The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of childless Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30, and an outsider—a 19-year-old dropout from SUNY Oswego, whose life secret (he gets admitted to Harvard and can’t afford to attend) puts him on the road to journalistic terrorism, social oblivion and an unknowable future on the run in the dark.

Ornamenting and offsetting this quartet are parents of various abilities to parent; a passel of lovers, most of them not very lovable; a Billy Budd–like, newly orphaned black teenager; a languishing Abyssinian cat, called The Pope, who can barely drag himself from one room to the next without heaving onto an Oriental carpet; and—my own favorite character—a maid named Aurora, who has the clearest vision in the book and who confides only in herself (we get to eavesdrop).

Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor’s Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late-twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990’s, a recycled Jazz Age of lavish magazine start-ups and “renovations” of older publications costing a king’s ransom. Those were the days of earnest professorial disquisitions on every detail of mass culture except for the staggering greed of the music and entertainment companies that controlled it; of the dot-com rollercoaster and the platinum parachute; of cross- and trans- everything; of the end of history and the death of art and the extinction of merit as a major consideration for any sort of evaluation.

And why shouldn’t they be stars? They have Ivy League credentials, glamorous contacts, natural good looks, and elegance acquired at power tables in the best restaurants and in bathrooms in the hottest new clubs. Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and a formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them.

Ms. Messud’s novel offers the notion that, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, this entire milieu underwent a new “feeling,” and suddenly the comfort and security of family and close friends became felt priorities. The author, however, is also a realist about human nature—in places, scathingly so. And she’s a master at demonstrating how one can’t win for losing when a jerk is pulling the strings. By the novel’s end, Murray Thwaite, the self-made “emperor” of the title, has blithely seduced and abandoned a woman half his age (after an extended affair) even though Annabel, his wife of 33 years, already offers him tender lovemaking at his whim as well as wholehearted emotional support; works full-time to help sustain the family’s lifestyle (which includes a rambling Upper West Side apartment, a summer compound in Stockbridge and live-in help); cooks gourmet meals on demand; and otherwise manages the household to provide the most comfortable environment for her husband, the country’s most lauded moderately liberal pundit, to fulfill his writer’s destiny.

Meanwhile, another young woman—who’s married her eligible, youngish, handsome, dashing, spectacularly cynical and deeply sensual employer in a late-summer wedding that, in the age of Jane Austen, might have ended such a novel as pure comedy—discovers before the cake is cut that she plays second fiddle to her husband’s ambitions and sense of self-preservation. Austen may have set up this union, but George Eliot and Oscar Wilde have officiated at it.

For all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters; and one reason may be that, well before the wake-up call of national disaster, most of them experience inklings of how vulnerable they make themselves in their willful efforts to nudge the world into conformity with their self-absorbed fantasies.

Of the three college chums, the impecunious yet defiantly freelance (“regularity was bourgeois”) book reviewer Julius Clarke—Eurasian, promiscuous and gay—is most fully enthralled by celebrity for its own sake. In this, he far surpasses his pals: the lonely and unhappy yet professionally disciplined television producer Danielle Minkoff, and the beauteous, violet-eyed and somewhat clueless Marina Thwaite, an aspiring intellectual and cultural critic (and daughter of Annabel and the famous, fatuous Murray). And yet even Julius, “an inchoate ball of ambition,” is aware that he himself—unwilling to search for a full-time job, picky about the writing assignments he’ll consider, temping only when the bank account hits bottom, reluctant to give up his Champagne tastes—won’t thrive on what is, to all intents and purposes, nothing. (“He had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.”)

In dramatic contrast, we find Frederick (Bootie) Tubb, the Oswego dropout 10 years younger than Julius and his friends. For much of the novel, they treat Bootie as if he’s of another, lower species, the way the South Park kids treat the hapless Kenny. And Bootie treats himself just about the same way, despite his truly remarkable intellectual gift: At 19, with only a diploma from high school (where he was valedictorian), he’s a peer of his uncle Murray in intellectual chutzpah, as the uncle is the first to realize. Son of a widow who doesn’t understand him, overweight and clumsy, lacking both sophistication born of experience and the most fundamental intuition regarding the ambitions and agendas of those around him, he might be thought of as belonging to Gen DMZ.

But it’s the nerd-loser Bootie who slogs through Emerson’s essays, Robert Musil and other world literature as if reading were a life-and-death matter—and who, unlike Marina or Danielle or Julius, remembers what he reads; who has the idealism as well as the nerve to pick a few bones with Tolstoy over War and Peace; who sincerely, if with destructive naïveté, tries to apply what he learns from his reading to his life; and who makes an effort to develop the highest literary and moral standards in the vacuum of a social isolation so intense that he might as well be living on Crusoe’s island as in the 212 area code.

