This is the ideal time to release Mongo: Adventures in Trash , Ted Botha's paean to the garbage foragers of New York. All summer long, as students vacate their dorms and prosperous young families head to the beach, the city's curbs fill with reusable-and often extremely valuable-trash. In the past week alone, on my poky Brooklyn street, I've walked past three gutted refrigerators, a futon, a rather extraordinary bathtub-sized Captain Morgan Rum mirror, a fuchsia two-seater sofa, several head- and footboards and a collection of pristine hardbacks, among them Fear of Flying , Shadow of the Dolls and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . Not bad for an outer borough.

As a child, Mr. Botha stockpiled used batteries in shoe boxes, and when he moved to New York in the early 1990's, he furnished his apartment with "mongo"-local slang for "any discarded object that is retrieved." (The term, unknown to me, sounds dispiritingly like the name of a Bobby McFerrin comeback album.) A South African familiar with the creative resurrection of other people's possessions, Mr. Botha began to study, then pursue, his fellow scavengers. "I soon discovered that furnishing your apartment off the sidewalk has been a New York tradition for a very long time," he writes. Why here precisely? "The combination of wealth, residents living at close quarters, and the fact that so much gets thrown away out of lack of space, sheer laziness, ignorance, or wastefulness means there's lots of mongo and it's easy to reach." Or, more aphoristically: "Great wealth makes great garbage."

Mr. Botha is interested not in button-down dilettantes who boast of rescuing potted ferns off Waverly Place, but in the full-time mongo devotees who sift through the trash as profession or vocation. In New York, it seems, collectors are as surprising and multifarious as the treasures they unearth. Mongo: Adventures in Trash is organized by scavenger type, each chapter introducing a different genre of collector: the articulate young anarchists who "Dumpster dive" for restaurants' and grocery stores' edible trash; the visionaries who converted an Allen Street brownstone into a folk-art installation of objets trouvés ; the archaeologists who dig up privies in Greenwich Village in search of antique medicine bottles and other Victorian refuse. Within these categories, Mr. Botha finds complex striations: For example, among the survivalists-collectors who make their living from trash-one must never confuse the "canners," who take aluminum to redemption centers, with the "black-baggers," who take whatever they can get.

Mr. Botha never lets us forget that most mongo maniacs rummage for motives other than profit. Steven Dixon, the former Chase Bank employee who now combs Upper Manhattan for printed matter (his finds range from first editions of Finnegans Wake , Ulysses and You Can't Go Home Again to a card signed by Disraeli and a letter signed by Aaron Burr), is a lifelong bibliophile who immediately recognizes the literary and commercial value of every book he disinters. Self-improvement, and later curiosity, keeps one Chelsea woman rising early on trash-collection days: She first taught herself how to rehabilitate tossed-out computers to qualify for an I.T. job, then took to reading the contents of the computers' hard drives. Other spurs to collecting include reverence for the past, escape from the cubicle, the thrill of discovery, political conviction and a shield against death.

"It became like an addiction," one pack rat-the most familiar and least interesting group in Mongo's gallery-told Mr. Botha. "I always had to go out when I knew there was a garbage collection. Once you start, you have to go out. There's this fear you might miss something." But though Mr. Botha acknowledges the psychological instability of some extreme collectors, or hoarders-take the notorious Collyer brothers in Harlem, who were buried beneath their accumulated rubble-he would rather discuss mongo's healthier practitioners.

Living for and off trash affords a degree of freedom rare in this citadel of late-stage capitalism, and many mongo collectors identify themselves with heroes of the Wild West. "I think people that collect would have been cowboys or something like that. They can't be tied down," says Stephen Dixon. Scott, the outhouse archaeologist, says collectors remind him of the "daring forty-niners of the gold rush," while Dave-a "sludger" who excavates centuries-old treasures from New York's vast acreage of landfill-compares himself to Crocodile Dundee. "Whether cowboy, prospector, knight-errant, or train-jumping circus performer," Mr. Botha concludes, "in the end the ultimate quest of every collector seems to be, at least in part, freedom and adventure." He makes this same point earlier: "Being free is something that every collector prizes almost as much as the mongo itself."

As the above quotations indicate, Mr. Botha's prose occasionally veers toward the clunky, but he writes about his subject with such earnest reverence that it's difficult, after a time, not to share his enthusiasm. Megapolitans eager to learn about the seamy underbelly of Manhattan should certainly consult Mongo , a work of urban reportage packed with arcane trivia and entertaining revelations. Once you know about mongo, you start to notice it everywhere; and once you know about the subculture of people dedicated to the pursuit of mongo, you remember to marvel at what an odd, amazing city you've washed up in.

