How does our panel of professionals rate her performance?

JOHN UPDIKE

Senator Clinton is an excellent and thoroughgoing politician and not a novelist; her description of “the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience” of her life is nowhere as moving or human as the legalistic vignettes of furtive partial pleasures in the Starr Report. Her surprise at her husband’s belated confession is indeed surprising, as if they had never quite met before. But I loved the sentence, “I hadn’t decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President.” Her citizenship is ardent.

John Updike’s most recent novel is Seek My Face (Knopf).

ERICA JONG

In any campaign biography, the writer--or her ghost--solicits sympathy for the campaigner while pretending to be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Living History is no different. Hillary Clinton’s moment of maximum public sympathy arrived when she became the woman scorned, and she has no intention of letting us forget it. “This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life,” she writes. “I was furious and getting more so by the second,” she writes. “[H]is eyes filled with tears. He had betrayed the trust in our marriage and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach.” With these soapy sentences, Hillary reminds us relentlessly of her instant of greatest P.R. glory, the moment she stopped being too brainy, too brilliant, too adamantine and became, in the tabloids, just another betrayed wife. How pathetic that she has to twang our heartstrings in this cheesy way. Hillary Clinton has changed the role of First Lady for all time. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, her mentor, she has proved that the First Lady can be more compelling and empathic than the President. The woman is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.

Erica Jong’s most recent novel is Sappho’s Leap (W.W. Norton & Company).

LAURA MOORE

Dear Senator Clinton,

In my line of fiction, we call it the “black moment”: the moment of crisis between the heroine and hero, when they discover that their love and trust are in jeopardy. You’ve done a great job, in Living History, of setting the scene for the key confession/confrontation, but if I may, I’d like to make a few suggestions to turn your story into a real “keeper” for your fans.

We need to feel your pain. The best romance novels wring every last drop of emotion as they expose the heartache of betrayal. Simply crying, yelling and saying you’re furious won’t make those pages turn and those readers’ eyes moisten with tears of understanding and connection. You have to make us identify with you as a wife and lover. Let’s see whether we can’t open up this scene in the bedroom (terrific choice of setting, by the way) and let the reader share more fully in your thoughts, emotions and reactions when Bill drops the bomb.

My mind reeled from the blow of his softly stammered words. Stunned, I stared uncomprehending. A wave of dizziness assailed me and I thought I might be sick. Fighting against the sudden nausea, my fingers clutched at the bed sheets. A distant region of my brain registered the fact that here I was in our bed, the one Bill and I had shared countless nights, his warm, wonderfully familiar body pressed against mine. It had been a place of joy and refuge where we had lain and whispered dreams in the dark. Now it was horribly transformed into an icy field of lies. As though of their own accord, my hands released their hold to wrap themselves protectively about me as I shivered from the tears coursing down my cheeks, from the awful chill invading my heart. A scream of pain rose up inside me, and yet all I managed was a broken whisper. “Why, Bill, why? Why did you lie to me?”

He just stood there, his head lowered, unable to meet my eye, his shoulders slumped, looking like a sullen, naughty child. Perhaps I should thank Bill for that, for at that moment as I stared at him, rage hot and pure began coursing through my veins, spreading until it consumed every atom of my being. Bill must have sensed it, for he raised his head, his red-rimmed eyes finally meeting mine. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.”

Now, obviously we can’t have Bill explaining too much here. That would take away from your story--and besides, your book can be a great marketing teaser so that next year we’ll all rush out and buy Bill’s take on the bedroom scene--but there’s one more thing I feel could really enrich the emotional impact of the scene: forgiveness. Even the merest hint of it allows your reader to hope that maybe there’s some way to get past this darkest moment of your marriage and your love. As you know, this is a challenging bit of writing, because you’ll have to convince us that you found something redeemable in Bill, something worth saving in your relationship. But let’s give it a shot. Let’s try and open the door of your heart a crack, because, after all, that’s what you did manage to do.

“I believed in you, Bill. We all believed in you.” My throat, raw from pain, closed tight and I was unable to continue. I shut my eyes in despair. I couldn’t bear to look at him. Not now, maybe never.

I heard the sound of his feet moving closer, the heavy muffled thud of his knees hitting the carpet as he dropped down next to the bed. “Hill …. ” His whisper was an agonized plea. “Please, please, I need you. Now more than ever.” I felt his head drop, its weight resting heavy against my thigh. I opened my eyes, and involuntarily my hand reached out, a feather brushing against his graying hair.

Unchecked tears flowed down his cheeks as he gazed at me. “You’ve always been strong where I was weak. Be strong for me now, Hillary …. If not for me, then for Chelsea …. ”

Chelsea. The one truly wonderful thing our marriage had given us. Chelsea, our pride and joy. How this sordid affair would hurt her, a pain a thousand times greater than my own. “I don’t know, Bill. I don’t know if I can be that strong …. ”

From outside the bedroom door, our dog, Buddy, gave a plaintive whine of distress.

I think we’ll leave the suggestions at that. I’m sure you’ve got the gist. In closing, please let me add that I hope we’ll have you and President Clinton back in the White House in 2008. The material W. is providing is far too scary to contemplate.

With warmest regards,

Laura Moore

Laura Moore’s latest contemporary romance novel, Night Swimming (Ballantine), was published in May.

DAVID GATES

This doesn’t feel to me like the time to be making sport of Hillary Clinton--not when the far right, having essentially engineered a coup d’état, is busily reinventing America as a theocratic cloud-cuckooland, with suicidal economic, social and environmental policies and a mean streak so wide it would take a B-52 hours to fly across it, and with the mouth-breathing millions cheering them on. I’m a lot less dainty than I used to be when I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a sellout like her husband. So I’m not the guy to give her book the ridicule it might deserve in better days.

Living History isn’t an X-ray self-portrait, but a belated--or a be-earlied--campaign autobiography, as well as a moneymaking product calculated to save her hours and hours of paid speechifying. Since one recurring theme is her tendency to put her supposedly innocent foot in her mouth---”tea and cookies,” “Tammy Wynette,” “vast right-wing conspiracy”--it’s understandable, maybe even commendable, that the book has been thoroughly gaffe-proofed, apparently with the help of the speechwriters, editors and friends whom she thanks in her copious acknowledgments. If her goal was to include nothing that might come back to bite her in the ass, she’s done just fine. For instance, she doesn’t come right out and say that if Ken Starr hadn’t distracted the White House and Congress with the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, the Sept. 11 attacks would never have happened. But she sure lets you know it, by constantly juxtaposing President Clinton’s prescient worries about Osama bin Laden with the Republican right’s jihad against Mr. Clinton. It sounds a little sketchy, but I’m not dead sure she’s wrong.

If I’d been her editor, I would have cut the sentence where she says: “My own approval rating was nearing an all-time high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic.” And I might have urged her to lose the namedroppy stuff, where Stevie Wonder comes and sings her a song he just wrote about forgiveness, and Walter Cronkite takes Bill and Hill for a sail, and the Dalai Lama puts in his two cents. At Davos, she runs into Elie Wiesel and the missus, and he asks her, “What is wrong with America? Why are they doing this?” She says, “I don’t know, Elie.” Icky as this is, though, she undoubtedly was on a first-name basis with Elie and Stevie and Walt and Dalai. And they undoubtedly were nice to her. So what’s she supposed to do, not say so?