Not so long ago, commentators like Murray Thwaite were ruminating on the question of whether it would be possible for novelists to write persuasive fiction in the wake of 9/11. The Emperor’s Children is outstanding proof that they can.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of childless Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30, and an outsider—a 19-year-old dropout from SUNY Oswego, whose life secret (he gets admitted to Harvard and can’t afford to attend) puts him on the road to journalistic terrorism, social oblivion and an unknowable future on the run in the dark.

Ornamenting and offsetting this quartet are parents of various abilities to parent; a passel of lovers, most of them not very lovable; a Billy Budd–like, newly orphaned black teenager; a languishing Abyssinian cat, called The Pope, who can barely drag himself from one room to the next without heaving onto an Oriental carpet; and—my own favorite character—a maid named Aurora, who has the clearest vision in the book and who confides only in herself (we get to eavesdrop).

Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor’s Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late-twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990’s, a recycled Jazz Age of lavish magazine start-ups and “renovations” of older publications costing a king’s ransom. Those were the days of earnest professorial disquisitions on every detail of mass culture except for the staggering greed of the music and entertainment companies that controlled it; of the dot-com rollercoaster and the platinum parachute; of cross- and trans- everything; of the end of history and the death of art and the extinction of merit as a major consideration for any sort of evaluation.

And why shouldn’t they be stars? They have Ivy League credentials, glamorous contacts, natural good looks, and elegance acquired at power tables in the best restaurants and in bathrooms in the hottest new clubs. Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and a formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them.

Ms. Messud’s novel offers the notion that, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, this entire milieu underwent a new “feeling,” and suddenly the comfort and security of family and close friends became felt priorities. The author, however, is also a realist about human nature—in places, scathingly so. And she’s a master at demonstrating how one can’t win for losing when a jerk is pulling the strings. By the novel’s end, Murray Thwaite, the self-made “emperor” of the title, has blithely seduced and abandoned a woman half his age (after an extended affair) even though Annabel, his wife of 33 years, already offers him tender lovemaking at his whim as well as wholehearted emotional support; works full-time to help sustain the family’s lifestyle (which includes a rambling Upper West Side apartment, a summer compound in Stockbridge and live-in help); cooks gourmet meals on demand; and otherwise manages the household to provide the most comfortable environment for her husband, the country’s most lauded moderately liberal pundit, to fulfill his writer’s destiny.

Meanwhile, another young woman—who’s married her eligible, youngish, handsome, dashing, spectacularly cynical and deeply sensual employer in a late-summer wedding that, in the age of Jane Austen, might have ended such a novel as pure comedy—discovers before the cake is cut that she plays second fiddle to her husband’s ambitions and sense of self-preservation. Austen may have set up this union, but George Eliot and Oscar Wilde have officiated at it.

For all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters; and one reason may be that, well before the wake-up call of national disaster, most of them experience inklings of how vulnerable they make themselves in their willful efforts to nudge the world into conformity with their self-absorbed fantasies.

Of the three college chums, the impecunious yet defiantly freelance (“regularity was bourgeois”) book reviewer Julius Clarke—Eurasian, promiscuous and gay—is most fully enthralled by celebrity for its own sake. In this, he far surpasses his pals: the lonely and unhappy yet professionally disciplined television producer Danielle Minkoff, and the beauteous, violet-eyed and somewhat clueless Marina Thwaite, an aspiring intellectual and cultural critic (and daughter of Annabel and the famous, fatuous Murray). And yet even Julius, “an inchoate ball of ambition,” is aware that he himself—unwilling to search for a full-time job, picky about the writing assignments he’ll consider, temping only when the bank account hits bottom, reluctant to give up his Champagne tastes—won’t thrive on what is, to all intents and purposes, nothing. (“He had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.”)

In dramatic contrast, we find Frederick (Bootie) Tubb, the Oswego dropout 10 years younger than Julius and his friends. For much of the novel, they treat Bootie as if he’s of another, lower species, the way the South Park kids treat the hapless Kenny. And Bootie treats himself just about the same way, despite his truly remarkable intellectual gift: At 19, with only a diploma from high school (where he was valedictorian), he’s a peer of his uncle Murray in intellectual chutzpah, as the uncle is the first to realize. Son of a widow who doesn’t understand him, overweight and clumsy, lacking both sophistication born of experience and the most fundamental intuition regarding the ambitions and agendas of those around him, he might be thought of as belonging to Gen DMZ.