Laura C. Moser is the author of a biography of Bette Davis and a young-adult novel, both of which will be published this year.

Acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate, who grew up in the crowded slums of Williamsburg, has long marveled at the transformation of his native city over the last half-century. In Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan , he laces up his sneakers and sets out to explore Manhattan's shoreline, the area he believes has changed the most, from "a working port, to an abandoned, seedy no-man's-land, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail/residential" developments. On these slivers of land abutting the Hudson and East rivers, Mr. Lopate discovers the inevitable New York dualities: grandeur and decay, diversity and insularity, possibility and self-destruction-evidence of the city's great past and the promise of its future.

The book covers a massive time frame, beginning with the formation of Manhattan during the Ice Age 75,000 years ago and continuing beyond the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001. But the structure of Waterfront is geographical rather than chronological: In Part I, Mr. Lopate slowly proceeds up the island from the Battery to Washington Heights along the West Side; in Part II, he makes his way up the East Side from the South Street Seaport to Highbridge Park.

As he's quick to point out, Mr. Lopate is neither a historian nor an expert in urban studies; he's just a "bellettrist" who loves his native city and felt the urge to write an intimate pedestrian travelogue. His informal first-person approach allows him to include sources from a wide range of disciplines, as well as conversations with experts, encounters with friends and his own shoreline adventures. He scoops up whatever historical, scientific, ethnographic, architectural, literary, cinematic, biographical or otherwise enriching tidbits cross his path.

On his long afternoon rambles, Mr. Lopate interviews fellow shoreline fanatics: the nonprofit organizers at the River Project in Tribeca; the advocates-and opponents-of Westway, the infamous interstate highway once proposed as an alternative to the West Side Highway; visionary architects, and even the odd local ichthyologist. He revisits the ghosts of Manhattan's outer banks, from the legendary pirate William Kidd, who lived on Pearl Street in the early 18th century, to the mid-20th-century writer, rake and heroin addict Alexander Trocchi, who worked as a scow captain off a pier in Chelsea. No aspect of waterfront lore escapes Mr. Lopate's notice: the underside of his beloved Brooklyn Bridge; the fishmongers on Fulton Street; the Amazonian vegetation of East Harlem-the list is inexhaustible.

Mr. Lopate never withholds his opinion. He scorns the well-oiled robots trotting through Hudson River Park and laments the glossy emptiness of several "sterile and manicured" developments like Battery Park City and the South Street Seaport, while celebrating the neglected viaducts of Manhattanville and the forgotten splendors of Highbridge Park. He imagines several "outrageous" plans to enhance Manhattan's waterfront real estate in the future: more parks, residences, cultural zones, markets.

Mr. Lopate is always chatty, never pedantic-but for such talkiness to succeed on the page, the author must exercise great restraint. In the first sentence of his introduction to Waterfront , Mr. Lopate explains his intention "to write a short, lighthearted book about wandering the watery perimeter of Manhattan." Lighthearted it is-informative and fascinating, too … but Waterfront simply cannot be described as short. And length (421 pages, not counting the acknowledgments and the index) is the chief problem with this undertaking. If it were 100, or even 150, pages shorter, Waterfront would have been a far more powerful book. Mr. Lopate (or, ahem , his editor) could easily have shaved off this much without omitting a single neighborhood, sidebar or even riverside exchange. It's the sentences that need trimming: Far too often, Mr. Lopate's prose imitates the meandering of his feet.

Heintroduces himself as a "native" New Yorkeralmosta dozen times, and frequently prefacessentences withgratingdisclaimers like "to me at least" and "to my way of thinking." His descriptions run on-take the "blond, slender, fit-looking woman in her forties, Danish or German, with sun-leathered skin" who disappears as soon as she's introduced. Mr. Lopate also tends to supply one explanation too many (or in this case, in a passage about crossing the Major Deegan Expressway, two): "Given my preferences, I would rather not walk into traffic (should my foot slip, I would fall into a speeding car)." As if reluctant to let his readers draw their own conclusions, he pads lovely observations with deflating afterthoughts: "A plane flies by with a streamer attached: ANDREA I LOVE YOU WILL YOU MARRY ME LENNY. No one near me jumps up and down, so we have to assume Andrea is elsewhere." It seems he can't resist the unnecessary final clause: "Most waterfront housing in Manhattan is built on the island side of the highway, but Waterside rises on the river side, making it the exception."

