"Home." (Courtesy Knopf)

Home (Knopf, 160 pp., $24.00) Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, is about the ironically named Frank Money (he doesn’t have any), an embittered, alcoholic veteran of the Korean War who travels south through segregated America to return to Lotus, Ga., the “home” of the book’s title, where “there [is] no future, just long stretches of killing time.”  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the description of Lotus could also serve as an account of the island occupied by Homer’s lotus-eaters. For more than four decades, Ms. Morrison’s fiction has been populated by ghosts and monsters—both real and metaphorical. She turns to the recent past, thereby conjuring the very distant past, in order to communicate something people don’t know about the present. When it is successful, her writing has a sense of myth.

The Odysseus of Home, Frank, makes his journey in order to save his ailing sister from an archetypically evil employer rather than rescue his wife from a throng of sexually frustrated suitors, but Ms. Morrison is most certainly channeling The Odyssey’s familiar premise. As America’s most celebrated writer—she is a Nobel laureate (the only American in 20 years and the first black woman ever to earn such an honor), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and, most recently, the Presidential Medal of Freedom—she has more than earned whatever subtle revision of the Western canon she’d like to make, but unfortunately, Home—which is just under 150 pages with very wide margins—falls short of its epic aspirations, coming across as simultaneously overwritten and unfinished.

The story begins with Frank restrained in a hospital bed, feigning sleep so that the orderlies will loosen his wrist straps. He’s received a letter about his sister that reads, simply, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” We do not yet know who wrote the letter or what’s wrong with Frank’s sister (or even what her name is). In time, we discover that she is called Cee, and that she has taken a job with a Dr. Beauregard Scott—“Dr. Beau”—a eugenicist who likes to hire childless young black women in order to perform sexual experiments on them, and that the letter was written by Sarah, an older assistant employed by Dr. Beau.

“In time” is putting it lightly; it takes most of the novel to learn all of this. One of Ms. Morrison’s great strengths as a novelist is how she assumes that her readers are as smart as she is, and that they’ll go along with her on a story that is, at least initially, entirely opaque. Home, however, is too often stopped dead in its tracks by awkward narrative devices. The book, which is predominantly written in the third person, is interspersed with first-person chapters printed in italicized script. We learn that the “I” in these sections is Frank, and that he’s talking to Ms. Morrison’s stand-in, some anonymous presence—“you”—who is writing his story. In the first of these sections, the one that opens the novel, he describes sneaking into a farm in Georgia with his sister, where they admire a group of horses standing on their hind legs “like men.” The image is captivating, if less poignant than Ms. Morrison seems to believe (she employs the phrase “they stood like men” several times in this chapter), but the scene quickly becomes violent as the men accompanying the horses come into view, stuffing a body into a shallow grave:

One foot stuck up over the edge and quivered, as though it could get out, as though with a little effort it could break through the dirt being shoveled in. We could not see the faces of the men doing the burying, only their trousers; but we saw the edge of a spade drive the jerking foot down to join the rest of itself.

The casual violence of this passage is as strong and unsettling as anything Ms. Morrison has written, but however fascinating her cold detachment might be here, it is spoiled by the contrived device of Frank talking directly to the author: “Since you’re set on telling my story, whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men.” Frank’s interjections become increasingly disruptive as the novel goes on, eventually taking on the form of a kind of self-handicap on Ms. Morrison’s part, as though the shortcomings of her novel were intentional, all part of the stylistic game she’s playing with the reader through the metafictional ruminations of Frank. At one point, as Frank sits behind the “whites only” section on a passenger train that is stopped at a grocery, the store’s owners kick out one of the black passengers and beat him as his wife tries to intervene. The third-person narrator says that Frank believes the man will later beat his wife because her attempts to help only bruised his ego further. First-person Frank cuts in, saying, “I don’t think you know much about love. Or me.” This postmodern planting of the seeds of doubt in the narrator’s reliability only weakens the story and steals away its momentum.

Self-guarding and heavy-handedness are rare for Ms. Morrison; her work is predominantly about balance. Here she is in a 1987 interview with the New York Times, published just after the release of her fifth novel, Beloved: “There are certain emotions that are useful for the construction of a text and some are too small. Anger is too tiny an emotion to use when you’re writing, and compassion is too sloppy. Almost everything that makes you want to write, or feel like writing, is not useful in the act of writing. So it’s the mediation between those two states, the compulsion and all those feelings, that make you compelled.’’

With Frank constantly breaking in, it is like Ms. Morrison is battling with the hero of her own story (Ms. Morrison’s writing was, in fact, disrupted in real life by the death of her son Slade, to whom the book is dedicated). In the longest of Frank’s first-person interludes, he wrests control of the writing completely. This section contains the most detailed description of the war that haunts Frank throughout the novel. Still, that description is hardly evocative of anything: “Korea,” Frank says. “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it. First let me tell you about cold. I mean cold. More than freezing, Korea cold hurts, clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off.”

I get what she’s doing here, privileging the sheer violence of the place over its physical attributes, but landscape description has always been one of Ms. Morrison’s greatest strengths as a novelist. Consider her portrait of New York, from 1992’s Jazz:

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep.

The writing is so passionate and playful, the narrator is literally cut off by an excited hiccup. Compare that to this passage about Frank’s homecoming:

There were no sidewalks, but every frontyard and backyard sported flowers protecting vegetables from disease and predators—marigolds, nasturtiums, dahlias. Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue. Had these trees always been this deep, deep green? 

Like Whitman, Ms. Morrison approaches pastoral imagery through the composition of lists, creating a kind of fugue of objects, associations, adjectives and people. But here, instead of enacting the environment she describes, she simply rattles off the names of flowers.

If Ms. Morrison’s writing does not possess its usual force, worse is that there are characters who serve no real purpose. Mike and Stuff, Frank’s war buddies, are almost comically underdeveloped, only referred to as dying bodies in a battlefield. Frank’s lover Lily, whom he leaves in order to find his sister, is mostly glossed over through broad explanations like “When he woke up with her, his first thought was not the welcome sting of whiskey,” and the occasional line describing their early days together as “glorious.” We can infer that the sex was good because the one time it is mentioned we learn that Frank refers to their lovemaking as “entering the kingdom between her legs.” No more detail is offered. Compare that to the ease with which Morrison has, in the past, covered the arc of a relationship in a few short paragraphs, or, as with the collapse of the marriage of Ruth and Macon Dead in 1977’s Song of Solomon, a single sentence:

Fifteen years of regret at not having a son had become the bitterness of finally having one in the most revolting circumstances. 

“Revolting circumstances,” a melancholy image simply allowed to simmer in the reader’s mind, is as subtle and alluring a phrase as “kingdom between her legs” is crude.

That the breakup of Lily and Frank was “more of a stutter than a single eruption” just doesn’t make for very good reading. He leaves her to go find his sister, choosing “not to think of this trip as a breakup. A pause he hoped.” We don’t see Lily again.

Dr. Beau, Cee’s employer, introduces a certain amount of tension as the kind of eerie villain—both misanthropic and pitiable—that Ms. Morrison is so good at writing (Guitar from Song of Solomon, Cholly from The Bluest Eye), but the final confrontation between him and Frank is so lacking in urgency that it makes the central conflict of the novel—preventing Cee’s death—anticlimactic. After spending the novel traveling, Frank simply walks into the doctor’s office, snatches up his sister and walks out:

Sarah and the doctor stood locked in an undecipherable stare. As Frank passed around them with his motionless burden, Dr. Beau cast him a look of anger-shaded relief. No theft. No violence. No harm. Just the kidnapping of an employee he could easily replace.