But it’s the nerd-loser Bootie who slogs through Emerson’s essays, Robert Musil and other world literature as if reading were a life-and-death matter—and who, unlike Marina or Danielle or Julius, remembers what he reads; who has the idealism as well as the nerve to pick a few bones with Tolstoy over War and Peace; who sincerely, if with destructive naïveté, tries to apply what he learns from his reading to his life; and who makes an effort to develop the highest literary and moral standards in the vacuum of a social isolation so intense that he might as well be living on Crusoe’s island as in the 212 area code.

Not so long ago, commentators like Murray Thwaite were ruminating on the question of whether it would be possible for novelists to write persuasive fiction in the wake of 9/11. The Emperor’s Children is outstanding proof that they can.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

And, for a self-described “gregarious melancholic, a highly sociable misanthrope,” Mr. Epstein is fortunate to have a rather lovely life: a wife he calls his best friend; reasonable health for a man in his late 60’s who has undergone bypass surgery; literary work as a writer of essays and short stories—his new collection, Friendship: An Exposé, is his 17th book—that challenges and rewards; and, by his estimate, around 75 friends. ( Friendship is dedicated to one of them, a former bookseller named Arnie Glass who suggested the topic.) Furthermore, unusually for an American today, Mr. Epstein still lives close to where he was born and reared; he has the security of rootedness. Although retired from university teaching, at Northwestern, he seems to possess resources at the ready to go out for lunch or dinner with the least objectionable of his friends whenever he and his wife can find the time.

Mr. Epstein’s privileged perceptions of the 21st century’s shrinking clock, and his irritability over extended intrusions into his day by individuals outside his family and his profession, are hardly news. Yet it’s the rare chronicler of the evaporation of grace in contemporary life who frames his own observations with what Aristotle or Samuel Johnson had to say—and then unflinchingly explains how it’s impossible nowadays to derive comfort from them. Mr. Epstein attempts to set out a taxonomy of his own friendships, from spouse-soulmate to long-dead friends he still thinks about, with a hierarchy of friendship built in. He’s willing to lose friends by articulating some rather hard truths about them as individuals in the context of a “friendship diary” that records a week’s worth of pesky obligations and meetings he wishes hadn’t been scheduled. And he’s also willing to own up to hard truths about himself, such as examples of how his thoughtless cruelty severed friendships forever (though his appetite for le mot juste converts the confession into a boast). He confides that on hearing the news of the death of a good friend who suffered from a torturing disease, his first response included relief that he no longer had to make awkward visits to the dying man. Hard truths like these, Mr. Epstein promises, will “say something” about the reader’s own friendships.

All of this is set out with Mr. Epstein’s much-admired literary wit, every sentence weighted and balanced so that, like a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, it could stand on its own as an essay in miniature. Among the essays, one finds unsentimental (even acidulous) reflection, fine language, amusement and an intolerance for embarrassing confession, at least when others do it in conversation. One also finds a sophisticated appreciation of literature; a practiced storyteller’s finesse; a clear understanding that actions and choices have consequences; a moral stance that values “above intellect—kindness, generosity, amused self-deprecation.” Why, then, does the book have the effect of what editors like to call a “downer”?

Mr. Epstein has noticed this valedictory element himself. As he puts it in the conclusion: “At moments in the course of writing this book I had the staggering thought that I seemed to be coming out against friendship …. That is not at all what I had in mind when I began …. What I wanted was to take some of the air out of the idealization of friendship, so that a friend, like a teacher or a clergyman, need not always feel that he or she is falling short of an impossible ideal.”

But despite Mr. Epstein’s efforts to soften his thesis (he believes that modern friendship is decisively different from friendship as described by philosophers and poets of the previous two millennia), and despite his lively portraits of the friends who’ve mattered to him, he leaves the distinct impression that not only has he personally crossed some sort of Rubicon concerning his capacity to be a friend, but that he represents American society as well. And he may be right, to judge by the brutal depictions of friendship currently on network television and in other mass-market media, some of which he discusses.

I’m not sure whether the author of a book on friendship who thinks of himself as a “trophy friend”—someone so important and successful that, in order to become his friend, it’s necessary to offer him extensive praise of his writing—can be a representative figure. He’s certainly unconvincing when he defends himself against the charge of being a spoilsport who pokes at the idealization of friendship because he, Joseph Epstein, is so exhausted from fielding—or having to provoke—encomia during the periodic lunches that friendship entails.