About Mr. Clinton’s sexual betrayals--the plural is mine, not hers--she’s as forthcoming as you could reasonably expect. Her only comment on Gennifer Flowers’ allegation that she’d had a long affair with Mr. Clinton is: “He told me it wasn’t true.” (End of sentence. End of paragraph. No halfway intelligent reader could miss the implication.) Similarly, she says a couple of times that her husband will have to give us his own explanation for what the hell he was thinking when he got involved with Ms. Lewinsky. And while Bill and Hillary went into marriage counseling after the affair became public, Hillary never tells us specifically what the upshot was--if there was a specific upshot--or even if they started sleeping in the same room again. Well, it’s none of our business, really, and left to herself--to the extent any politician has a self--she might have told us so. But without at least dipping a toe into this swamp, she wouldn’t have had a promotable book or, perhaps, a political career beyond the Senate. Which, I have to say, I hope she’s got her beady eye on. Since she had to deal with the mess somehow, she’s done a reasonably deft job of giving away not much of anything we didn’t know. Did anybody, for instance, think she wasn’t angry with Mr. Clinton? Would anyone have respect for her if she hadn’t been? As rawly confessional as Living History is designed to seem, it’s an artifact crafted by a politician and her team, and she doesn’t give up a damn thing she didn’t have to. Would you?

David Gates is the author of two novels and, most recently, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Vintage Books).

VINCE PASSARO

It’s a decent bet that almost every day that Monica Lewinsky went down on Bill Clinton, bombs dropped somewhere in Iraq--and while he hardly ever got to climax, the bombs frequently did. Now that Hillary has spilled “all,” that’s one of many facts you won’t see discussed in the stupefying reporting about her book. Nor, it occurred to me today while looking over “August 1998,” the curiously affectless chapter on her “personal agony” that was much reported on after it was leaked to the Associated Press last week, are we going to be enlightened as to why Hillary voted in favor of our spectacularly mendacious little war in the Fertile Crescent, either.

All we get are her tears over the casual infidelities of a man who, by most credible accounts, hasn’t kept it in his pants since the diapers came off.

Here’s a news item for the media, for Simon & Schuster, and for whatever bizarre, salacious readership leads the publisher to believe this book needed a first print run of a million copies: It wasn’t the Clintons’ genitals that were so troubling, it was their brains.

But, of course, there’s a lot of political cover in pointing our attention groin-ward. Perhaps that’s why her book reads so much like the establishing scenes in a bad porn video.

August 1998 is when Bill Clinton testified to a grand jury via video what he then had to announce to the nation: He’d had a little action in the Oval Office. Hillary kindly reminds us that (just by coincidence, mind), “within hours of his statement about his personal transgression, the United States would launch a missile strike against one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, at a time when our intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top lieutenants would be there.”

This little arrangement, in which dire national-security requirements dovetail so perfectly with the political needs of a desperately underclad emperor, feels kind of familiar, doesn’t it? But then, that’s not an aspect of Hillary’s now-famous chapter--the “personal revelation” of her “agony” (as opposed to the agony of so many others)--that we care to discuss much.

Vince Passaro’s first novel was Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster).

JENNIFER EGAN

Reading Hillary Clinton reminds me of how hard it is to pull off climactic, emotionally charged scenes without lapsing into cliché. Of course, there is frisson in the very idea of being secreted past the bedroom door to witness the moment when her husband, the President, admitted to her that he had fooled around with Monica L. after months of denying it. But the language Senator Clinton uses to render this encounter veers between legalese (“there had been an inappropriate intimacy”) to familiar prose shorthand for heightened emotional states (“Gulping for air”; “I was furious and getting more so by the second”; “I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged … ”).

Clichés are a kind of literary Esperanto, recognizable to everyone in a vague, general way. Take out the names, and just about anyone could have written this stuff about anyone. That’s why Ms. Clinton’s answer to another much-pondered question back in 1998--how does Hillary feel about Bill now?--is so weirdly disappointing: “As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck.” The cliché blocks the gritty specificity of what went on between these two particular people; it actually obscures it. Which may be the point. Does she really want millions of readers to know how she felt when her husband confessed to yet another infidelity--one that might cost him his Presidency? I wouldn’t.

As a writer, I try to look at clichés as a starting point. Early drafts of my work are lousy with them, in the same way that they creep into (cliché) so much spoken language without our even noticing. In the end, I try to isolate each one and ask myself: What exactly is this standing in for? The answers are usually interesting. I’d love to know Hillary Clinton’s.

Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories.

LOUIS BEGLEY

We live in a decadent era that grows uglier by the minute. The spectacle of the media salivating in gluttonous anticipation of Senator Clinton’s telling how she learnt from her husband the “truth” about Monica has been one more painful and shaming lesson in the abasement of the American public’s taste as the media and publishers perceive it. Is it true that Hillary Clinton needed to let the entire world into her bedroom to justify an $8 million book contract? She had, after all, other useful and interesting information to impart, and she is an engaging and sometimes deeply moving figure. I readily imagine Kenneth Starr, Orrin Hatch, Tom DeLay and the other stalwarts of the great Presidential peep show in their viewing booths, shifting eagerly from foot to foot, ready to climax as Hillary and Bill undress. But are the rest of us just as depraved? If we are, I wonder whether Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have settled for less money and written a book that did not delve into matters normally reserved for fiction and the transcripts of divorce proceedings. Peep shows are hardly ever worth the price of admission--a quarter? Fifty cents? I honestly don’t know; the last one I attended--other than the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which came free on CNN--was in the early 50’s, in smelly premises near Boston’s Scollay Square. The price of the current one--$28, minus such discounts as Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other chains will grant--will seem like highway robbery to the prurient reader the media have postulated: Senator Clinton has, in fact, written with commendable restraint and modesty.

Louis Begley’s seventh novel, Shipwreck (Knopf), will be published in September.

FRANCINE PROSE

Even those of us who have given up the losing battle against the misplaced modifier and the dangling participle still believe that certain rules of English grammar are not optional, and that their importance is not merely linguistic, but philosophical and moral. One of these is the rule that says that to put dialogue between quotation marks signifies (unless you’re writing fiction) that those words were spoken as written, and were transcribed directly from what we call real life. I’ve sometimes wondered if the increasingly common confusion about this simple relationship between truth and punctuation may be at the heart of some of the media’s current problems with journalistic ethics and accuracy.

It’s possible that, when Bill Clinton finally admitted to his affair with a White House intern, Hillary said, as she reports in Living History: “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?” And it’s possible that Bill replied: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.” It’s likely that they said something like that, but unlikely that they said that, exactly. For one thing, it’s very difficult to remember precisely what words we used in the past, unless we’ve uttered some fabulous bon mot. Which this is not. And it must be doubly hard to recreate the conversation that ensued when one’s husband, the President of the United States, suggested that Ken Starr might soon tell the world how Monica Lewinsky was encouraged to get acquainted with a cigar.

But someone felt that we needed to hear (not merely hear about) this historic exchange, and that to dramatize it--to borrow from the rhythms and speech patterns of the afternoon soaps--would help us to feel like a fly on the wall. Or, as Senator Clinton’s publishers must hope, one fly among millions on the wall. The result is that, reading the scene, you don’t have to be a writer to think that you could have written it yourself. Which can only add to the sense of déjà vu and anti-climax that (despite the advance publicity and the tantalizing promises of heartfelt, steamy, tell-all revelation) readers may wind up feeling about Living History.

Which is as it should be. Because now that we’re being routinely bombarded with so many big lies, it’s hard to get excited about the little lies and the little exposures. It’s just not as much fun as it used to be. Reading Living History feels like an exercise in a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that gets downright depressing as we try to imagine the equivalent we might get--but never will--from the current administration:

“I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: ‘What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?’”