I found myself asking a question I never thought would come to mind with Ms. Morrison’s fiction: what’s the point?

mmiller@observer.com

Mr. Robbins. Not pictured: the Feelies t-shirt. (Photo by Robert Baird)

Poets are burdened with a certain expectation: that they will live out their lives not merely as poets but also as The Poet—that tweed jacket-wearing, squinty-eyed creature with mouth curled into a reflective scowl, prone to tuberculosis and self-seriousness. Michael Robbins, whose first book has just been released by Penguin, does not fit this model. The Poet should not wear a black Feelies T-shirt with a white deodorant streak across the stomach. He should not name his first collection after a campy science fiction horror franchise (Alien vs. Predator). Probably, he should not be a germaphobe who carries around a small bottle of hand sanitizer that he uses compulsively after human contact. The Poet might have a tattoo of lines from Yeats on his forearm, but when asked about it, he should not say, “I don’t even remember it. There was this girl … I was 22 … I don’t want to talk about it.”

Mr. Robbins is not a typical poet. When the title poem of his book first appeared in the New Yorker in 2009, it caused a small sensation, even though the press could normally care less about poetry. Mr. Robbins was unknown at the time (he did not even have a press photo), but “Alien vs. Predator” is self-assured, unforgiving and hilarious:

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.

We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s

Berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys

For a living, you’d pray for me, too

I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

It is something between the New York School and a frustrated, well-read preschooler, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book. There is no strict structure. His disregard for simple meter is heightened by the irregular rhymes. Sometimes he will rhyme in the usual way, focusing on the final syllables of a line (“too” and “glue”), other times he will focus on an enjambment (“jerk” and “berserk”), which—despite its irregularity—actually softens the normally awkward rhythm that results from one line spilling over into the next, creating the illusion of a more formal structure than is actually the case (that his poems are almost always arranged into four- or five-line stanzas strengthens this facade as well). Then there is the subject matter. There is an “I” behind these words who finds more Romance with a capital “R” in the fluorescent glow of the Best Buy than in nature itself (“that elk is such a dick,” goes one line). With “Alien vs. Predator” Mr. Robbins had taken poetry indoors, and inside the head of the frustrated suburban loser. His work eschews the outside world for a stack of records and trashy television (T. Rex, Ghostface Killah, Xbox and Meerkat Manor all make appearances in the book). If the poem that gave the book its name hinted at the arrival of a new kind of poet—one whose obsession with contemporary pop culture might even have crossover potential—this excellent debut delivers on that promise.

Mr. Robbins, 40, was born in Topeka, Kansas. When he was five, his parents divorced and he moved with his father and stepmother to Colorado, but regularly visited his grandparents in a suburb outside Wichita called Rose Hill—“not even a 7-Eleven, like a Quik Mart, a gas station, a cheap little grocery store and a video store, and that was it,” he said in an interview last week in Washington Square Park. The settings of his poems are towns that could be off any highway exit in America, populated by Pizza Huts and American Apparel catalogs and lit by the glow of television sets playing CSI: Miami. The poems are haunted by these banal images even as they poke fun at them. In “Modern Love,” the suburban ephemera is the subject of nearly every line, the raison d’être for the poem’s existence that also serves as a blatant interruption, creating a choppy rhythm: “I turn on Shark Week, plan a killing spree./I’m all stocked up on Theraflu.//I love the word chum. By Kinko’s early light,/the Korean children say swim, swam, swum.”

These images, equal parts muse and hindrance, come across like an irresistible assault. Mr. Robbins himself speaks gravely about the distractions that often provide fodder for his writing.

“There are some days where I just have to watch episodes of Justified all day,” he said. “I get depressed and I can’t do much at all but sort of watch TV or read some trashy novel. Sometimes it just happens and I wake up and know I’m gonna write a poem that day.”

In 2007, while at the University of Chicago working on his PhD dissertation on subjectivity in the work of Paul Muldoon, Frederick Seidel, Jennifer Moxley and Allen Grossman, Mr. Robbins wrote to Mr. Muldoon about a line from his long poem “Yarrow:” “the deelawg was not so much an earwig, I suspect, as a clock.” Mr. Robbins did not know what “deelawg” meant and could not find a definition anywhere. Mr. Muldoon wrote back explaining the word was Hiberno English meaning “a clock in the beetle sense.” Mr. Robbins asked if he could send him some poems. When he did, he remembers Mr. Muldoon commenting, “These are smart in all the right ways.” When Mr. Muldoon replaced Alice Quinn as the New Yorker’s poetry editor later that same year, Mr. Robbins submitted his work. The first batch he sent was rejected, but the second batch included “Alien vs. Predator.” A bulk of his book was written in the year following that poem’s publication, as his name was becoming well known in poetry circles. The poet Robert Wrigley discovered him in the New Yorker and started teaching Mr. Robbins’s poems to his students at the University of Idaho writing program.

“He doesn’t do what a lot of young poets do, which is emote and talk about how shitty they feel,” Mr. Wrigley said. “Nobody cares how shitty you feel. But he’s able to take feeling awful and turn it into this marvelous energy.”

Mr. Wrigley wrote to Mr. Robbins and asked if he had a book, and if he could show it to his editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak.

“And I said to him, are you fucking kidding me?” Mr. Robbins said. “I had sent it out and it had been very kindly rejected by three places. And now all of a sudden Paul Slovak is emailing me and asking for the thing. And then I thought, well, they’re not going to like it. There was this review on Goodreads, some woman said that I quote lines from pop culture and she writes, ‘Off color ones at that!’ Could you imagine quoting from pop culture in a poem?”

In “Sway,” one of Mr. Robbins’s strongest poems, he writes: “Mick Taylor’s solos and Prefab Sprout/taught me more than John Donne did about/how to do within and do without.” This is a rewriting of one of Mr. Muldoon’s most famous passages, from the poem “Sleeve Notes,” a collection of epigrams about canonical rock albums. For Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, Mr. Muldoon writes, “his songs have meant far more to me/than most of the so-called poems I’ve read.” It’s a line Mr. Robbins often refers to as explanation for what he calls “the dismantling of certain hierarchies,” namely the readiness with which contemporary poets repurpose pop music. Later in “Sway,” he quotes the refrain of the Rolling Stones song that lends the work its title, “That demon life has got me in its sway,” but follows it with a question mark, as if baffled by the line’s poignancy. He follows this moment of bewilderment with a sort of punchline: “A bit rich for early afternoon.”

That’s typical. This poetry often borders on rapturous, but Mr. Robbins never lets himself get too dramatic. It prevents him from pandering or showing off, which is why he can get away with a line like “I wash it out with Old English—Anglo Saxon if you’re nasty,” from “Any One I Want.”

“I don’t know if my stuff sounds like hip-hop at all,” he said, “but mostly I was listening to hip-hop when I was writing these poems. Jay-Z, Ghostface, Clipse.” In conversation, he’ll quote alternately John Ashbery and Pusha-T. (He’s particularly fond of this Clipse lyric, which is a closer analogue to his work than, say, “Daffy Duck in Hollywood:” “All the snow in the timepiece confusing ’em/all the snow on the concrete Peruvian/I flew ’em in, it ruined men, I’m through with ’em/blamed for misguiding their life/so go an’ sue me then.”)