Of course, he’s thought of this long before any reviewer has, and, as a master of self-deprecation as a way to provoke affection, he has built into his book many ingenious passages that read like little trials, in which the author functions as perp, arresting officer, judge and jury—thereby retaining as much control as possible of the critical process. Indeed, perhaps the biggest exposé in Friendship: An Exposé is Mr. Epstein’s recognition of his capacity for selfishness and its dampening effect on his friendships, even the closest and most long-lived. This effort to control the uncontrollable—to shape and guide a reader’s opinion in detail—is the most vulnerable element of Mr. Epstein’s writing and, in its quixotic quest for complete self-preservation, perhaps the most lovable.

Less lovable are some of the details of the preservation process. Mr. Epstein—a sports fan—thinks of life as a “game.” It turns out to be a tragic one for all players, but he doesn’t want to hear any whining about the cards his friends may have been dealt; in fact, he’d prefer not to have to discuss any personal miseries, his own or anyone else’s—a preference he assures us is shared by most heterosexual men, along with a need to say “boobs” with impunity from time to time and a disinclination to hug another guy anywhere, for any reason. Male competition is the oxygen that keeps the author vital; irony is what he eats for breakfast; and shared laughter at the pitiable foibles and excesses of the human condition— levity—is what he craves.

In several chapters, Mr. Epstein has made an effort to examine the possibility of friendships between men and women that do not admit an erotic dimension. His motives appear to be gallant, although it’s a little vitiating to read him on the subject: There’s something punishing to the imagination in his ideas about what men and women think (or should) and may feel about one another.

Although his characterizations of the women whom he counts as friends are mostly flattering, he states as general fact several presumptions concerning women and friendship that, in my experience, at least, are simply untrue. It is not my experience that men, as a sex, are more forgiving than women; indeed, if one steps outside the upper-middle-class bubble of academic intellectuals in which Mr. Epstein lives, I think one quickly finds that people are in danger of being maimed and murdered—by both sexes—for offenses that Mr. Epstein feels are peccadilloes. And perhaps I was lucky to come of age during a time of vibrant feminism, but I must say that I know many women who not only can tolerate being told that their ideas are, in Mr. Epstein’s word, crap, but can also defend them. Finally, I was astounded to discover his explanations for why women have male friends who are homosexual, declared or undeclared—especially when I compare them with the author’s painstakingly uncategorical account of his own relationships with homosexual friends. As for his speculations in “Disparate Friends” on whether individuals of different social classes, races or ethnic backgrounds can be friends, I found what he writes so disheartening (and foreign to my own experience) that I almost couldn’t continue past the chapter.

One wonders whether the book’s 19 interlocking essays were written more or less in the sequence one finds them. If so, that could explain why the second half of Friendship is better than the first: less dependent on the paradoxical consanguinity of rigid assertion and free association, more reflective, more sensitive to exceptions and individuals. Although he has no use for therapy as a way to help resolve one’s thornier relationships or mend one’s character flaws, I also sometimes wondered whether Mr. Epstein was dissing Freud or competing with him. (Portions of the book sound like syntheses of patient monologues and physician responses from psychoanalytic sessions.)

My deepest reservation about Friendship concerns the anecdotes (most of them about individuals who are still alive) that Mr. Epstein uses to illustrate the limits of particular friendships. Some of the portraits are very bruising, and the fact that the friend described is not named won’t soften the hurt when he tries on the details and finds that they fit him to a T. This willingness to hurt people in public suggests a capacity for malice that surpasses the mischievous and enlightening. It smacks of vendetta.

At least it does on the page. Could it be that a book of essays isn’t the best vehicle for the author’s particular brand of humor on this subject? Maybe a sitcom would be a more congenial medium. In fact, many of the cameos that Mr. Epstein presents are startlingly reminiscent of episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, Sex and the City and Friends.

Twice, Mr. Epstein refers to Seinfeld to make his points. Oddly, one show he invokes, “The Deal,” he uses inappropriately to make a psychoanalytic point about how sex and friendship don’t mix. (In “The Deal,” ex-lovers Jerry and Elaine once again get to have their cake and eat it, too.) Perhaps Mr. Epstein ought to send a copy of Friendship to Jerry Seinfeld. Or at least check the script, which is posted on the Web.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

And, for a self-described “gregarious melancholic, a highly sociable misanthrope,” Mr. Epstein is fortunate to have a rather lovely life: a wife he calls his best friend; reasonable health for a man in his late 60’s who has undergone bypass surgery; literary work as a writer of essays and short stories—his new collection, Friendship: An Exposé, is his 17th book—that challenges and rewards; and, by his estimate, around 75 friends. (Friendship is dedicated to one of them, a former bookseller named Arnie Glass who suggested the topic.) Furthermore, unusually for an American today, Mr. Epstein still lives close to where he was born and reared; he has the security of rootedness. Although retired from university teaching, at Northwestern, he seems to possess resources at the ready to go out for lunch or dinner with the least objectionable of his friends whenever he and his wife can find the time.