"I think her sexuality is tainted with a lot of her own issues of safety and control," the husky, balding, bearded Mr. Sigerson said smoothly as he polished off a croque-monsieur. "I'm not saying she doesn't get off on the anality, but I think her pleasure is in the giving and getting. It's power, to give pleasure like that to someone else."

Anality? Power? Giving and getting ? At a moment in which weary members of the publishing food chain usually toss galleys of the latest "hot" novel onto a pile with a resigned sigh, Mr. Sigerson's book-coming out this month from the eminently literary Nan Talese-is raising more than eyebrows.

First there's Mr. Sigerson's singular path to the ranks of published fiction writers. He's a 46-year-old former record-industry big shot: a professional songwriter and musician who recorded two albums; a producer for Tori Amos and the Bangles; named, at age 33, the president of Polydor records, then president and chief executive of EMI and Chrysalis Records, where he broke acts like the Neptunes and D'Angelo, eventually ending up as the chairman of Island Records.

And second, there's his novel's sexually unfettered female protagonist: Will readers find Trish-a gorgeous, responsible London professional with a boundless sexual appetite and a fondness for … anality, who's capable of brain-teasing infidelities (are you cheating when you sleep with your husband, whose child you're pregnant with, after you've left him for another man?)-believable?

"I have to make one thing clear right up front," Mr. Sigerson said, his cornflower-blue eyes shining behind rimless oval glasses. "I love Trish! She's a decent person who's trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation." The idea that some readers might find Trish and her situation a little too far on the outré side hit a nerve. "Of course there are women like Trish! Thankfully, I'm not married to one, but we all knew them in college, for example," he said. "The idea that there aren't women who do those kinds of things is bizarre to me."

Discussing Trish's erotic repertoire, Mr. Sigerson grew reflective. "In the 70's, blowjobs were a big deal. Maybe we needed a new transgressive thing, and it's anal stuff, butt-fucking." Although, he pointed out, "there is no actual butt- fucking in my novel."

Whether Mr. Sigerson has pulled it all off will be for readers to decide when Faithful arrives in bookstores this month. There's no question it's an impressive debut, a cut above the workshopped snoozers that make up the majority of first novels these days. But will it catch on? Will it be the next In the Cut , the darkly sexy 1999 Susanna Moore novel (turned Jane Campion movie) that sold and sold in several editions, or another Rapture , Susan Minot's 2002 "blowjob novel" that went pffft ?

The book's fate may be a referendum of sorts on the ability of the current literary-fiction regime to pick a serious, well-written book that's also a commercial winner: Just days after Mr. Sigerson's agent, David Gernert, submitted the manuscript, Faithful was bid on by a trifecta of publishing powerhouses: Nan Talese at Doubleday, Gerald Howard at Broadway and Daniel Menaker, then at HarperCollins and now editor in chief of Random House.

The author chose to work with Ms. Talese because, he said, he had great conversations with her. "I offered Davitt a two-book contract, because I think he is a real writer," Ms. Talese said. "You sail along on the prose, and then it hits you that there are lots of other levels underneath what he's saying."

For Mr. Sigerson, the stakes are high in the way they can be only for someone who doesn't need the money. He's already done the worldly-success thing-the private planes, the hanging out with famous people. Now he's after something more exquisite, and much more elusive: the chance to be acknowledged as a legitimate artist. In a way, his position is all the more difficult after years of having the power himself to make or break artistic careers.

"When I look at the trajectory of my life," he said, "I was moving away from being the judged to being the judge. There was a security in that." (Later, he admitted he's been in psychoanalysis for the last three years: "three days a week, on the couch.")

When Mr. Sigerson gets on the subject of his writing, there's an unself-conscious glow about him. You have to love a novelist who talks sincerely about his characters like they're real.

"I was writing in my journal one day, and these people just appeared ," he said. "I go, 'I know, I think her name is … Trish!'" He is willing, however, to give his people some tough love, in particular the divorced parents: "If I could sit them down in a room, I'd give them a talking to! I mean, Trish did what she had to do, and I think she felt she took her medicine for it, but I don't feel at all it was the right thing for the child in the situation. She got a raw deal."

In stark contrast to the erotic and familial disarray of his characters, Davitt Sigerson lives with his wife and their two young daughters in apparent domestic bliss. They occupy the kind of spacious, immaculate Riverside Drive apartment that most fiction writers enter only when they're invited to a dinner party by their agent, or maybe their editor (if she happens to be married to a Skadden, Arps partner). It's furnished in low-key expensiveness-artfully mismatched upholstered dining chairs, cheerful throw pillows on subdued sofas, smallish modern paintings here and there on serene white walls. The place looks rigorously edited. On an afternoon in February, there wasn't a cliché in sight as a cook prepared the family's dinner-lamb stew, it smelled like. Outside an ample row of uncurtained windows, the half-frozen Hudson laid itself out in long, languid strips.

"I don't talk about money," Mr. Sigerson said, sitting back on a sofa to reluctantly chronicle those years as a music executive. He's what his analyst might call "well-defended": confident, sanguine, able to turn his potential minuses to his own advantage. As he crossed an ankle over a knee, his large belly hovered in front of him like a soft shield. "I am so done with the music business," he said. "It's all been fun. It was great and wonderful and made possible this stability. I know my family is secure. But in the end, it's just playing games with numbers."

Mr. Sigerson spent his early childhood on the Upper West Side, a block from where he now lives, and for elementary school went briefly to Hunter, then Dalton. When he was 13, his father-a science writer who founded magazines for doctors-sold the business, and the family moved to London. Mr. Sigerson, the only child of his parents' marriage (his father's fourth, his mother's second), attended St. Paul's and then Oxford, where he came back to London on weekends and made his way around the club scene, producing records and even doing a cover of an old O'Jays tune, "For the Love of Money," that became an underground hit.

"To see the dance floor at your club get flooded with people when your record comes on," Mr. Sigerson recalled, "you feel like you made a contribution to their psyche."

He had aspirations of making his own record, and eventually was signed for his first album, called Davitt Sigerson . In the tidy study of his apartment, Mr. Sigerson produced a copy with great embarrassment: The black-and-white cover image is a just barely recognizable version of the older man, a smooth-faced, sensual-lipped youth with a head of dark glossy hair.

"How red is my face?" he asked as he put the record on a turntable and turned the volume up loud enough that he had to yell to be heard. It wasn't bad-Mr. Sigerson sang with conviction, if not great vocal depth. It sounded like an undepressed Elliott Smith. You got the feeling the guy who wrote and sang these songs wouldn't take it all that hard if he didn't get the girl. And, in fact, he took it in stride when his albums didn't do well, Mr. Sigerson said. "I was really such an unlikely character to be doing this anyway. I just thought it would be neat to try."

Writing had always been a more comfortable fit for him. While he was still at Oxford, Mr. Sigerson submitted an article on spec to Black Music magazine, then became a regular contributor and found other places to publish his music journalism. It was all going swimmingly enough, but after Oxford he came back to New York. "I didn't want to become some American house-guest character," he said, "bouncing from country house to country house."

Then came the years of writing "weird rock songs" for bands like Kiss and Eddie Money ("I learned a lot from Gene Simmons," he said, primarily that "we don't laugh at our audience-they pay the bills"), then record producing, ("All of a sudden, everybody wanted me-I worked nonstop for 11 years"). Eventually, the lack of real control he had as a producer got to him. An incident involving someone at Atlantic foisting a drum machine and synthesizers onto the deliberately spare Tori Amos record he was working on became the last straw.

"My feeling was, it was an obscenity. I just thought, 'If these people don't get the Tori Amoses of the world, I have to have more control,'" he said. When he saw an opportunity to make a seemingly crazy power move, he took it.