To one interviewee's suggestion that he "check out the facts," Mr. Lopate objects: "If I were an investigative reporter, I would certainly do so. But I'm too lazy. I'm a belletrist, for God's sake!" Laziness, alas, surfaces far more often in Mr. Lopate's prose than in his research. He occasionally uses SAT-class words like "espy" and "surmise" that jar with his strenuously offhand diction, as does corporatese like "underutilized" and its poor cousin, "second-most-utilized." And even more annoying than the repeated misuse of "presently" is the rampant corruption of nouns into verbs: "impact on," "site" (as in, "decided to site a sewage treatment plant in West Harlem"), "niched," "foregrounds," "decks" ("decks over the highway") and "requester" ("Stefan would occasionally slip the requester another sandwich"). At times, Mr. Lopate lays out the skeletons of topic sentences with too heavy a hand, his transitions hinging on ponderous conjunctions like "consequently," "anyway," "on the other hand," "in any case" and so forth. Redundancies, too, abound: "my second argument is that" (and, two paragraphs down, "my third argument is that"); "I have to say that"; "the sad fact is that"; "I might add that." And he's a belletrist, for God's sake!

Mr. Lopate is a fluid thinker, and he can be an engaging companion. He's at his best when analyzing books and dipping into private memories, as when he returns to the hilly mazes of Inwood and describes the long walks he and his pregnant first wife took through the Cloisters and Fort Tyron Park, their anguished debates about abortion. But for all these poignant interludes, Waterfront too often reminded this weary reader of driving through Connecticut on I-95: It just goes on and on and on.

Laura C. Moser is the author of a biography of Bette Davis and a young-adult novel, both of which will be published this year.

Kate Christensen is a serious writer: Don't be fooled by the relentless hipness or what seems the full-throttle frivolity of her subject matter - the joke, if you don't get it, is on you. Her first novel, In the Drink (1999), earned her wide recognition as New York's answer to Bridget Jones, but Ms. Christensen is too talented to remain another snarky chronicler of single-girl dystopia. In her second novel, Jeremy Thrane (2001), Ms. Christensen traded In the Drink 's undersexed-in-the-city female-writer protagonist for a more ambitious vessel, a gay man whose life implodes when his longtime celebrity lover dumps him. And now, in The Epicure's Lament , Ms. Christensen's first-person narrator undergoes an even more radical transformation to become Hudson Valley aristocrat Hugo Whittier, lover of Calvados, women, cigarettes and solitude.

The effete last issue of an old Yankee dynasty, Hugo-prep-school dropout, onetime boy toy and jet-setting idler-has spent the last decade self-immured in Waverly, his family's splendid ancestral home on the banks of the Hudson, preparing lavish meals for one and picking through his forebears' collection of leather-bound classics. A "decaying forty-year-old man in his decaying childhood home at the ruined finale of a wasted life," Hugo is dying, or so he hopes, from Buerger's disease, a rare and romantic condition that afflicts only heavy smokers. Giving up cigarettes could cure him, but-as he glibly informs his doctor-Hugo would rather smoke than survive.

His generation's token "reclusive eccentric," Hugo is contentedly keeping company with Montaigne and M.F.K. Fisher, limiting his human contact to a flirtation with the "gormless, lumpen girl" who works at the convenience store where he buys cigarettes, when, in an unforeseeable stroke of ill-fortune, his grating, "'Dudley Doright'" big brother Dennis shows up after the sudden collapse of his marriage. Energetically unsympathetic, Hugo despises his "chipper and clean-shaven" sibling and recoils from the burden of daily-life interchange: "There's nothing I dread and resent more first thing in the morning than the double-headed monstrous hydra of obligatory pleasantries." To preserve his sanity, Hugo, years after discarding his youthful fantasies of authorship, decides to keep a diary, one that will soon evolve into a "long, extended suicide note" and last confessional; voilà- The Epicure's Lament .

But Dennis, it seems, is only the first trespasser in Hugo's citadel of classic literature and aged cheese. Soon a whole cast of crazies will trickle back into his life: first Hugo's "diabolical and poisonous jolie-laide sans merci" wife-in-name-only, Sonia, accompanied by their daughter Bellatrix, an alien creature whose paternity Hugo vigorously disclaims; then "Fag Uncle Tommy," the withered Greenwich Village socialite. Also making an unwelcome cameo is Schlomo, the Jewish hit-man cousin of Tovah, Hugo's obese lover and keeper many years back.