Mr. Epstein’s privileged perceptions of the 21st century’s shrinking clock, and his irritability over extended intrusions into his day by individuals outside his family and his profession, are hardly news. Yet it’s the rare chronicler of the evaporation of grace in contemporary life who frames his own observations with what Aristotle or Samuel Johnson had to say—and then unflinchingly explains how it’s impossible nowadays to derive comfort from them. Mr. Epstein attempts to set out a taxonomy of his own friendships, from spouse-soulmate to long-dead friends he still thinks about, with a hierarchy of friendship built in. He’s willing to lose friends by articulating some rather hard truths about them as individuals in the context of a “friendship diary” that records a week’s worth of pesky obligations and meetings he wishes hadn’t been scheduled. And he’s also willing to own up to hard truths about himself, such as examples of how his thoughtless cruelty severed friendships forever (though his appetite for le mot juste converts the confession into a boast). He confides that on hearing the news of the death of a good friend who suffered from a torturing disease, his first response included relief that he no longer had to make awkward visits to the dying man. Hard truths like these, Mr. Epstein promises, will “say something” about the reader’s own friendships.

All of this is set out with Mr. Epstein’s much-admired literary wit, every sentence weighted and balanced so that, like a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, it could stand on its own as an essay in miniature. Among the essays, one finds unsentimental (even acidulous) reflection, fine language, amusement and an intolerance for embarrassing confession, at least when others do it in conversation. One also finds a sophisticated appreciation of literature; a practiced storyteller’s finesse; a clear understanding that actions and choices have consequences; a moral stance that values “above intellect—kindness, generosity, amused self-deprecation.” Why, then, does the book have the effect of what editors like to call a “downer”?

Mr. Epstein has noticed this valedictory element himself. As he puts it in the conclusion: “At moments in the course of writing this book I had the staggering thought that I seemed to be coming out against friendship …. That is not at all what I had in mind when I began …. What I wanted was to take some of the air out of the idealization of friendship, so that a friend, like a teacher or a clergyman, need not always feel that he or she is falling short of an impossible ideal.”

But despite Mr. Epstein’s efforts to soften his thesis (he believes that modern friendship is decisively different from friendship as described by philosophers and poets of the previous two millennia), and despite his lively portraits of the friends who’ve mattered to him, he leaves the distinct impression that not only has he personally crossed some sort of Rubicon concerning his capacity to be a friend, but that he represents American society as well. And he may be right, to judge by the brutal depictions of friendship currently on network television and in other mass-market media, some of which he discusses.

I’m not sure whether the author of a book on friendship who thinks of himself as a “trophy friend”—someone so important and successful that, in order to become his friend, it’s necessary to offer him extensive praise of his writing—can be a representative figure. He’s certainly unconvincing when he defends himself against the charge of being a spoilsport who pokes at the idealization of friendship because he, Joseph Epstein, is so exhausted from fielding—or having to provoke—encomia during the periodic lunches that friendship entails.

Of course, he’s thought of this long before any reviewer has, and, as a master of self-deprecation as a way to provoke affection, he has built into his book many ingenious passages that read like little trials, in which the author functions as perp, arresting officer, judge and jury—thereby retaining as much control as possible of the critical process. Indeed, perhaps the biggest exposé in Friendship: An Exposé is Mr. Epstein’s recognition of his capacity for selfishness and its dampening effect on his friendships, even the closest and most long-lived. This effort to control the uncontrollable—to shape and guide a reader’s opinion in detail—is the most vulnerable element of Mr. Epstein’s writing and, in its quixotic quest for complete self-preservation, perhaps the most lovable.

Less lovable are some of the details of the preservation process. Mr. Epstein—a sports fan—thinks of life as a “game.” It turns out to be a tragic one for all players, but he doesn’t want to hear any whining about the cards his friends may have been dealt; in fact, he’d prefer not to have to discuss any personal miseries, his own or anyone else’s—a preference he assures us is shared by most heterosexual men, along with a need to say “boobs” with impunity from time to time and a disinclination to hug another guy anywhere, for any reason. Male competition is the oxygen that keeps the author vital; irony is what he eats for breakfast; and shared laughter at the pitiable foibles and excesses of the human condition—levity—is what he craves.

In several chapters, Mr. Epstein has made an effort to examine the possibility of friendships between men and women that do not admit an erotic dimension. His motives appear to be gallant, although it’s a little vitiating to read him on the subject: There’s something punishing to the imagination in his ideas about what men and women think (or should) and may feel about one another.