In 1990, a friend arranged dinner for Mr. Sigerson with Alain Levy, then the head of Polygram, now at EMI Recorded Music. Ninety minutes into the dinner, Mr. Levy asked him if the friend who had arranged the dinner had a specific business purpose in mind.

Mr. Sigerson replied that he thought he might run one of Mr. Levy's labels.

According to Mr. Sigerson, Mr. Levy at first feigned surprise at his forwardness, then said, with a Gallic shrug and wave of his hand, "Eh, Polydor? You want to run Polydor?"

"I said, 'Sure, where do you want to go with it?'" Mr. Sigerson recalled. "And he said, 'I don't know-you make it what you want it to be.'"

Mr. Sigerson was 33 at the time, and this was his first real job.

From the start, he was able to adapt the ruthless reality of running a music company to the rounded edges of his own personality. His first move was to drop 19 of Polydor's 22 acts, but he was determined not to be seen as an ax-wielder.

"I dropped them on the basis of thinking, people deserve to be loved," Mr. Sigerson said. "You have to go into it with the belief that you can work for these people with passion."

All along in his music career, working with women seems to have been Mr. Sigerson's specialty. "When I produced the Bangles, their nickname for me was the Benevolent Manipulator," he said. He once tried to convince Susanna Hoffs, the Bangles' lead singer, to sing naked (though Mr. Sigerson was eager to point out that it was originally Ms. Hoffs' idea) by telling her that Olivia Newton-John had done it for him, which wasn't true. When Ms. Hoffs called Ms. Newton-John to ask her about it, the truth came out-but she did it anyway, Mr. Sigerson said. "It worked-she sang really well," he added.

Now, with the music business behind him, he will need to manipulate women in a different sort of way for his dream of being a writer with a real audience to come true. Because while records may get a boost from the buying power of adolescent boys, the vast majority of readers of literary fiction these days are women. Here may lie a roadblock for Mr. Sigerson, at least with Faithful : He may, in the end, love women-starting with that hot little number, Trish-a little too well for his own good as a writer. Male readers should find her a fun object of fantasy. ("If she's too drunk to fuck, you can fuck her. She likes you to get it in. She likes the taste of come.") But her uninhibited sexual virtuosity may play quite differently with women readers. (The secret of In the Cut , after all, was that the frumpy, utterly average female character got it on with the dangerously sexy cop, and so too, vicariously, could frumpy, utterly average women readers.)

In short, Mr. Sigerson may have made one of the few tactical errors in his charmed life so far by leaving out a comparably appealing male lust object. While he'll score points with women for the book's truly touching portrait of a divorced dad's anguish and devotion, Trish steals the book. It's perhaps an omen that Mr. Sigerson notes she has no close women friends.

Ms. Talese seemed to have registered the conundrum of Trish's sexual power as well. "The ones who really fall in love with the book are men. Women are made uncomfortable," she said. "And yet, women are readers …. "

One trusts, however, that while Mr. Sigerson is eager for Faithful to be embraced, he will not be deterred if it ends up where most novels end up these days: respectful mixed reviews, then remainder city. He's already overcome astoundingly steep odds to sit down at a desk every day and make a fiction writer of himself. Now he's at work on another novel, "with a whole new crew," he said of his next book's cast of characters. Already they've become happy fixtures in his life: "One day they just walked in the door and said, 'We're here! It's us!'"

Surely, they could not have chosen a more devoted author.

Last week, at a political rally, Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island told a gathering of Young Democrats in Washington, D.C.: "I don't need Bush's tax cut, I have never worked a [bleeping] day in my life." And when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz received a mild taunt from Al Franken at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, he responded with a simple, elegant, "[Bleep] you."

Snoop Dogg, the newly crowned king of television, jumps out of a pull-quote in Newsweek - Newsweek !-saying: "I guess I'm just a likable motherf--er."

Of course, sometimes the word is just the thing for little outbursts of temper, as when George W. Bush called Wall Street Journal reporter Al Hunt in 1992 and told him, "You [bleeping] son of a bitch. I saw what you wrote. We're not going to forget this." But lately, it's been saved for more casual dinner-table use, as in "Willie, I can't believe your [bleeping] report card!"

Note to the reader: Are we off page 1 yet? If we are, we might as well get on with saying what we mean:

It's the Summer of Fuck!

The door slams too loud, the waiter comes too late, the drinks are mixed too strong, the traffic's too bad on the L.I.E., the mother-in-law is coming, the Yanks are behind, the Mets are ahead, T-3 is good, The Hulk isn't. You stub your toe- fuck! You hear good news- fu-uhck! You hear amusing news: You're fucking kidding! You hear amazing news: No fucking way!

The sex act it used to so scandalously denote is barely conjured by the word any more; it's a linguistic tailbone, the vestige of a previous incarnation. It's the word that Superman would use for emphasis if he could have: What the fuck ! It's a stand-in for the black cloud that would rise above Charlie Brown's head in Peanuts : Fuck me ! But it's lost its bite, its Anglo-Saxon threat. And what it's gained in currency-and a new range of multi-expressiveness-it's lost in its former beautiful, lupine lethality.

Pardon our French, but-what the heck is going on?

Darned if we know. But the ascendance of the word expresses our topsy-turvy, mish-mash moment like nothing else. It's a non-stop cultural infusion in a culture pushed to the brink by infusion. Is our economy doing well, or terribly? Is your apartment the best investment you ever made, or a pitiful relic of a soon-to-burst bubble? Did we win the war, or not? Are we the luckiest nation on earth, or the most … fucked? If you've ever said, " Oh, fu-uck, honey ," then you know what we're talking about. Everything around us has been merged into one big sentimental glob-with a decided core of rage.

The roots of the word's new currency are everywhere. Musical artists like Eminem and Snoop Dogg, of course, can take a lot of credit; so can the dozens of rap and hip-hop groups, good and bad, who are downloaded by the fuck-happy masses. Ozzy Osbourne, likewise, also did his share. They are the family-values fuckers: Their language is street, but they're also perfectly sweet parents, family guys-perfect emissaries of the new usage of the word. Throwing "fuck" around skillfully, sharply, lovingly, these multicultural potty-mouthed dads show that you can express your inner rage and still be a good, concerned parent.

Fuck is au fait :

Customized versions of an "I fucked __" T-shirt (fill in the blank: Paris Hilton, Gisele, Anna Wintour, David Remnick … ) are flying out of Landing, a boutique on Wythe Street in Williamsburg, at $80 apiece. "Basically, they're commentary on social climbing and star-fucking," said the shirt's creator, Ken Courtney, 31, a Williamsburg artist. "They are the names that get fucked, that are overused by the media, as currency-like Matthew Barney. It's commentary more on us than on the people whose names are on the shirts. I call it name-fucking."

Mr. Courtney added that high-end boutiques have been talking to him about stocking the shirts. "The word 'fuck' is almost so honest that no one believes it," he said.

Fuck is young:

This week, for example, a barely five-foot-tall boy in a Red Sox cap was selecting comics at Alex's MVP on 89th Street between Second and Third avenues. "I'm going to camp soon, so my mom's letting me pick out a bunch of comics," he said. "Isn't that cool?" There was an assent that it was. "Yeah," said the kid. "It is pretty fucking sweet."

Fuck is old:

At a senior center on the Upper East Side the other day, social worker Jen Maybar had to break up a physical confrontation between two elder ladies, one age 98 and the other 65. When Ms. Maybar pulled the younger woman aside to explain that it was inappropriate to get in a 98-year-old's face, she was taken aback to hear the 65-year-old declare: "I don't give a fuck how old she is, she is gonna show me some respect!" Or, as 78-year-old Elaine Stritch toasted Liz Smith at the Drama League's annual benefit gala, "Fuck old age!"