Pushed from his sanctuary, Hugo must extend his social circle. He first courts his brother's charming "chubstein" nanny-"a mouse cornered by a whisker-twitching alley tom sniffing at the entrance of her hidey-hole"-then the married woman his married brother has long coveted. "Lately," Hugo notices midway through his notebooks, "I'm finding myself increasingly embedded in other peoples' lives, which nauseates me and fills me with fear." Fear and nausea fast accumulate, forcing Hugo to confront his impending death-and his "wasted life." This requisite epiphany, when it comes, bears little resemblance to the more common quivering-seaside variety: Hugo remains wry and arch to the end, his honesty always undercut by obnoxiousness.

Nothing much happens in The Epicure's Lament ; that's not the point. With his armchair approach to existence, Hugo is less interested in action than commentary-the more provocative, the better. Take the events of Sept. 11, presented time and again as casual parlor chat, or fodder for Hugo's world-weariness: "Well, that's one thing you can say for those Ay-rab terrorists-at least, it's the one thing I myself will say here-they've distracted a sovereign nation's collective mind from the goings-on of other people's genitalia." This brand of offensiveness, forthright and thorough, recalls novelists of a less tremulous age, Percy Wyndham Lewis or the young Evelyn Waugh, men too pissed off to maintain any pretense of sanctimony.

Also like Wyndham Lewis, Ms. Christensen piles up the adjectives, using three when one would suffice. She isn't simply getting carried away with her own cleverness, though, for her lengthy aerobic descriptions reflect the narrator's personality perfectly. Hugo Whittier is nothing if not a man of excess-excessive in misanthropy, excessive in sex, excessive in smoking and dining and worthlessness-so it seems only fitting that his language also go overboard on occasion. Consider Hugo's "thick, pungent, unspeakably reeking private thoughts," or the "thin, watery Buchenwald soup" his mother force-fed him as a boy, or the "didactically eager smile that hinted at black, simmering, repressed puritanical anger" that Bellatrix's sixth-grade teacher flashes him. In a conversation with his brother, Hugo places Dennis' estranged wife in "the thesaurus next to 'virago,' 'shrew,' 'harridan,' 'fishwife,' 'alewife.'" Readers bored by minimalism will find Hugo's exuberant, exhausting, hilarious, maddening voice delightful and compelling.

One remaining question, then: Does it work? It's a mark of Ms. Christensen's distinction and confidence that she doesn't worry for a minute about whether a female writer can successfully impersonate a male voice. In three novels, she has experimented with three different identities: a straight girl, a gay man and a straight man, alike only in the misfortunes they bring on themselves. In The Epicure's Lament , Ms. Christensen has sidestepped the problem of verisimilitude by creating a foppish Wildean oddball, deliberately anachronistic in tastes and vocabulary, a recluse whose interest in sex is more metaphorical than sensuous. Hugo's diary, in any event, is by no means a work of rigorous realism, but one of brilliant swooping sentences, acidic observations on contemporary life, hilarious bitchy asides, and-every once in a while-arresting reflections on regret and aging and plain unironic despair.

Laura C. Moser is the author of a biography of Bette Davis and a young-adult novel, both of which will be published this year.

Trashy books fall into two basic categories: first, those bodice-rippers with puffed fuschia-lamé lettering and "sizzling!" blurbs by daytime-soap stars. This group includes Jackie Collins, Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz-authors who know exactly what they do and love it, and drive red convertibles around West Beverly accordingly.

Then there's a more insidious subset of sleaze: trash masquerading as literature, potboilers with higher aspirations, in which DD-cup characters quote Ezra Pound between blowjobs and attend public-library lectures between disfiguring car wrecks-the accidental specialty of writers as diverse as Anne Rivers Siddons, Barbara Kingsolver, Anita Shreve and Michael Crichton.

With its combination of lurid sexual episodes, cut-out characters and fatuous observations on the life of the flesh, Tama Janowitz's new novel, Peyton Amberg , takes a proud place in Category B. Like most trash-lit, the eponymous protagonist's astonishing beauty helps to speed things right along. But in disappointing contrast to Jackie Collins' best work-in which dirt-poor Missourians marry platinum recording artists and 14-year-olds engage in wild, unprotected sex with Oscar nominees-Ms. Janowitz, for all her delight in graphic recap, insists on using sex as a "symbol" and a "warning sign" of greater ills in contemporary society.

Take the following passage, perfectly acceptable in its proper context: "No one had ever looked at her this way before, it was more than pure lust: a jaguar sprawled across a branch and she a small gazelle realizing, too late, what lay above. It made her breathless." For some reason, Ms. Janowitz insists on interlarding these jungle-action sequences with fuzzy (or just embarrassing) moments of private revelation: "It never occurred to her that it was possible to view sex as something other than a purely physical conquest, a release. That there were people out there-including men-who believed sex might be a spiritual communion between two people."