Although his characterizations of the women whom he counts as friends are mostly flattering, he states as general fact several presumptions concerning women and friendship that, in my experience, at least, are simply untrue. It is not my experience that men, as a sex, are more forgiving than women; indeed, if one steps outside the upper-middle-class bubble of academic intellectuals in which Mr. Epstein lives, I think one quickly finds that people are in danger of being maimed and murdered—by both sexes—for offenses that Mr. Epstein feels are peccadilloes. And perhaps I was lucky to come of age during a time of vibrant feminism, but I must say that I know many women who not only can tolerate being told that their ideas are, in Mr. Epstein’s word, crap, but can also defend them. Finally, I was astounded to discover his explanations for why women have male friends who are homosexual, declared or undeclared—especially when I compare them with the author’s painstakingly uncategorical account of his own relationships with homosexual friends. As for his speculations in “Disparate Friends” on whether individuals of different social classes, races or ethnic backgrounds can be friends, I found what he writes so disheartening (and foreign to my own experience) that I almost couldn’t continue past the chapter.

One wonders whether the book’s 19 interlocking essays were written more or less in the sequence one finds them. If so, that could explain why the second half of Friendship is better than the first: less dependent on the paradoxical consanguinity of rigid assertion and free association, more reflective, more sensitive to exceptions and individuals. Although he has no use for therapy as a way to help resolve one’s thornier relationships or mend one’s character flaws, I also sometimes wondered whether Mr. Epstein was dissing Freud or competing with him. (Portions of the book sound like syntheses of patient monologues and physician responses from psychoanalytic sessions.)

My deepest reservation about Friendship concerns the anecdotes (most of them about individuals who are still alive) that Mr. Epstein uses to illustrate the limits of particular friendships. Some of the portraits are very bruising, and the fact that the friend described is not named won’t soften the hurt when he tries on the details and finds that they fit him to a T. This willingness to hurt people in public suggests a capacity for malice that surpasses the mischievous and enlightening. It smacks of vendetta.

At least it does on the page. Could it be that a book of essays isn’t the best vehicle for the author’s particular brand of humor on this subject? Maybe a sitcom would be a more congenial medium. In fact, many of the cameos that Mr. Epstein presents are startlingly reminiscent of episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, Sex and the City and Friends.

Twice, Mr. Epstein refers to Seinfeld to make his points. Oddly, one show he invokes, “The Deal,” he uses inappropriately to make a psychoanalytic point about how sex and friendship don’t mix. (In “The Deal,” ex-lovers Jerry and Elaine once again get to have their cake and eat it, too.) Perhaps Mr. Epstein ought to send a copy of Friendship to Jerry Seinfeld. Or at least check the script, which is posted on the Web.

Mindy Aloff’s Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford) was published in May.

Although A Little History of the World has been translated into 18 languages since its original 1936 publication, with a reissue by a German publisher and revisions by the author in 1985, this is the first time it’s appeared in English. As Gombrich’s granddaughter, Leonie, explains in a preface as carefully articulated as her grandfather’s text, Gombrich’s second book was his landmark and still internationally popular chronicle for adults, The Story of Art—and he went on to write many other books. But despite repeated pleas from publishers, he never brought out an English edition of his first book. “It took the events of the 1990’s, and Britain’s increasing involvement in the European Union—as well as my grandmother’s tactful encouragement—to convince him,” Leonie Gombrich writes.

Assisted by Caroline Mustill, Gombrich reworked 10 of the chapters into English before he died; and, after his death, his granddaughter commissioned Ms. Mustill to complete the translation. In the course of his own effort, Gombrich refined some passages and laid out plans to write a few new chapters relating to England (to which he and his wife fled in the 1930’s) and the United States. However, even without his illuminations of Shakespeare, the Bill of Rights and the birth of parliamentary democracy, A Little History speaks to readers of any age. Its tone of voice is immediate and humane, like the writing of Gombrich’s American contemporaries E.B. White and Edwin Denby. The prose was tested by being read aloud, and it pleasures the ear as well as the mind.

The 40 chapters—each no more than four or five pages and each ornamented with its own evocative woodcut by Clifford Harper—bear out the book’s title more faithfully than one might expect in an unashamedly personal volume of less than 300 pages. This “little” history makes no pretense to being impartial or complete or innovative in its method. The major incidents and figures were selected according to what Gombrich thought most people remembered, or would if their upbringing and education had been like his. And, since he was looking through a sensibility that had been cultivated at the university level in pre–World War II Vienna, one finds much more about Germany, for instance, than the United States, whose entry on the book’s world stage is confined to a page or two: a few sentences on the 1776 Revolution, a brief summary of our institution of slavery, the Civil War.