Fuck is left: In language, if not in action, most of the Democratic party is right there with it.

Fuck is right: The President throws "fuck" around with the best of them. According to conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, George W. Bush is "a fan of 'fuck.' He's a 'fuck' fan. It's good, 'cause he's American. He's a fundamentally American man."

Fuck is happy:

" This is really, really fucking brilliant! " Bono yelled on live national television, on NBC in January 2003, as he bounded onstage to accept his award for best song at the Golden Globes. "We're the best fucking band on the planet!" There was no bleep. And people were so unsurprised, so inured, there was almost no protest.

Fuck is angry:

At the corner of 86th and Lexington, a woman in her 30's was hailing a cab. The cabbie slowed down. The woman tried to open the door. The cabbie kept driving.

The woman: "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

The cabbie: "What the fuck are you doing? I can't stop in a crosswalk like that!"

Fuck is grateful:

Have you picked up your "Thanks a fucking lot" notecards at Papyrus yet? They're on sale.

Fuck is friendly:

" Fuck you man ," began an e-mail that Jay Cocks, the screenwriter of Gangs of New York and The Age of Innocence , recently received. "He means it as a compliment," Mr. Cocks said. "It's a guy I bought some records from off eBay, and he said, 'I paid so much money for these and you got them so fucking cheap, I don't believe this. Thanks and good luck.'"

Fuck is witty:

Well, maybe not Noël Coward witty, or as witty as the first time the word was heard on television, when critic Kenneth Tynan said it live on the BBC in 1965. But dial the Nokia of Philip Stark, 30, a producer for That 70s Show , and you'll get this message: " Hi, you've reached Philip, please leave a message at the fucking beep and I'll call you back as soon as I can ."

"It beeps and they're like, 'Uhhh … hey … fuck! Hey, what the-?'" Mr. Stark said. "Producers call me and say, 'Fucking Stark, that's hilarious!'"

Do we know how to be entertained any more without fuck? Not in the movies, certainly, except in Finding Nemo . Downtown at the Public Theater, Fucking A closed in April-and there was, of course, last year's Shopping and Fucking . From the summer camps come stories of campers chanting the lyrics of 50 Cent and Eminem under the stars; to Madonna chiding file-sharers with "What the fuck do you think you're doing?", sparking the inevitable remixes; to the destination TV of the moment, the entire HBO line-up- Six Feet Under ("Fuck my legless grandmother"), The Sopranos ("What, no fucking ziti?"), Sex and the City ("Abso-fucking-lutely")-but exempting most of Nickelodeon, so far.

Get good enough with the word, and some people might see you as Presidential material. Cursing, after all, has been consistent with authority, masculinity, toughness and Presidential leadership from Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson through the White House tapes of Richard Nixon. Andrew Jackson was never taped, but one can guess. According to Mr. Carlson, a facility with profanity is a not-insignificant part of Mr. Bush's appeal. "Every American male over the age of 12 uses 'fuck' in daily conversation," Mr. Carlson said. "It didn't detract, in fact it added to my feelings for him. The fact that Gore reined his impulses in so tightly made me think less of him. It implies a trust-you're revealing something about yourself. It sort of suggests that he's an ordinary guy, a towel-snapper, and if you like towel snappers-and I do-it's good."

That can only be cheering news for Senator Hillary R. Clinton, who would definitely know her way around a Sopranos script. "Stay the fuck back, stay the fuck away from me!" the Senator reportedly yelled at a Secret Service agent.

Needless to say, the word sells. Capitalism has welcomed it like a long-lost prodigal son into branding: the French Connection's "FCUK" ad campaign refuses to go away, with a boppy "FCUKiki" layout in a recent New York Times Styles section. The MuchMusic USA Channel on Time Warner Cable is changing its name to Fuse, with a "Keep on fu**ing" marketing campaign. Urban Outfitters on Broadway in Soho has a display sign that reads: F*UCK TV, TAKE A HIKE. It's an ad for CD's that are meant to be a soundtrack for a New York walking tour.

Timothy Jay, a psycholinguist at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written four books on cursing, said that he credits the intrusion of video into quotidian life ( The Osbournes , etc.) with the infusion of a formerly forbidden four-letter word into the mainstream culture. "We're under observation more than ever before," he said on his way to a panel on censorship and the Internet ("a real gold mine for my research!"). "We've got cameras all over the place-TV goes everywhere. Now we can go down in the locker room and hear Greg Lloyd say: 'We're going to bring home the fucking Super Bowl,' whereas five years ago nobody did that-and believe me, the football players talked like that."

Philip Kaplan, 27, who founded Fuckedcompany.com-a Web site about corporations going under-in May 2000, thinks that "fuck" may be the legacy of the go-go 1990's crowd, of macho Wall Street/tech talk. "It shows you that this isn't run by a really big corporation," he said of his Web site's name, which has propelled him to regular spots on CNN. "It makes it cool."

What the four letters express best, according to Aaron Karo, 23, a stand-up comic who lives in the Gramercy area, is "exasperation." He said he uses it promiscuously, in his act and in his everyday life: "There's the war, the recession, everything sucks, and it just sums everything up nicely." Mr. Karo has found fortune in the word. He attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a monthly e-mail newsletter called "Ruminations on College Life," famously signing off each column with the phrase "Fuck me." After Simon & Schuster made it into a book (excising the F-word), he quit an investment-banking job and is in talks to do a sit-com.

"' Fuck me ' means so many different things," he said. "It means … there's nothing you can do about it. I use it even more so now since I don't have a 'real job' anymore …. Instead of saying 'Hmmmmm' when I'm thinking, I say 'Fuuuuckinnnnnnnn'.'

"I don't think fuck is the new damn ," said Mr. Karo. "I think it's the new the ."

Gosh.

How does our panel of professionals rate her performance?

JOHN UPDIKE

Senator Clinton is an excellent and thorough-going politician and not a novelist; her description of "the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience" of her life is nowhere as moving or human as the legalistic vignettes of furtive partial pleasures in the Starr Report. Her surprise at her husband's belated confession is indeed surprising, as if they had never quite met before. But I loved the sentence, "I hadn't decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President." Her citizenship is ardent.

John Updike's most recent novel is Seek My Face (Knopf).

ERICA JONG

In any campaign biography, the writer-or her ghost-solicits sympathy for the campaigner while pretending to be telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Living History is no different. Hillary Clinton's moment of maximum public sympathy arrived when she became the woman scorned, and she has no intention of letting us forget it. "This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life," she writes. "I was furious and getting more so by the second," she writes. "[H]is eyes filled with tears. He had betrayed the trust in our marriage and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach." With these soapy sentences, Hillary reminds us relentlessly of her instant of greatest P.R. glory, the moment she stopped being too brainy, too brilliant, too adamantine and became, in the tabloids, just another betrayed wife. How pathetic that she has to twang our heartstrings in this cheesy way. Hillary Clinton has changed the role of First Lady for all time. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, her mentor, she has proved that the First Lady can be more compelling and empathic than the President. The woman is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.

Erica Jong 's most recent novel is Sappho's Leap (W.W. Norton & Company).

LAURA MOORE

Dear Senator Clinton,

In my line of fiction, we call it the "black moment": the moment of crisis between the heroine and hero, when they discover that their love and trust are in jeopardy. You've done a great job, in Living History , of setting the scene for the key confession/confrontation, but if I may, I'd like to make a few suggestions to turn your story into a real "keeper" for your fans.