Some of Mr. Robbins’s poems can resemble lyrics more than other poems—favoring cadence and placing greater emphasis on words’ syllables than on their meaning. “The Dark Clicks On” begins: “The morning slathers its whatever/ across the thing. It puts the fucking/lotion in the basket. Can’t smoke/in the confessional anymore./If you do, you have to confess it.” It is as if the poet just didn’t feel like describing a beautiful sunrise, and chooses instead to retreat to the comfort of reference, even if the relief comes from the creepiest line from Silence of the Lambs.

Lately, he’s been shopping around a new poem that isn’t in the book called “40^th Anniversary Edition.” It is about turning 40. The title is a riff on the reissue of Can’s album Tago Mago, which came out the year Mr. Robbins was born. It is darker, but there is the same artful echo chamber of low-culture associations, from the make of the airplane that crashed and killed several members of Lynyrd Skynyrd to a line from Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long”:

Convair CV-300, play that dead band’s

last black-box seconds. I can’t imagine that Can’s

records were favorites of Ronnie Van Zant’s.

Gary Rossington (later he married Dale Krantz)

broke both arms and legs and, yep, his pelvis,

two months after, yup, the death of Elvis.

Asked if he has a routine for writing, Mr. Robbins turned once more to pop culture. “I saw a clip of Jimi Hendrix on The Dick Cavett Show. And he asks Hendrix, ‘Do you try to get up in the morning and practice everyday?’ Hendrix says to him, ‘Yeah, I try to get up in the morning.’ That’s pretty much how it is.”

mmiller@observer.com

Neil "I love Q&Aaaa's" Young

Neil Young, who needs no introduction other than to say he has penned a memoir called Waging Heavy Peace that will be out in the fall of 2012, will be at the 2012 BookExpo America, the annual publishing clusterfuck at the Jacob Javits Center in June. Details are still, like Neil Young's voice, shaky (really sorry about that one), but the event will take the form of a Q&A. It is called, appropriately, "A Conversation With Neil Young." The interviewer will be announced at a later date.

So what can we expect from this conversation?  Maybe Mr. Young will speak a little about Buffalo Springfield, and his days cruising around California in a hearse. Perhaps he'll talk of Danny Whitten, the fine rhythm guitar player for Mr. Young's backing band, Crazy Horse, who died of a heroin overdose the very night that Neil Young fired him from the band for going overboard with heroin. Maybe Mr. Young's own epic marijuana use will be discussed, or one of his many comebacks, from 1979's Rust Never Sleeps to 1989's Freedom, or 2005's Prairie Wind. Who knows? Below, a fine song to listen to while speculating.

HHhH by Laurent Binet.

Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008 by John Leonard (March 15, Viking Adult) 

John Leonard was the critic’s critic, and anyone who has ever penned a book review has in some way, whether conscious or unconscious, felt his influence. This book collects Mr. Leonard’s prolific career. In his 40 years as a critic, he contributed to most major media outlets, from The Nation to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review, where he served as executive editor from 1971 to 1975.

Reticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (April 10, Dalkey Archive)

This Belgian detective novel combines the noir grit of Raymond Chandler with the hedonism of Hunter S. Thompson. The feckless protagonist is vacationing in the Mediterranean when he begins to believe that he’s being kept under surveillance by a writer named Biaggi. He goes back and forth between wanting to solve this mystery, and simply enjoying his vacation.

Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen (April 24, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In his second collection of essays, a follow up to How to be Alone, the author of The Corrections and Freedom tackles subjects ranging from China’s economic development to the suicide of his friend, contemporary and competitor, David Foster Wallace. The essay on Wallace, a frustrated meditation, appeared in The New Yorker last year and mined a number of Franzen tropes: bird watching, crankiness, insecurity, regret, middle class narcissism and did we mentioned crankiness?

HHhH by Laurent Binet (April 24, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A novel about trying to write a novel about the assassination Reinhard Heydrich, “the butcher of Prague.” First published in France, Mr. Binet’s first novel is wondrously self-assured and poignant, despite the gravity of its subject. Heydrich has one of the most gruesome deaths in all of history (which is kind of fitting; we guess this is one of those ‘spoiler alerts’ everyone hates so much): After a sub-machine gun and a bomb failed to kill him immediately, he died of infection from his wounds days later after his doctor refused to give him antibiotics; he would have likely recovered had he been given them.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller (April 24, Metropolitan Books)

Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller returns with the disturbing story of a 17-year-old prisoner at a Soviet labor camp, exploring the physical and mental absurdities therein, and the humanity that continues to shine through. The “hunger angel” of the title is mostly literal: above everything, the novel is about starvation and the frightening algorithm that guides the labor camp: one shovel load of coal equals one gram of bread.

Home by Toni Morrison (May 8, Knopf)

In her new novel, Toni Morrison follows the travels of the impossibly-named Frank Money, a black soldier wounded in the Korean War. He escapes the confinement of a veteran’s hospital to travel through the American south, on his way home to his ailing sister. What he finds outside the hospital’s walls is a country as full of blistering, illogical hate as the worst battleground. Morrison’s prose here is spare, distilled to nothing but a fast-paced progression, a kind of replication of Frank’s frantic journey and a rare departure from her more opaque earlier work.

Antigonick by Anne Carson (May 10, New Directions)

A new translation of Antigone with text printed from Anne Carson’s own handwriting, Antigonick also includes drawings by Bianca Stone. The poet’s latest work is as sculptural as it is lyrical, an object that replicates the intimacy of Ms. Carson’s fresh take on the classic tragedy. Her poetry is among the most lyrical and tragic being composed today, but her true strength is in translation; she manages to make even the work of Sophocles come across as unexpected and, above all else, leaves her own indelible mark on a familiar piece of writing.

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey (May 15, Knopf )

After the death of her lover, with whom she carried on a secret affair for 13 years, museum conservator Catherine Gehrig’s boss (the only person who knew of the relationship) gives her an assignment to bring back to life a 19^th century automaton. Naturally with Peter Carey, the contemporary and the antiquated intertwine. The follow0up to his Parrot and Olivier in America, the new novel is as imaginative as anything Mr. Carey has written, but with deeper traces of sadness.

Not Working by DW Gibson (May 17, OR Books)

For what reads as a kind of oral history of the recession and housing crisis, DW Gibson traveled the country talking to people who are out of work—from college graduates looking for a first job, to executives with decades-long careers. The book is a catalogue of these responses. The point that comes across is that the most democratic thing in America today is a shared suffering (note the title’s pun). The book gives a name and a face to what is often tossed around as a mere statistic.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (May 22, Henry Holt and Co.)

In her Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel offers a dramatic re-telling of Tudor history. The first, eponymous book was one of the more tasteful entries in the historical fiction category. That book followed Henry VIII as he hoped to annul his marriage and marry Anne Boleyn. In this new book, the sequel, Henry is having a bit of a change of heart: his marriage to Boleyn has lost its allure. We all know how this ends, but Ms. Mantel has a way with making history feel new again.

Mr. Lewis-Kraus. Photo by Rose Lichter Marck.

The day after the prerelease book party for A Sense of Direction (May 10, Riverhead Hardcover), the writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s memoir about pilgrimage, writing and relationships—particularly the one with his gay rabbi father—a sizable sample of young people who work in media and publishing were lying in bed, trying not to throw up. Most emails exchanged that morning began with “Ugh.” One said, “I feel like death.”

The Observer did not so much wake up that morning as writhe himself into cold consciousness. The night before, the guests took a bus from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to a bar in Red Hook with little surrounding it beyond a salvage yard. An invitation promised “infinite nachos.” Karaoke was
involved. The night went dim around the time The Observer was doing his rendition of Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose.” From what he can remember from the first half of the song, he killed it.