Ever since A Little History’s initial publication, readers have noted that Africa and Japan are accorded much less attention than China or India, that Latin America has been melted down to the atrocities committed against Montezuma by Hernándo Cortéz and his conquistadores, and that there’s barely a mention of Scandinavia or Ireland or North America. This is primarily a story of southern Europe and Britain, with an occasional long glance eastward. And many omissions: Apparently, Gombrich never considered—even in his late revisions—adding a passage to mark the founding of Israel and the modern agony suffered by the Middle East in the wake of the Balfour Declaration.

But this is a book one goes to for the imagination and resourcefulness of the storytelling, and for the way the teller takes the bird’s-eye moral measure of the individuals and groups he’s chosen to include. No two chapters follow quite the same map: One begins by plunging straight into the action, while another begins with a meditative analogy worthy of Pascal. One chapter concerns emperors and kings; the one that follows concerns the social classes and economic activity of a generalized town. Technological invention is always credited; cruelty, especially cruelty in the course of empire-building, is always remarked upon; and the book’s pacificism seems as much a child’s dream in our moment as it must have when the Nazis banned it.

A Little History is a collection of miniatures, chronologically arranged, which veer between poetry and ethics; and to be able to plunge into its wry voice, fantastical imagery and sheer reasonableness at the end of a dispiriting workday seems—to me, at least—a privilege. The respect for the reader on every page, along with certain passages profoundly reverent of innocence, are a kind of lost treasure unexpectedly restored.

It’s a book one wouldn’t hesitate to read to a child—though a final chapter, apparently written for the 1985 German edition, contains the author’s debate with himself about how much children ought to learn of cruelty, torture and mass murder, especially in the context of the Holocaust. (One is amazed to discover that even Gombrich—who emigrated to escape the Nazis—couldn’t believe the depth of the horror without extensive evidence.)

The chapters on the European Middle Ages evince particular care and joy in their making. Gombrich clearly had an affinity for that place and period; indeed, his granddaughter’s preface notes that the very first chapter he wrote the first time around was the one concerning the age of chivalry.

“What I have always loved best about the history of the world is that it is true,” Gombrich writes. “That all the extraordinary things we read were no less real than you and I are today.” Bitterness, cynicism, arrogance, puffery: Open A Little History to any paragraph, and it’s as if they had never been. Ernst Gombrich’s sensibility is both a mystery and a language.

Mindy Aloff’s anthology, Dance Anecdotes, will be published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

Although A Little History of the World has been translated into 18 languages since its original 1936 publication, with a reissue by a German publisher and revisions by the author in 1985, this is the first time it’s appeared in English. As Gombrich’s granddaughter, Leonie, explains in a preface as carefully articulated as her grandfather’s text, Gombrich’s second book was his landmark and still internationally popular chronicle for adults, The Story of Art—and he went on to write many other books. But despite repeated pleas from publishers, he never brought out an English edition of his first book. “It took the events of the 1990’s, and Britain’s increasing involvement in the European Union—as well as my grandmother’s tactful encouragement—to convince him,” Leonie Gombrich writes.

Assisted by Caroline Mustill, Gombrich reworked 10 of the chapters into English before he died; and, after his death, his granddaughter commissioned Ms. Mustill to complete the translation. In the course of his own effort, Gombrich refined some passages and laid out plans to write a few new chapters relating to England (to which he and his wife fled in the 1930’s) and the United States. However, even without his illuminations of Shakespeare, the Bill of Rights and the birth of parliamentary democracy, A Little History speaks to readers of any age. Its tone of voice is immediate and humane, like the writing of Gombrich’s American contemporaries E.B. White and Edwin Denby. The prose was tested by being read aloud, and it pleasures the ear as well as the mind.

The 40 chapters—each no more than four or five pages and each ornamented with its own evocative woodcut by Clifford Harper—bear out the book’s title more faithfully than one might expect in an unashamedly personal volume of less than 300 pages. This “little” history makes no pretense to being impartial or complete or innovative in its method. The major incidents and figures were selected according to what Gombrich thought most people remembered, or would if their upbringing and education had been like his. And, since he was looking through a sensibility that had been cultivated at the university level in pre–World War II Vienna, one finds much more about Germany, for instance, than the United States, whose entry on the book’s world stage is confined to a page or two: a few sentences on the 1776 Revolution, a brief summary of our institution of slavery, the Civil War.