We need to feel your pain. The best romance novels wring every last drop of emotion as they expose the heartache of betrayal. Simply crying, yelling and saying you're furious won't make those pages turn and those readers' eyes moisten with tears of understanding and connection. You have to make us identify with you as a wife and lover. Let's see whether we can't open up this scene in the bedroom (terrific choice of setting, by the way) and let the reader share more fully in your thoughts, emotions and reactions when Bill drops the bomb.

My mind reeled from the blow of his softly stammered words. Stunned, I stared uncomprehending. A wave of dizziness assailed me and I thought I might be sick. Fighting against the sudden nausea, my fingers clutched at the bed sheets. A distant region of my brain registered the fact that here I was in our bed, the one Bill and I had shared countless nights, his warm, wonderfully familiar body pressed against mine. It had been a place of joy and refuge where we had lain and whispered dreams in the dark. Now it was horribly transformed into an icy field of lies. As though of their own accord, my hands released their hold to wrap themselves protectively about me as I shivered from the tears coursing down my cheeks, from the awful chill invading my heart. A scream of pain rose up inside me, and yet all I managed was a broken whisper. "Why, Bill, why? Why did you lie to me?"

He just stood there, his head lowered, unable to meet my eye, his shoulders slumped, looking like a sullen, naughty child. Perhaps I should thank Bill for that, for at that moment as I stared at him, rage hot and pure began coursing through my veins, spreading until it consumed every atom of my being. Bill must have sensed it, for he raised his head, his red-rimmed eyes finally meeting mine. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea."

Now, obviously we can't have Bill explaining too much here. That would take away from your story-and besides, your book can be a great marketing teaser so that next year we'll all rush out and buy Bill's take on the bedroom scene-but there's one more thing I feel could really enrich the emotional impact of the scene: forgiveness. Even the merest hint of it allows your reader to hope that maybe there's some way to get past this darkest moment of your marriage and your love. As you know, this is a challenging bit of writing, because you'll have to convince us that you found something redeemable in Bill, something worth saving in your relationship. But let's give it a shot. Let's try and open the door of your heart a crack, because, after all, that's what you did manage to do.

"I believed in you, Bill. We all believed in you." My throat, raw from pain, closed tight and I was unable to continue. I shut my eyes in despair. I couldn't bear to look at him. Not now, maybe never.

I heard the sound of his feet moving closer, the heavy muffled thud of his knees hitting the carpet as he dropped down next to the bed. "Hill …. " His whisper was an agonized plea. "Please, please, I need you. Now more than ever." I felt his head drop, its weight resting heavy against my thigh. I opened my eyes, and involuntarily my hand reached out, a feather brushing against his graying hair.

Unchecked tears flowed down his cheeks as he gazed at me. "You've always been strong where I was weak. Be strong for me now, Hillary …. If not for me, then for Chelsea…."

Chelsea. The one truly wonderful thing our marriage had given us. Chelsea, our pride and joy. How this sordid affair would hurt her, a pain a thousand times greater than my own. "I don't know, Bill. I don't know if I can be that strong …. "

From outside the bedroom door, our dog, Buddy, gave a plaintive whine of distress.

I think we'll leave the suggestions at that. I'm sure you've got the gist. In closing, please let me add that I hope we'll have you and President Clinton back in the White House in 2008. The material W. is providing is far too scary to contemplate.

With warmest regards,

Laura Moore

Laura Moore's latest contemporary romance novel, Night Swimming (Ballantine), was published in May.

DAVID GATES

This doesn't feel to me like the time to be making sport of Hillary Clinton-not when the far right, having essentially engineered a coup d'état, is busily reinventing America as a theocratic cloud-cuckooland, with suicidal economic, social and environmental policies and a mean streak so wide it would take a B-52 hours to fly across it, and with the mouth-breathing millions cheering them on. I'm a lot less dainty than I used to be when I couldn't bring myself to vote for a sellout like her husband. So I'm not the guy to give her book the ridicule it might deserve in better days.

Living History isn't an X-ray self-portrait, but a belated-or a be-earlied-campaign autobiography, as well as a money-making product calculated to save her hours and hours of paid speechifying. Since one recurring theme is her tendency to put her supposedly innocent foot in her mouth-"tea and cookies," "Tammy Wynette," "vast right-wing conspiracy"-it's understandable, maybe even commendable, that the book has been thoroughly gaffe-proofed, apparently with the help of the speechwriters, editors and friends whom she thanks in her copious acknowledgments. If her goal was to include nothing that might come back to bite her in the ass, she's done just fine. For instance, she doesn't come right out and say that if Ken Starr hadn't distracted the White House and Congress with the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, the Sept. 11 attacks would never have happened. But she sure lets you know it, by constantly juxtaposing President Clinton's prescient worries about Osama bin Laden with the Republican right's jihad against Mr. Clinton. It sounds a little sketchy, but I'm not dead sure she's wrong.

If I'd been her editor, I would have cut the sentence where she says: "My own approval rating was nearing an all-time high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic." And I might have urged her to lose the namedroppy stuff, where Stevie Wonder comes and sings her a song he just wrote about forgiveness, and Walter Cronkite takes Bill and Hill for a sail, and the Dalai Lama puts in his two cents. At Davos, she runs into Elie Wiesel and the missus, and he asks her, "What is wrong with America? Why are they doing this?" She says, "I don't know, Elie." Icky as this is, though, she undoubtedly was on a first-name basis with Elie and Stevie and Walt and Dalai. And they undoubtedly were nice to her. So what's she supposed to do, not say so?

About Mr. Clinton's sexual betrayals-the plural is mine, not hers-she's as forthcoming as you could reasonably expect. Her only comment on Gennifer Flowers' allegation that she'd had a long affair with Mr. Clinton is: "He told me it wasn't true." (End of sentence. End of paragraph. No halfway intelligent reader could miss the implication.) Similarly, she says a couple of times that her husband will have to give us his own explanation for what the hell he was thinking when he got involved with Ms. Lewinsky. And while Bill and Hillary went into marriage counseling after the affair became public, Hillary never tells us specifically what the upshot was-if there was a specific upshot-or even if they started sleeping in the same room again. Well, it's none of our business, really, and left to herself-to the extent any politician has a self-she might have told us so. But without at least dipping a toe into this swamp, she wouldn't have had a promotable book or, perhaps, a political career beyond the Senate. Which, I have to say, I hope she's got her beady eye on. Since she had to deal with the mess somehow, she's done a reasonably deft job of giving away not much of anything we didn't know. Did anybody, for instance, think she wasn't angry with Mr. Clinton? Would anyone have respect for her if she hadn't been? As rawly confessional as Living History is designed to seem, it's an artifact crafted by a politician and her team, and she doesn't give up a damn thing she didn't have to. Would you?

David Gates is the author of two novels and, most recently, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Vintage Books).

VINCE PASSARO

It's a decent bet that almost every day that Monica Lewinsky went down on Bill Clinton, bombs dropped somewhere in Iraq-and while he hardly ever got to climax, the bombs frequently did. Now that Hillary has spilled "all," that's one of many facts you won't see discussed in the stupefying reporting about her book. Nor, it occurred to me today while looking over "August 1998," the curiously affectless chapter on her "personal agony" that was much reported on after it was leaked to the Associated Press last week, are we going to be enlightened as to why Hillary voted in favor of our spectacularly mendacious little war in the Fertile Crescent, either.

All we get are her tears over the casual infidelities of a man who, by most credible accounts, hasn't kept it in his pants since the diapers came off.