The next morning The Observer received an email from Mr. Lewis-Kraus with the subject line “Yo.”

“So what were you saying about the piece? You need to do it soon?”

It turned out many promises were made that night. Mr. Lewis-Kraus followed up with suggestions about where to meet for an interview: “We could walk the length of Manhattan. I think it would take about three hours.” The Observer dry-heaved. “We could also see the nearest place the Appalachian Trail comes to the city.” We responded with a desperate, “What’s this about the Appalachian Trail?” and heard back: “Actually. We might be able to arrange a scene with my dad, too. You should probably read the book first, though.”

We would travel to New Jersey, visit Mr. Lewis-Kraus’s father, and hike the Appalachian Trail to the state’s highest peak. At this point, even the prospect of physical activity was too much, and The Observer rushed to the bathroom.

A lot of A Sense of Direction concerns Mr. Lewis-Kraus running away from his father, so the prospect of meeting him became even more attractive. When he was 19, Mr. Lewis-Kraus’s father came out as gay. At 27, Mr. Lewis-Kraus left northern California, where he’d gone to school at Stanford, for Berlin. He called the move “a preemptive strike.” He wanted to escape his own life in his 20s, rather than at 46—his father’s age when he left his marriage for Brett, “a lovely guy he met at the gym.” In Berlin, he did for a time what a person does after moving to that city—essentially, nothing—until he wanted to escape that as well. So, after a drunken wager with the novelist Tom Bissell, he went on a pilgrimage, walking 500 miles across Spain in a trip known as the Camino. Needing to keep moving—and now having a book in mind about his travels—he spent several months walking around Shikoku, the least populated of the four main islands of Japan. But his life was always close behind. Mr. Lewis-Kraus spends his memoir running. His father is an apparition haunting his sentences, until he finally confronts him on one last pilgrimage. He calls the completed book that he handed to his father “an indictment and the forgiveness.”

On New Jersey Transit, Mr. Lewis-Kraus grabbed The Observer’s notebook and drew a rough map.

“Here’s New Jersey,” he said. “Here’s New York. Here’s Newark. I grew up here”—he made a dot west of Newark (a borough called Watchung)—“in a really small town that, at least when I was young, was sort of between New York suburbs and rural New Jersey. Now that border is considerably farther west. My mom lives here,” he said, pointing south. “My dad lives closer to the city. A town called South Orange.”

Like any good pilgrim, he began rattling off an itinerary that was both specific and open-ended: “We’re gonna take a train to South Orange and he’s gonna give us his car. Then what we’re gonna do is drive—the
Appalachian trail comes in here,” he pointed far west, “at the Delaware Water Gap. It runs like 75 miles up through New Jersey—through the Kittatinny Mountains. Up here is High Point state park. It’s the highest point in New Jersey. It has a big obelisk. We’ll see.”

On the Camino, a Christian pilgrimage, walking across Spain with a heretic friend and having to fill 12 hours each day with conversation, you begin to repeat yourself, Mr. Lewis-Kraus said. “And something about the repetition and the heat and the pain in your feet makes you notice the cracks in the story.” In the book, he starts rethinking his father’s letdowns: the time he missed the panel discussion in Chelsea or the time he ignored the magazine article or the time he visited Berlin and the two began fistfighting in the street. The walk never seems to have a point beyond the fact that you’re walking (“weight loss” is a popular answer to why people do the Camino) and so, on Father’s Day, he writes to his dad for the first time in 18 months. He says he loves him and that he’s still angry.

When we got off the train at South Orange, The Observer and Mr. Lewis-Kraus were greeted by a square-jawed man with silver hair, tan skin, a light purple shirt and a friendly smile. This was Dad. He began talking about how he stopped doing temple services a few years ago and now works in a hospice. A recent patient was, as he described her, “inconsolable” and mumbling in Yiddish.

The conversation went on for some time, feeling almost like a deliberate avoidance of the topic of the book, until The Observer asked Rabbi Kraus, “So have you read it?”

“I tell my friends,” he said, “if they’re going to read it, they have to read it until the end. If they stop reading at page 250, they’re never going to want to talk to me again. There are some things in there that are hard to read. There are a couple things in there, which in a perfect world, I would possibly ask him to change—I don’t think they’re entirely accurate. On the other hand, that’s not my place. Look, I think the book is amazing. I cried through most of it. It’s nice to see Gideon in a different light. And there’s nothing in there that’s not accurate.”

At the contradiction that the book is both not entirely accurate and that there’s nothing in it that’s not accurate, the younger Mr. Lewis-Kraus’s eyebrows perched and he whipped out a notebook to scribble down notes.

“You promised me no more memoirs,” his father said. “That pen comes out and I think, ‘Oh, shit!’”

‘I feel like you just got an extremely representative hour with my dad,” Mr. Lewis-Kraus said later in the car. “I thought he was going to read the book and never talk to me again. Because he didn’t even really know that he was in it. I mean, I think he suspected it, but certainly not to that extent. And I was really freaked out. He kept asking to see drafts. He kept asking my brother if he’d seen drafts. Finally, I had to go away to a wedding in September and I had Becky, my editor, send it to him while I was in China.” He laughed. “I had no idea what kind of response I was going to get. I’ll just show you.”

He pulled out an iPhone and looked through his email, producing a message from his father:

Brett read it in one day—and made copious notes. I haven’t slept well since I finished it—I’m not in a hut worried about the rain—but I certainly am not the same person I was before I read it.

A couple random thoughts:

1—I thought about you every single day while you were walking through Spain.

2—I am now really good at logistics.  I am able to tackle the
important stuff first, without having to have the inconsequential stuff done first … And I regret, very dearly, not having had this ability for 57 long years.

3—I hope you will be clearer when something is important to you.

4—Regretful that you were born?  Are you fucking kidding me?

5—We would like Richard Gere and Jude Law to play us in the movie.

After his trip alone across the mountains of Japan, Mr. Lewis-Kraus asked his father and brother to go with him to Ukraine for the Hasidic pilgrimage to Uman on Rosh Hashanah. All three of them were nervous—the trip had been staged and Mr. Lewis-Kraus and his brother rehearsed the conversations they would have with their father. His father finally came clean about the men he’d been with, about how he didn’t have any regrets. Mr. Lewis-Kraus told The Observer he’d thought, “What’s unusual about my relationship to my dad’s life is not that there were things about it I didn’t know because he was gay. It’s that I was able to indulge the fantasy that he kept secrets only because he was gay.” After parting ways with his father and brother, Mr. Lewis-Kraus got on a 24-hour train ride back to Berlin and began writing.

The Observer and Mr. Lewis-Kraus were walking on the Appalachian Trail and talking about the difference between New York—where Mr. Lewis-Kraus basically settled in 2010—and Berlin.

“New York forces you to come to terms with your own ambition in a way that Berlin doesn’t,” Mr. Lewis-Kraus said. “Whereas in Berlin, nobody gives a fucking shit. I remember at some point somebody had come to visit from New York and had emailed right when she got there and said: ‘So are you free on Thursday?’ And I was like, am I free on Thursday? Thursday might as well be a million years away. Of course I’m free Thursday. I have no idea what I’m doing on Thursday. I’m free right now! Everything in Berlin is: What are you doing right now? And the answer is always nothing.”

“And in New York,” The Observer said, “it’s the endless parties that are not at all parties, where nobody enjoys themselves or has fun.”