Peyton Amberg, the gorgeous middle-aged woman with the mid-century porn-star name, is herself decidedly lowbrow: the daughter of a mentally unstable, ex–Boston Brahmin woman and a long-gone Estonian no-goodnik. To escape her sordid upbringing, Peyton marries Barry Amberg, the dullest, baldest, most omni-allergic Jewish dentist on Long Island, a man who dresses for formal occasions in pre-creased polyester slacks and drives "ten miles out of the way to buy cases of paper towels that were ten cents less a roll." Barry, Peyton discovers with dismay, "never went on a binge, had manic highs-except with joy at seeing her." Understandably bored after a courtship of teeth-cleanings, Peyton takes a job as a travel agent and sets about roaming the globe unchaperoned. It's on these promotional junkets-to Rio, West Texas, Vegas, Hong Kong, Milan and Antwerp-that Peyton encounters men with names as improbable as her own: Germano Schmitt-Nausen, the pan–South American/Teutonic financier; Sandy, the Texan dude-ranch operator; Youssef Jones, the entertainer; and-finally, ruinously-Xiang Rong Chen, the Hong Kong gangster.

And yet-have you guessed?-despite these jet-set dalliances, Peyton's life remains dull, oppressive, intolerable. She has no relationship with her son and no feeling for her husband, and the requisite one friend allotted to sit-com characters is part-time at best. Perhaps it's because Peyton repeatedly proclaims her detachment from her supposed loved ones that Ms. Janowitz felt free to draw comic-strip excuses for these minor characters. It's unfortunate, though, that Peyton herself should also lack nuance and depth. There's her big breasts and her deficient education, her passion for dogs and her Bill Clinton–consort fashion sense, but what else are we told about her? And if that's it, why on earth should we care?

Ms. Janowitz is careful to spell out the nature of Peyton's existential malaise-at least once per chapter: "How useless it all was, a lifetime spent on airplanes or arranging trips for others, when ultimately each destination was, in some way-in many ways-no different from the place she had left. If there was a way to travel without taking oneself along, that would be the answer." "Little Gidding," anyone? It's this kind of slam-dunk that betrays Ms. Janowitz's unfortunate seriousness in this endeavor, which robs all pleasure from the scurrilous Barbara Taylor Bradford interludes.

Rather than acknowledge this lurid catalog of sexual misalliance for what it really is, Ms. Janowitz imagines her protagonist as a modern-day Emma Bovary: a provincial girl suffocating in a badly decorated Upper West Side apartment, a wasted beauty who uses adultery to confer meaning on her life.

Similarities to Flaubert stop exactly there. It's unlikely that the author who painstakingly weighed every pronoun would countenance Ms. Janowitz's eidetic descriptions like "yucky" and "totally absurd and yet glamorous"-to say nothing of her unaccountable adverb choices along the lines of "trudged pinkly" and the oft-repeated "foxily." Peyton's sentimental education includes the "swoony gushy stuff" of her engagement to the dull dentist and, much later, a flight attendant with a "toothy, oversexed smile and erect whiskers." (Huh?) Unlike the eternally lithe Peyton, this book could use a major diet: "The main thing was as everybody knew when you looked at a fat person you couldn't help but wonder how much shit came out when they sat on the toilet." A truth universally acknowledged?

To judge by the pulpy, bright-yellow cover of Peyton Amberg -featuring a Veronica Lake look-alike straddling a suitcase in a "Like a Prayer" negligee-Ms. Janowitz is willing to indulge in a little self-parody. But there's no excuse for sloppiness.

Though Peyton Amberg occasionally echoes the aggressive zaniness of Slaves of New York (1986), it lacks the heedlessness-and fun-of the stories that made Ms. Janowitz famous 17 years ago. Or perhaps the problem is of relevance: Once touted as the spokeswoman of hip youth, Ms. Janowitz seems to have fallen rather sadly out of pace with the times. Peyton-a femme fatale fast approaching 50, remember-spouts a bizarre idiom that is half Eisenhower-era, half Christina Aguilera. "I have total, like, jet lag," she observes at one point-and later, in a reflective moment: "My God, I have a total crush on this guy! He's my best friend!" This same character reacts to news of a friend's H.I.V. diagnosis in language of a rather different generation: "Gee, that's so awful."

Awful, indeed, that this novel-from a writer of considerable talent-should be marred by pretentiousness and promiscuous carelessness.

Laura C. Moser is the author of a biography of Bette Davis and a young-adult novel, both forthcoming in 2004.