Here's a news item for the media, for Simon & Schuster, and for whatever bizarre, salacious readership leads the publisher to believe this book needed a first print run of a million copies: It wasn't the Clintons' genitals that were so troubling, it was their brains.

But, of course, there's a lot of political cover in pointing our attention groin-ward. Perhaps that's why her book reads so much like the establishing scenes in a bad porn video.

August 1998 is when Bill Clinton testified to a grand jury via video what he then had to announce to the nation: He'd had a little action in the Oval Office. Hillary kindly reminds us that (just by coincidence, mind), "within hours of his statement about his personal transgression, the United States would launch a missile strike against one of Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, at a time when our intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top lieutenants would be there."

This little arrangement, in which dire national-security requirements dovetail so perfectly with the political needs of a desperately underclad emperor, feels kind of familiar, doesn't it? But then, that's not an aspect of Hillary's now-famous chapter-the "personal revelation" of her "agony" (as opposed to the agony of so many others)-that we care to discuss much.

Vince Passaro's first novel was Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster).

JENNIFER EGAN

Reading Hillary Clinton reminds me of how hard it is to pull off climactic, emotionally charged scenes without lapsing into cliché. Of course, there is frisson in the very idea of being secreted past the bedroom door to witness the moment when her husband, the President, admitted to her that he had fooled around with Monica L. after months of denying it. But the language Senator Clinton uses to render this encounter veers between legalese ("there had been an inappropriate intimacy") to familiar prose shorthand for heightened emotional states ("Gulping for air"; "I was furious and getting more so by the second"; "I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged … ").

Clichés are a kind of literary Esperanto, recognizable to everyone in a vague, general way. Take out the names, and just about anyone could have written this stuff about anyone. That's why Ms. Clinton's answer to another much-pondered question back in 1998-how does Hillary feel about Bill now?-is so weirdly disappointing: "As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck." The cliché blocks the gritty specificity of what went on between these two particular people; it actually obscures it. Which may be the point. Does she really want millions of readers to know how she felt when her husband confessed to yet another infidelity-one that might cost him his Presidency? I wouldn't.

As a writer, I try to look at clichés as a starting point. Early drafts of my work are lousy with them, in the same way that they creep into (cliché) so much spoken language without our even noticing. In the end, I try to isolate each one and ask myself: What exactly is this standing in for? The answers are usually interesting. I'd love to know Hillary Clinton's.

Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories.

LOUIS BEGLEY

We live in a decadent era that grows uglier by the minute. The spectacle of the media salivating in gluttonous anticipation of Senator Clinton's telling how she learnt from her husband the "truth" about Monica has been one more painful and shaming lesson in the abasement of the American public's taste as the media and publishers perceive it. Is it true that Hillary Clinton needed to let the entire world into her bedroom to justify an $8 million book contract? She had, after all, other useful and interesting information to impart, and she is an engaging and sometimes deeply moving figure. I readily imagine Kenneth Starr, Orrin Hatch, Tom DeLay and the other stalwarts of the great Presidential peep show in their viewing booths, shifting eagerly from foot to foot, ready to climax as Hillary and Bill undress. But are the rest of us just as depraved? If we are, I wonder whether Hillary Clinton shouldn't have settled for less money and written a book that did not delve into matters normally reserved for fiction and the transcripts of divorce proceedings. Peep shows are hardly ever worth the price of admission-a quarter? Fifty cents? I honestly don't know; the last one I attended-other than the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which came free on CNN-was in the early 50's, in smelly premises near Boston's Scollay Square. The price of the current one-$28, minus such discounts as Barnes & Noble, Amazon and other chains will grant-will seem like highway robbery to the prurient reader the media have postulated: Sen. Clinton has, in fact, written with commendable restraint and modesty.

Louis Begley's seventh novel, Shipwreck (Knopf), will be published in September.

FRANCINE PROSE

Even those of us who have given up the losing battle against the misplaced modifier and the dangling participle still believe that certain rules of English grammar are not optional, and that their importance is not merely linguistic, but philosophical and moral. One of these is the rule that says that to put dialogue between quotation marks signifies (unless you're writing fiction) that those words were spoken as written, and were transcribed directly from what we call real life. I've sometimes wondered if the increasingly common confusion about this simple relationship between truth and punctuation may be at the heart of some of the media's current problems with journalistic ethics and accuracy.

It's possible that, when Bill Clinton finally admitted to his affair with a White House intern, Hillary said, as she reports in Living History : "What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?" And it's possible that Bill replied: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea." It's likely that they said something like that, but unlikely that they said that, exactly. For one thing, it's very difficult to remember precisely what words we used in the past, unless we've uttered some fabulous bon mot. Which this is not. And it must be doubly hard to recreate the conversation that ensued when one's husband, the President of the United States, suggested that Ken Starr might soon tell the world how Monica Lewinsky was encouraged to get acquainted with a cigar.

But someone felt that we needed to hear (not merely hear about) this historic exchange, and that to dramatize it-to borrow from the rhythms and speech patterns of the afternoon soaps-would help us to feel like a fly on the wall. Or, as Senator Clinton's publishers must hope, one fly among millions on the wall. The result is that, reading the scene, you don't have to be a writer to think that you could have written it yourself. Which can only add to the sense of déjà vu and anti-climax that (despite the advance publicity and the tantalizing promises of heartfelt, steamy, tell-all revelation) readers may wind up feeling about Living History .

Which is as it should be. Because now that we're being routinely bombarded with so many big lies, it's hard to get excited about the little lies and the little exposures. It's just not as much fun as it used to be. Reading Living History feels like an exercise in a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that gets downright depressing as we try to imagine the equivalent we might get-but never will-from the current administration:

"I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: 'What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'"

Into a culture jammed with strenuously creative strategies for marrying off its unwed citizens-from Married By America to the Defense of Marriage Act-comes the political scientist Andrew Hacker to shut down the party with Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women . Mr. Hacker, the author of the influential Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal , has surveyed the marital landscape, crunched the numbers and come to a sobering conclusion: The institution is not just in bad shape, it's doomed. Men and women, for aeons thought to be inevitable partners in life's most vital pas de deux, can barely stand each other's company these days, let alone tough out a union over the long haul. Current "tensions and recriminations" are bound to grow, Mr. Hacker believes, making till-death-do-us-part an increasingly unlikely scenario.

The causes are familiar: We've changed; compared to our grandparents, we're less willing to sacrifice our individuality to a larger whole. But mostly it's women who are different, Mr. Hacker reports. No longer lagging so far behind in status and power, able to support themselves financially and willing to raise children without fathers, women are less and less inclined to stay married when they're not emotionally satisfied-and most women can barely get their husbands to talk to them. That is, if they can even find a husband; status and power tend to make women less attractive to the kind of men they'd be willing to marry. But while women have it bad, in Mr. Hacker's universe, men are actually the biggest losers in the divorce game. They've always been more satisfied with married life because they're not looking for intellectual companionship or emotional affinity. It's mostly women who file for divorce.

There's no hand-wringing or finger-wagging here-just blunt information about our misguided determination to get married. That's where the problems start. When it comes to marriage, in Mr. Hacker's view, ignorance really is bliss, at least for a little while. "Scrutinize a woman and a man, both of whom are marriage-ready, where one is plighting a troth and the other is encouraging that overture. Even if they have been together for some time, they still know little about each other, because they are in a milieu where emotions eclipse reality."