“This is why I wanted to have a karaoke party. Why not have everyone be structurally encouraged, by the nature of karaoke, to get hammered? And instead of having shop talk, people will just sing. And actually allow themselves to have fun rather than feel this is one more obligation. I wanted people to feel that because they had gone to Red Hook, they had committed to the idea of having a good time.”

Just as we began to get winded, Mr. Lewis-Kraus and The Observer reached the highest point in New Jersey. There was a phallic monument atop it and, looking out at the horizon, one could see where the borders of Jersey, New York and Connecticut converged. We stood for a time in silence. Mr. Lewis-Kraus looked out on the expanse of land below.

“There’s always a feeling with things like this of: ‘What now?’” he said. He paused before adding, “I’m ready to keep moving.”

mmiller@observer.com

“Larry was part of a team of human rights researchers,” Mr. Oakes continued, “That spent countless hours going through well over a hundred thousand documents to produce a book that’s really the definitive work of human rights abuses committed under the auspices of the U.S. government post-9/11.” He turned to the night’s host. “Anthony is perhaps the foremost voice on behalf of human rights in this country, if not the world. I think it’s fair to mention Anthony’s latest book—The Honor Code.” He pulled a book with a white jacket out of the pocket of his blazer. “This is my copy.”

Mr. Siems, originally a poet and the director of PEN American Center's Freedom to Write and International Programs, pieced together The Torture Report from government documents, official investigations, testimonials and a variety of other materials. (There were some 140,000 sources altogether.) It was published first serially online where a group of appointed commentators—many of which were former interrogators and investigators—left public comments and suggestions. Many of these are reprinted in the book.

“There’s too much for one person to deal with,” Mr. Siems told The Observer. “To have a career interrogator say, 'That’s absurd for the following six reasons,’ that brings something to this that I couldn’t do.”

So how did a poet switch gears to become a human rights watch dog and the author of a fairly comprehensive history of atrocities committed by the Bush administration?

“Writers have always played a really key role in societies that are emerging from human rights abuses,” he said. “They’ve been the ones who have helped tell the story, expanded the story or made the story more nuanced. You think about postwar Germany—the fiction turned it from, ‘Well it was us and the Nazis’ to ‘How do this happen under our watch? What is our level complicity?’”

The apartment’s floors were covered in oriental rugs and the walls adorned with paintings from all kinds of eras. It was the sort of large and dignified Manhattan home that one imagines was the site of countless archetypal book parties from days past—warm and welcoming even though “torture” is not usually the banner under which people gather for a party. Anyway, Mr. Appiah sees speaking for human rights as only a “sometimes depressing” business, split 50-50 with “sometimes exhilarating.”

“It’s very important in our work that we’re not just another bunch of Americans telling other people that they’re behaving badly,” he told the crowd during a toast for Mr. Siems. “Our talk of these things is meaningless if we don’t also hold our own government to the standards that we ask other governments to live up to.”

Later, The Observer found Mr. Oakes deep in the middle of conversation in a corner by the bar. His tall tuft of white hair made him stick out from the fray, and he had an intense, furrowed brow.

“It’s just that I know publishing, and the system doesn’t work for anybody,” he was saying gravely, then turned to The Observer and shot out a cheerful, “Oh, hi! Sorry, I’ll be with you in one minute.”

“The big thing about OR Books,” he continued (and again he threw The Observer a quick “sorry”), “Is that we sell books on a non-returnable basis. Even my mother has to pay upfront. We will not ship books unless they are prepaid. We will not accept returns. There’s no inventory—we print as they’re ordered. We also do eBooks. And it’s working! It is a much better system.”

“What do you think about the book?” The Observer cut in.

“It’s moving and it’s exciting and it’s awful,” he said. “You think it’s gonna be on every bed stand in America?”

Ms. DeWitt.

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000.

Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies in English and be translated into 20 languages. People told Ms. DeWitt she was a star. Tina Brown, the owner of Talk Miramax Books—the short-lived publishing imprint of her short-lived Talk magazine—wanted to throw her a big release party at the office. Ms. DeWitt did not believe she could handle that. She thought she was going insane and she told everyone as much. “I tell people I try not to go insane,” she said last month over coffee in a diner by Penn Station, a few hours before catching a plane back to Berlin where she currently lives. “And they think it’s funny and then I go insane and they get mad.”

She made it through to the end of the party. She was living in England at the time and had flown in for the occasion, but before that she had put her affairs in order. She gave away her clothes and put her books in storage. She went to the Talk party on Nov. 29, 2000, and after a few days, she left. She got on a train—“my body got on a train” is the way she puts it—got off in New Haven and checked into a hotel. How she spent her days is anyone’s guess. When she speaks about it today, she makes vague allusions to Niagara Falls. She was gone for about two weeks and ended up at her mother’s in a suburb of Washington, D.C. She fired her agent, returned to England and put off trying to sell her second novel.

That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan Burnham, Ms. DeWitt’s editor and the editorial head of Talk Miramax. He bought the rights and paid Ms. DeWitt her advance, but the novel never surfaced.

Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

Many writers have gone mad trying to finish a manuscript, but Ms. DeWitt, who has a history of depression, is one of the few to lose her mind from the process of trying to publish one. The industry beat her down and wore her out. Mr. Burnham said she was “completely enveloped” in every detail of Last Samurai—from the choice of type to the layout of the page. It drove her to the edge. Like Lightning Rods, Last Samurai had also been bought by one publisher—Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld—before being published by another. After reading Ms. Wilson’s comments on the manuscript—“crap comments,” Ms. DeWitt says—she wrote to her agent, Stephanie Cabot, then at William Morris, and said she would commit suicide if she had to keep working with her. She then wrote to Ms. Wilson, thanked her for her comments and informed her she was going away to work on other books. She wanted to “protect her book from the publishing process.” She retreated to a house in Chesterfield in the north of England and started a number of novels; Lightning Rods was the first that she finished.

She wrote it, she said, because she “felt like she was getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall” by the publishing industry.

Ms. DeWitt was born in 1957. She has platinum blond hair and a youthful face made more girlish by thick-rimmed glasses. She earned her PhD in classics at Oxford, where she wrote her doctorate on propriety in ancient literary criticism, but gave up her academic career in 1988 when she was finishing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in Arabic poetics. She has varying degrees of fluency in multiple languages, including French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

This knowledge informed her debut, which some critics read as a novel about translation. The protagonist of The Last Samurai, Ludo, is an unusually bright boy who is raised by his mother; as a substitute for his absent father, she has him watch Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (the book’s original title), about a village that hires seven ronin samurai to guard them against bandits. Ludo’s mother refuses to reveal his father’s identity, so he goes on a search for him. The book is a linguistic and aesthetic triumph, seamlessly weaving Greek, Japanese and various other languages into the narrative framework. For that reason, Ms. DeWitt was very particular about the book’s punctuation and typesetting. Greek, with its subtle and significant use of varying accents turns to gibberish if not printed correctly.

In 1998, after Last Samurai’s first deal with Weidenfeld went sour, Ms. DeWitt retreated to the English countryside to write more books; she had given up hope on selling her debut right away. She was at work on several novels, keeping tabs on them by maintaining an elaborate spreadsheet of each manuscript’s title with a word count next to it and the date she expected it to be finished. If she wrote 2,000 words in one day on a given manuscript, she would adjust the date accordingly. After about 10 months, she had finished Lightning Rods. She showed the book to Mr. Burnham at Miramax before she showed him Last Samurai. He wasn’t thrilled by it so she showed him her other book.

