killings were almost always multiple homicides."

Mr. Hamill invokes the concept of the "pseudo-event," a term coined by historian Daniel Boorstin in The Image (1961) to describe events that exist solely to be covered by the media. Politicians' visits to schools or hospices are quintessential pseudo-events; the reporter's mandate in such cases becomes decoding the artifice on display to lay bare some hidden kernel of authenticity. An early, hilarious pseudo-event depicted in this volume features John D. Rockefeller on his 84th birthday, having ostentatiously bestowed a nickel upon an unimpressed toddler, who is handing it back to him. Mr. Hamill notes that as the pseudo-event has become ascendant in America, reporters hunger for genuine crises as a relief from the numbing grind of public relations. "All routine assignments are cancelled," he writes. "Adrenaline flows. Photographers and reporters rush to the scene of the calamity." Though Mr. Hamill doesn't go this far, it's safe to say that readers and viewers feel similarly; catastrophes are authentic, and the prevalence of pseudo-events in our culture creates a longing for authenticity.

A survey of news photography in New York cannot help but raise the question of where, and how, the spectacle of destruction we have witnessed this fall will take its place in such a narrative. To be sure, there are pictures in New York Exposed that stand apart from the general continuity: a Prohibition photograph of children in Red Hook lunging with pots and pails into a gutter to scoop up wine being dumped from a nearby warehouse; a 1934 shot of a Nazi rally in a packed Madison Square Garden arrayed with swastikas and columns of young men in gleaming black boots; soldiers from the 82nd Airborne marching through the Washington Square arch during a victory parade in 1946.

The images we've seen this fall strike me as something different in more than just degree. Terrorist acts are in some sense pseudo-events: manufactured occasions intended to reverberate through the mass media. And yet the carnage and chaos they have wrought are as brutally authentic as anything we've seen. As events, they are both false and true. From a news standpoint, they are new.

The picture I've returned to most often in New York Exposed is from 1927; it shows the construction of the Independent Subway System on Sixth Avenue. Slightly retouched, it lays bare a chasm of dirt and pilings that extends for miles, a construction project so massive and ambitious that it looks like folly. One can hardly believe that the work will ever be completed, or the street made whole again. And yet it was, many decades ago, using technology we've far surpassed-a welcome, timely reminder of what New York is capable of building.

Jennifer Egan's Look at Me (Nan A. Talese-Doubleday) was a finalist for the National Book Award.