Reality, of course, is our stubbornly high divorce rate. Mr. Hacker is oddly wooden as a social critic, given to random pop-culture references and awkward phrasing, but he's a pleasure to survey statistics with. All on their own, the numbers he's assembled give more insight into the state of our unions than any 10 books by the earnest table-pounders who usually wind up writing about matters matrimonial. You could spend a long time, for example, contemplating "States of Divorce," a table of the number of divorces per 1,000 marriages in any given year for the 45 states that release their divorce figures (minus Nevada, since over half of its marriages involve out-of-state couples).

Coming in first and second are New Hampshire and West Virginia, with a mind-boggling 959 and 795 divorces per 1,000 marriages, respectively. Is it something about mountains and secluded valleys? You'll be tickled to hear that in the Bible Belt, the divorce rate is higher than in godless New York: Our 395 per 1,000 looks like a shy younger cousin to Kentucky's licentious 506 or Alabama's blowsy 527. And guess what? You really would be much, much happier if you ditched it all, moved to Hawaii and married a surfer. In the Aloha State, there are only a minuscule 231 divorces per 1,000 marriages, by far the lowest rate in the nation.

Mr. Hacker's analysis of the new "cultural divide" between the sexes is the meat of Mismatch . Clearly he's on to something, though too much of his book seems like padding, as if he were straining to find material to illustrate his points, and his evidence for a growing gender split is often bizarrely anecdotal. "[L]ook at the visitors in an art museum," he suggests. "On weekdays, most will be women by themselves or in pairs. On weekends, when there are more couples, many of the men seem to be there under duress, glancing furtively at their watches and wondering if they are nearing the exit."

He's on firmer ground when he sticks to numbers. He finds ingenious ways of showing that while men still appear to be ruling the world, their star is in serious eclipse. More to the point, they're lagging behind women in ways that bode ill for relations between the sexes. Only 43 percent of bachelors' degrees go to men these days, for example, meaning that women college graduates will find a "shortfall of their male cultural peers" as potential mates. And while it's true that women's wages continue to be less than men's-in 2000, women made $733 for every $1,000 men made-and that "in almost every occupation they have entered, from neurosurgery to investment banking, at mid-career women still have not advanced as far as men," the percentage of women within professions like college teaching, medicine and law is ballooning.

Mr. Hacker's fascinating, and of course controversial, point is this: Not only are women not benefiting much economically from these gains (in nearly every case, the entrance of large numbers of women into a profession brings a corresponding decline in its prestige and pay scale), they're also making it less likely that they'll find true love: With their every victory in the workplace, more eligible men slide down the class and education scale. The consequence is that men are slowly giving up nearly everything: Porn substitutes for romance; the sports bar stands in for family life; drudgery takes the place of ambition. And forget about fatherhood. Men, Mr. Hacker maintains, "feel less compelled to accept parental duties once assigned to their sex." Single motherhood is on the rise as men relinquish the raising of children to these newly confident, competent, culturally superior women.

So should men just accept the trend and abandon all hope, while women enjoy their Pyrrhic victory? Well, no. Mr. Hacker's frank pessimism is appealing in an age of frenzied marriage hype, but the curmudgeon does allow for a ray or two of hope, if you look creatively at some of his findings. Although fewer African-Americans than whites are married, those marriages tend not to follow the white economic model of a higher-earning, more educated man and a relatively dependent woman-a trend that whites will eventually have to follow. Professional white women, that is, will have to broaden their romantic horizons. In Europe, meanwhile, more and more stable middle-class couples are becoming parents without getting married, which means that European marriage and divorce statistics tell us less and less about what's going on over there between the sexes . There are some statistics you just can't snuggle up to.

We all find our own ways into tragedy. In the weeks after 9/11, I heard a lot of "Have you been down there yet?" I hadn't. But every morning on my way to work, I braced myself as the No. 1 train made its way toward the Cortlandt Street subway stop. This was my private ritual. As the train slowed and entered the station, I would crane my neck to take it all in. The darkened token booth. The piles of rubble beyond the turnstiles, spilling down the stairs. Bright orange tape making giant X's between the columns on the edge of the platform. The train moved through the station at a funeral pace.

Over the weeks, I noted changes. A sign went up saying "Do Not Open Doors," positioned where the conductor's car would have stopped, and the rubble gradually disappeared. In truth, there wasn't much to see in the Cortlandt Street station, but I suppose that was the point. I absorbed all there was, and then we were back in the blackness of the tunnel, where I felt a weird relief, embraced again by a void New Yorkers find routine.

A year later, I still haven't been to Ground Zero. When I imagine going there, I experience a kind of panic, a fear of my own confusion. I worry I won't know what it is I want to see, or how to decide what to rest my eyes on.

When the books about 9/11 started arriving at my office-over 100 have been published so far-I found myself avoiding the ones about what happened in New York. Instead, I picked up the book about the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, Jere Longman's Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 & the Passengers & Crew Who Fought Back .

Flight 93 has become my new Cortlandt Street station. The event has a clear narrative shape, and it's of manageable size. Mr. Longman pieces together what happened on the plane that morning in a measured voice that seems at first oddly flat, but gathers resonance. It steadies us as we confront a chaotic, horrific episode.

Among the Heroes has the combined appeal of a suspense novel, a sermon and an issue of People magazine. I'd even say it achieves a kind of quasi-literary power: There's a certain amount we can learn about what happened aboard that plane, and what we learn sheds light on such abstractions as courage, community and the human spirit. But even as Mr. Longman patiently combs through the details, the definitive story remains just out of our reach. It invites us to wonder what exactly went on in those last moments, what kind of struggle the passengers put up, what the details of their plan were and which of them played what role, and how close they came to achieving their extraordinary coup over the hijackers.

Mr. Longman, a reporter for The New York Times , was able to interview the families of all but one of the 40 passengers and crew members, and he weaves capsule biographies together with the memories of family members telling how the passengers ended up on that flight-at least 15 of them were booked on it at the last minute-or how they got to the airport that morning. Some of the family members describe how they found out, minute by minute, what was happening, or how they reacted to the news that someone they loved was on board. Several family members recounted, word for word, their final phone conversations. Mr. Longman also presents a necessarily sketchy narrative of the final moments of the plane, gleaned from phone calls the passengers and crew made and from the cockpit audiotapes that the F.B.I. eventually let the families listen to. As the crash nears, he shows us the view from the ground, first through the eyes of stunned witnesses and then through the figure of the Shanksville, Penn., county coroner, whose work at the crash site continued until just before Christmas.

The 40 people hijacked on Flight 93 were a random group of ordinary Americans, and yet it's hard not to see them as almost bizarrely well-suited to the life-or-death situation they faced. It's not too much of a strain to imagine them succeeding in taking back the plane from the terrorists. There was a former national collegiate judo champion and several others who had practiced martial arts. There was a rugby player, a former cop and a federal agent trained in close-quarter fighting. There was even an air-traffic controller and a licensed pilot who could have landed the plane. As a group, they were also an almost perfectly diverse slice of America, a guaranteed pull at the patriotic heartstrings: They were men and women, young and old, white, black, Latino and Asian; they were gay and straight, married and single; there was even an advocate for the disabled.

It would've been easy to present a soft-focus portrait of these brave, doomed people, but Mr. Longman wisely interjects some jarring elements. He describes, for example, the animosity that developed between some of the families in the aftermath of 9/11, notably one group who felt that Lisa Beamer, the wife of Todd Beamer, was grabbing too much of the spotlight for herself, making her husband look like the only hero. But then Mr. Longman turns our attention back to the ways in which the families found solace. Here's what some of them did, and what I did, too, as I read Among the Heroes : form a mental image of the final moments of Flight 93-and along with the terror, picture dignity, humanity and, perhaps improbably, hope.

Maria Russo is a senior editor at The Observer .