“Helen thought Lightning Rods would be very easy to sell and Last Samurai would be very difficult,” Mr. Burnham said. “But I felt that The Last Samurai was a masterpiece.”

He took the novel to the Frankfurt Book Festival, where his hunch proved correct: it quickly became apparent that Last Samurai would be the breakthrough novel of the season.

Ms. DeWitt was looking for an editor who was an intellectual equal and who understood the value of her words. In Mr. Burnham she found someone who at least would give her a contract guaranteeing her the final say on usage. This is very rare. Writers write and editors edit. That is how the publishing industry works. But Ms. DeWitt thought the only way she would remain sane was if she could get Last Samurai into print in two months. She made her final changes to the book’s punctuation and style and sent it off to the copy editor. When she received the 600-page manuscript with the copy editor’s proofs, Ms. DeWitt’s edits had been covered over with whiteout. There were hundreds of changes. “O.K.” was spelled out “okay,” “15” was “fifteen” and so on. “I am Helen DeWitt,” she said. “I wrote this book. You want to write OK as o-k-a-y go write your own novel.” She admits it sounds trivial, but Mr. Burnham himself called her “one of the great talkers and one of the great readers of our time.” She is careful and possessive with her words. Ms. DeWitt had not made a photocopy of her initial edits and had to painstakingly redo them.

“If they had sent a team to my house,” she said, “and just taken a truncheon and smashed my computer and taken my books and stripped the place bare, people would see that as outrageous. But if they just kill the mind that wrote the book, they don’t see that as bad. The point is, once something goes wrong in this particular business, it is very hard to make right.”

It was at this time, near the beginning of 2000, when Ms. DeWitt began to entertain the thought of suicide.

“Joe was the first to admit that he made a lot of mistakes when he started out,” Ms. DeWitt writes in Lightning Rods. “He worried about all the wrong things.” One of his biggest mistakes, Joe says, was thinking that the hardest part would be finding women who would agree to have anonymous sex with their co-workers through a hole in the bathroom wall: not two weeks went by before he’d talked 19 women into believing they were right for the job. The problem was that sex in a bathroom stall felt “clinical and impersonal.” He considers solving this problem by having the woman leave her skirt on so the man can hike it up, but that would compromise the anonymity. He realizes the whole aesthetic is off. For one thing, the toilet would have to go. Joe “seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.”

In 2001, when Ms. DeWitt was living in London, recovering from the depression that had prompted her earlier disappearance, Mr. Burnham had a change of heart about her second book. He made an offer, but Ms. DeWitt turned it down. She didn’t want to deal with the publisher’s world rights department a second time, which was claiming she was still $75,000 in the red for Last Samurai. Mr. Burnham upped the offer to a $525,000 advance for two books. This went back and forth for a while, with Mr. Burnham coming down in the price and eventually offering $400,000 for two books. In addition to Lightning Rods, Ms. DeWitt had proposed a book about poker. “Dealing with the publishing industry was a game of poker,” she said. “Not bridge, where you gather information and use it. It’s a game of lies.”

They negotiated a detailed contract offering Ms. DeWitt technical support for the poker book. The design was to be very specific. But the support never happened. Miramax was breaking up. The lawyer who helped draft the contract, Dev Chatillon, left without briefing Mr. Burnham on it. Ms. DeWitt told him Miramax was in breach of contract for not providing her with the support she needed to make the poker book. Mr. Burnham said he no longer wanted to buy Lightning Rods. Ms. DeWitt walked away with $200,000, her advance for Lightning Rods, which had already been accepted; there was still no published book.

The deal had fallen through and Ms. DeWitt, who was at this time staying on Staten Island, reminded Ms. Chatillon that the stipulations of her contract existed to protect her sanity. Then she once again attempted suicide. “I did not know how to write the books I wanted to write,” she said. She had read that if you took a sedative and tied a plastic bag around your head, you would go to sleep and not wake up. At 4:30 in the morning on May 25, 2004, Ms. DeWitt wrote an email to Ms. Chatillon with the subject line “termination”:

“Please call my cellphone. If I don’t answer you can assume that I am dead; in that case, please call my landlord, Silver Sullivan, and ask him to check my apartment. I have left my mother’s name and phone number by the bed.

It would be helpful if you could also tell Sheila Kohler that I will not be able to come to dinner on Wednesday.”

She wrote to Ms. Chatillon because she thought Ms. Chatillon would be indifferent to the email’s content. Writing to her about the proper disposal of her body was, to Ms. DeWitt’s mind, the same as saying, “I’m going out of town and I left a sirloin steak in the cupboard and it will start to smell.” Committing suicide sounds demented, but almost invariably seems practical to the person wanting to do it. As it turned out, the sedative and bag approach was ineffective. About an hour later she sent a second message:

“This method does not work as well as I’d been told, so I will try something simpler elsewhere. There is no need to call my landlord as the body will not be in the apartment. I will also contact Ms. Kohler.”

Once again, her body got onto a train and she disappeared. Her lawyer contacted her family and friends. As she headed north, she received multiple phone calls, which she didn’t answer. News of her disappearance leaked to the press. The Niagara Falls police department found her a few days later. The New York Times, which in a short article described a “suicidal email message to friends,” printed a comment from Lieutenant Joe Morrison of the Niagara Falls police: “She had a history here,” he said.

Ms. DeWitt had met the literary agent Bill Clegg in 1998, when The Last Samurai was still in the hands of Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld. At that time, she was hoping Mr. Clegg could find her a new editor. In 2009, she was reintroduced to Mr. Clegg through the young novelist Ida Hattemer-Higgins. Ms. DeWitt was living in Berlin and working on different writing projects. A short novel, Your Name Here, written in collaboration with the journalist Ilya Gridneff, was excerpted in the literary journal n+1 in 2008. That book never found a publisher, but could be purchased through Ms. DeWitt’s web site. Jenny Turner wrote a nearly 5,000-word review of Your Name Here in the London Review of Books. She said the self-published novel was “like catching a flicker of the future” and praised The Last Samurai as something like “what Joyce and Pound would do with the Internet.” Meanwhile, Ms. DeWitt was becoming widely read as a blogger, cataloguing the grim details of her experience in publishing.

She contacted the defunct Miramax books in 2008 and had it revert the rights to Lightning Rods. Mr. Clegg, now back in the picture, thought he could sell the book in a week to Mitzi Angel at Faber US, but Ms. Angel didn’t think the book was right for her company. Over the course of two months, he sent the novel out to 16 more editors, a checklist of some of the most prominent people in publishing: Hannah Griffiths at Faber UK; Jill Bialosky at Norton; Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown; David Ebershoff at Random House; Andrea Shulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Molly Stern at Viking; Lauren Wein at Grove/Atlantic; Gerry Howard at Doubleday; Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf; James Gurbutt at Constable UK; Nan Graham at Scribner; Dan Frank at Knopf; Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury; Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury; Dan Halpern at Ecco; Sean McDonald at Riverhead. They all turned it down. Most of them liked it; they just couldn’t get over the premise.

Mr. Clegg wanted to resign, but he met once more with Ms. DeWitt, who had flown to New York to show him projects she was working on. She showed him plans for what she calls an “insanely ambitious” novel, the one everyone had wanted from her since Last Samurai. Mr. Clegg was thrilled, but said he wanted to see 100 pages in two months. Ms. DeWitt went to the D.C. suburbs to be with her mother, who required live-in care for about three months after colostomy surgery. Once the surgery was reversed, Ms. DeWitt spent most of her time sitting in intensive care. She did not manage to write 100 pages worthy of submission.

She could not see a way forward. “Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight,” she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things.” She continued:

“… The system strangles the books in the head; it’s not possible to live that way because not living will make someone desperately unhappy.  It goes on too long.   If I had died in 2000 it would have been very simple and clean; the things one does to try to make things work only make it all go on longer.”

Forty minutes later, Mr. Clegg responded:

“None of this—and whatever else is telling you that dying would be better than living—is true, none of it.  As sharply as it may feel so, it is not.   I know, because I reached that black place exactly five years ago.  I failed, somehow, and thank god.  It is snowing today in New York—the fattest flakes against a copper roof out my window.  My brother who is in rehab just called and needed an encouraging voice.  I had lunch with a friend who is having a professional success after years of crushing disappointment.  And you just emailed.  None of these moments would I be here for if I’d left the world when I planned to.”

Ms. DeWitt never made it to the cliff. She sat in her hotel room, smoked, looked at the wall and continued living. It was not long after that when she met with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. He asked her if he could see Lightning Rods and she said yes.

When Joe’s Lightning Rods business really begins to catch on, he gets a visit from an FBI agent. He thinks to himself: “Holy shit.” The FBI agent, instead of arresting Joe on the spot and shutting down his business, tells him that the public sector is the place where a service like having sex through a hole in the wall is really necessary. People who serve in the public sector, the agent says, “you don’t know when, or how, they’re going to blow.” The bureau would provide a range of locations for Joe to operate his business. They would give him the opportunity to serve his country “and make a profit at the same time.” Joe says, “There comes a time when you have to recognize that you can’t always do things exactly according to plan.”

mmiller@observer.com

-"Awww, poor Katie! Some mean pewson got her tewwibly, tewwibly sad."

-"If only Al Gore had invented the internet earlier. Imagine all the attrocities that could have been prevented if bloodthirsty dictators had a socially acceptable outlet for their vitriol.  Also, our war hero memorials would be dedicated to freelance writers."

-"This whole article is really just a middle-finger to readers in general. I don't have the slightest feeling of anger towards you, just despair in the knowledge that people regurgitate stupid nonsense like this. Give just a little bit of credit to your fellow humans, for pete's sake."

-"Usually, the 'angry' comments follow an article that readers consider to be full of bias, incompetence, inaccuracies or is generally useless. Take your article above for example. We all have the right to express our opinions. Yeah, there are a lot of people who are angry. Perhaps rather than talking down to them in such a condescending manner as you have in this article, you could listen to what they are angry about."

-"Wow, project much? People hate the writer because they're jealous? I've seen a lot of anger in comments, but I've NEVER seen it directed at a writer because he/she is a writer. Isn't it just possible that much of the anger is because what the author has written is flat-out wrong, inaccurate, self-serving, smug, or some obnoxious combination thereof? Or that people get upset when they see someone who is actively working to make the world a dumber place? No, I suppose not: it isn't that angry commentators dislike the sloppy, misguided ignorance on display in a piece, it's that their precious time has been wasted. I guess I must be a member of this new and fascinating species, because after reading this article, I hate the writer myself."

-"stop writing crap, Katie. The mean comments will decrease exponentially, I promise."

-"--ck you."

-"F*** OFF!"

-"No comment."

Illustration by Fred Harper

In 1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University in Massachusetts. Before heading north, he spent time walking in Central Park and visiting the tenements of the Lower East Side. He saw the amusement rides on Coney Island and marveled at the antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum. Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Freud’s cultural home in the U.S. One hundred years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”) Several generations have been raised on the notion of psychoanalysis as New Yorker cartoon.

This is something that analytic institutions like the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute must reckon with.
Inside NYPSI’s headquarters on the Upper East Side, the cream-colored walls and dark brown carpet give off a sterile, medical feel, like a photograph of a hospital lobby from decades past. Posters and busts of Freud adorn the space. NYPSI, the oldest analytic institution in the country, celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. The faculty here have a reputation among fellow analysts as the most Freudian of Freudians, but they are nevertheless trying to keep up with changing times.

Sitting in an upstairs office was Maxine Gann, a Ph.D. who trained at the institute in the ’90s and was in the first class that was entirely female, and Roger Rahtz, M.D., the president of the board, who enrolled at the Institute in 1973.

The NYPSI, first known as the New York Psychoanalytic Society, was founded in 1911 by Dr. A.A. Brill, at the time Freud’s biggest champion in the States and the person responsible for bringing the good doctor to America. It was here that Freud’s disciples like Ernst Kris, Charles Brenner and Margaret Mahler began developing Freud’s theory in the United States.

“It’s not just about doing psychoanalysis anymore,” said Dr. Gann, speaking of the practice today. “Nobody so far as I know would raise an eyebrow if an analyst prescribed an antidepressant for a patient who was really in a bad way.”

“Among some,” Dr. Rahtz clarified.

“Well, at this instant.”

“To some degree,” he conceded.

“There’s a much broader, more open mind-set,” Dr. Gann said. “I’ll tell people to lay down on the couch and ‘tell me more’ if I think that’s the best treatment for my patient. But I know people who say, ‘I wish my analyst would shut up.’”

Indeed, among analysts there is little consensus on how to keep Freud relevant, and like the rest of the field, the NYPSI is trying to expand and make room for methods other than classical Freudian analysis. Even so, they still have a reputation among the analytic community of being dogmatic. One analyst, a social worker with a Ph.D. in psychology who did an externship at the NYPSI a few years ago, described a class syllabus that had been reprinted since 1980, the date crossed out and a more current one put in its place.

Further adding to the difficulty of negotiating such a balance is that the discourse is taking place in a cultural milieu in which the figure of Freud is at best a looming historical presence, and at worst a punch line.

By the time the man who invented the “talking cure” was dying from cancer of the mouth, he was a public celebrity and revered in his field, though his controversial reputation, which persists today, was already in place. An unsigned editorial published in The New York Times two days after his passing at age 83 in 1939 questioned his clinical validity in the same breath that it championed him as a great thinker: “Whether he was a true scientist or not, Freud’s place is secure if for no other reason than that he broke down ancient taboos and cleared the way for a new approach to the mind.” The literary scholar Harold Bloom, writing in The Times in 1986, the centennial of Freud’s establishment of his private practice in Vienna, called Freud “The Greatest Modern Writer” (in his headline, no less) while dismissing psychoanalysis as a kind of living fossil that “still survives among us, as an isolated and disputable therapy.” A 2008 report published in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association said psychoanalytic theory thrived in English departments and in the arts—from film to television to theater—but was treated as “desiccated and dead” by psychology programs in universities. As Freud’s stature as a historical figure grows, analysts must treat him as something more than pop culture fodder; he is also their field’s founder and its seminal thinker.

This task is increasingly important; today, Freud is more of a pop icon than ever. A recent nonfiction book about Freud’s cocaine use was a best-seller at the end of the summer. A star-studded blockbuster film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen as Freud recasts the father of analysis’s relationship with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient—herself a future analyst—Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightly) as a sexed-up psychological thriller. It recently became a critical smash at its debut during the New York Film Festival. The success of Freud’s Last Session—a modest but thrilling one-act play now in its second year of sold-out shows off Broadway—should come as no surprise. To much of the public at large, Freud and his theories are dated oddities, stigmatized as disproved, even as they help sell innumerable books and movie tickets. Ask an analyst, however, and they’ll tell you Freudian analysis is alive and well—even if its form is unrecognizable to those familiar with the cliché of the couch-bound patient being asked by an old man to “hear more about that.”

In the office of Lewis Aron, a Ph.D. and director of the N.Y.U. Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, there were two leather chairs, a long couch and a wispy line drawing of Freud hanging behind the reclining chair where he sat slouching as he spoke to The Observer. We entered the room and inspected the furniture and he told us to take a seat—not to lie down, mind you—on the couch.

“The mistake most people make is that the way they are defining analysis is how it was in the 1950s, in its heyday, which is really when it was first being defined. If they then look out in the world and wonder, ‘Is analysis alive or dying?’ … My feeling is that if you see psychoanalysis as something that’s alive and changing and growing,” he trailed off, the portrait of Freud frowning heavily over his shoulder.

“Maybe it’s not going to look like I expected it to look,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

One of the country’s preeminent programs in analysis, N.Y.U. postdoc was established in 1961 by Bernard Kalinkowitz; it was the first university program to give non-M.D. psychologists a way of formally training in psychoanalysis. It is known for using a progressive curriculum, incorporating—like many other institutions these days—various methods of psychology into the general spectrum of analysis. But Freud is still a complicated influence. Some students discussed an anxiety of being branded “too Freudian.” Last year, the program renamed the “Freudian” track the “contemporary Freudian” track.

In his office on the Upper West Side, Dr. Aron hosts reading groups that speak to this assimilation of various theoretical models into classical Freudian practice (his forthcoming book is called Towards a Progressive Psychoanalysis). A few weeks ago a group of five women joined Mr. Aron to discuss Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, a book about Jean-Martin Charcot, with whom Freud studied hypnosis. The conversation turned to the issue of countertransference, or how much an analyst’s own individual take on the treatment should be brought into a session with a patient. It is a topic debated by everyone from classical analysts to relational psychologists to contemporary Freudians and more progressive analysts like Professor Aron.

“Freud defines psychoanalysis in contrast to suggestion,” he said. There was a brief silence and the conversation continued about Ms. Hustvedt’s book. Later one of the students in the class interrupted.

“You say we’re not supposed to be influencing our patients,” the student said. “Just by sitting and having an expression on our face we do have influence.”

“I was being ironic,” Dr. Aron said.

Another student chimed in: “If we were so influential, wouldn’t we see dramatic improvements in our patients immediately? We’re not influential. We’re not.”

This line of conversation doesn’t have an end. The level of an analyst’s presence in a session has been a question since the beginning of psychoanalysis. Though Freud insisted that he be seated out of his patient’s view, he would go on walks with them. He would even feed them (admittedly, exceptions and not the rule). The persistence of the debate speaks to the difficulties of reconciling the Great Man’s ideas with what modern therapy has become.

Dr. Aron defines Freudian analysis in broad terms with many subsets—a belief in the unconscious (or, as another professor put it, “Anyone who is middle class and has gone to college is a Freudian”).

“As an educator,” Professor Aron said, “to call yourself an analyst or call yourself a psychologist in 2011 and not have a pretty good familiarity with Freud is just to be uneducated. It seems to me that it’s part of anybody’s good education. That doesn’t mean that people are identified as working in a Freudian tradition. Our Freudians are adapting Freud to modern life. Nobody’s practicing the way he practiced in Vienna. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Most Americans, in 2011, do not want to hear a theory—even a highly metaphorical one—that deep down they desire to kill their one parent in order to make love to the other. As Steven Ellman, of the contemporary Freudian faculty at N.Y.U. postdoc, put it, Americans have a “very narrow view of Freud,” one that is grounded predominantly in the Oedipus complex. Many of his writings, however, moved away from that.

“Narcissism,” Dr. Ellman said, “something that shouldn’t be unknown in New York society, was a major aspect of his theory.”
No matter. Was Freud a coke addict? Did he have a love affair with his sister-in-law? And besides the torrid details of his biography, there is the much-documented misogyny, his often laughable treatment of homosexuality in his writing and his inability to say when he is wrong. Arnold Rothstein, director of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training at N.Y.U. Medical Center, has noted in his own work when Freud reaches the limits of psychology, he blames it on biology.

Freud is not respected clinically, but for all his contentiousness, he’s an easier sell as a pop culture figure than he is a scientist. Dr. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst and a first generation student of Derrida (he translated four of his books), teaches Freud in both a clinical and an academic setting (at the New York Freudian Society and in the philosophy department of the New School, respectively). He said that with philosophy students he stresses how Freud’s theory is constructed and held together. With analysts in training, he emphasizes clinical principles—what a given theory has to do with the way one works with a patient.

“I would say Freud’s clinical reputation in my very particular view is mixed,” he said. “It contains clinical genius, it provided clinical tools that are indispensable but there are also major problems and blind spots in it at the same time. To be really responsible about Freud is to really come to grips with both sides.”

This is a time of 140-character rants and news updated by the half-minute, all of it breaking. The NYPSI’s Dr. Gann put it succinctly: “the zeitgeist runs counter to what an analytic perspective and process necessitates.”

WOODY ALLEN HAD A SESSION BARBARA WALTERS HAD A SESSION ALEC BALDWIN HAD A SESSION JERRY STILLER HAD A SESSION MARCIA GAY HARDEN HAD A SESSION WARNER WOLF HAD A SESSION CELESTE HOLM HAD A SESSION DICK CAVETT HAD A SESSION JOHN CLEESE HAD A SESSION T.R. KNIGHT HAD A SESSION PATRICIA HEATON HAD A SESSION DAN LAURIA HAD A SESSION

So goes the sign out front of the theater where Freud’s Last Session is playing. It is referring to the celebrities who have gone to see the play. Based on The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., it imagines an encounter between C.S. Lewis and Freud on the day England declared war on Germany, a few weeks before Freud’s death. The two are in Freud’s study in London; Freud provides the comic relief. He talks to a non-complacent dog. He says things like, “Psychoanalysis does not profess the absolutes of religion. Thank God.” As a recurring joke, he answers the phone with a drastically drawn-out Teutonic “Hey-looooo?” When Lewis enters the room for the first time and hesitates before the famous couch in the study, Freud sneers at him and tells him to sit in the chair by his desk. That got a big laugh from the crowd.

“From day one, Freud was a huge magnet to pull people,” said Mark St. Germain, the production’s playwright of the audience-garnering subject.

Psychoanalysis changes along with culture, but Freud stays the same. Analysts and theorists continue to work with him, to build on his foundations, but to much of the American public he remains a cocaine-sniffing, whacky old man, the kind who speaks of an unseen other, buried deep inside us, who really just wants to play house with Mommy. His life’s work, of course, goes deeper than that, and what he created persists—but he remains, as one practicing Freudian called him, “a figure of levity.” For that, Freud is the great patriarch of mental health: both feared and respected, hated and idealized.

Near the beginning of Mr. St. Germain’s play, there is a moment that alludes to a scene from Freud’s childhood that is recounted in Peter Gay’s brilliant biography Freud: A Life for Our Time. His father, Jacob, a feckless wool merchant, was talking to his son about how much life had improved for Austria’s Jews. “When I was a young fellow,” he told Freud, “one Saturday I went for a walk in the streets in your birthplace, beautifully decked out, with a new fur cap on my head. Along comes a Christian, knocks off my cap into the muck with one blow, and shouts, ‘Jew, off the sidewalk!’” Freud asked his father what he did. He said: “I stepped into the road and picked up my cap.” “I don’t know which of them I detested more,” the dying Freud tells Lewis in the play.

It is the one indisputable fact that Freud got right: there’s no living down one’s parents.

mmiller@observer.com