Ever since A Little History’s initial publication, readers have noted that Africa and Japan are accorded much less attention than China or India, that Latin America has been melted down to the atrocities committed against Montezuma by Hernándo Cortéz and his conquistadores, and that there’s barely a mention of Scandinavia or Ireland or North America. This is primarily a story of southern Europe and Britain, with an occasional long glance eastward. And many omissions: Apparently, Gombrich never considered—even in his late revisions—adding a passage to mark the founding of Israel and the modern agony suffered by the Middle East in the wake of the Balfour Declaration.

But this is a book one goes to for the imagination and resourcefulness of the storytelling, and for the way the teller takes the bird’s-eye moral measure of the individuals and groups he’s chosen to include. No two chapters follow quite the same map: One begins by plunging straight into the action, while another begins with a meditative analogy worthy of Pascal. One chapter concerns emperors and kings; the one that follows concerns the social classes and economic activity of a generalized town. Technological invention is always credited; cruelty, especially cruelty in the course of empire-building, is always remarked upon; and the book’s pacificism seems as much a child’s dream in our moment as it must have when the Nazis banned it.

A Little History is a collection of miniatures, chronologically arranged, which veer between poetry and ethics; and to be able to plunge into its wry voice, fantastical imagery and sheer reasonableness at the end of a dispiriting workday seems—to me, at least—a privilege. The respect for the reader on every page, along with certain passages profoundly reverent of innocence, are a kind of lost treasure unexpectedly restored.

It’s a book one wouldn’t hesitate to read to a child—though a final chapter, apparently written for the 1985 German edition, contains the author’s debate with himself about how much children ought to learn of cruelty, torture and mass murder, especially in the context of the Holocaust. (One is amazed to discover that even Gombrich—who emigrated to escape the Nazis—couldn’t believe the depth of the horror without extensive evidence.)

The chapters on the European Middle Ages evince particular care and joy in their making. Gombrich clearly had an affinity for that place and period; indeed, his granddaughter’s preface notes that the very first chapter he wrote the first time around was the one concerning the age of chivalry.

“What I have always loved best about the history of the world is that it is true,” Gombrich writes. “That all the extraordinary things we read were no less real than you and I are today.” Bitterness, cynicism, arrogance, puffery: Open A Little History to any paragraph, and it’s as if they had never been. Ernst Gombrich’s sensibility is both a mystery and a language.

Mindy Aloff’s anthology, Dance Anecdotes, will be published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.

4th of July, Asbury Park: A
History of the Promised Land,
by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In
July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman (The
Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water)
and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old
house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old
houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves
possessed by “full-blown houselust.” They wanted it: Not the three-story,
arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it—dilapidated, attached
to a “telephone book” of code violations—but as they imagined it once was and
could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr.
Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir,
his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of
what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to
purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the
Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within
the city of Cleveland—a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the
course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As
anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have
predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they
bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the
contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the
original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their
marriage—already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman
having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which
her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his
personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the
renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short
drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child
when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The
Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation
adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that
House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that
looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts
to analyze—or at least recognize—a group of interrelated issues that have
implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the
suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a
suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed
“exurbs” or “edge cities”? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention
of self—so much a part of the American character—ever be reconciled with the
larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family
rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we
bequeath to the future?

Along
with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints
of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with
a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his
“sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality”—and
yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that “contentedness” will be
shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully
worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland,
where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital,
has been in the news recently as “the poorest city in the country,” based on the
results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31
percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to
jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though,
is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30
percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent
of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The
vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning
yet also fastidiously documented 4th of
July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American,
and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870,
when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his
“colored man,” the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey
Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley
had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip
as “our Robinson Crusoe life,” and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation:
He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by
building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might
convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a
well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After
some resistance, Baker also reported that “delight has come into my soul,” and
from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100
years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how
Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that
Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley
establishments that excluded them. By 1924—Asbury Park's heyday as a watering
hole for middle-class whites—it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and
the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at
that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, “more than Alabama,
or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia.” Thanks to spectacular
corruption as well—among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it
seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk—the town began to slide
into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of
much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a
leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The
one thing that the city fathers never tried—investing in the West Side, where
most of the black population has always lived—is still untried. Baker is still
being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to
a hotel for lunch.

Daniel
Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty (You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke).
4th of July—whose chapters are
ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the
times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years,
and of other watershed events—tenderly intertwines a summary history of
American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the
city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story
of Asbury Park—now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of
Bruce Springsteen's songs—is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book
reviews have appeared in The
New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to
freshmen at Barnard College.

4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman ( The Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water) and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves possessed by "full-blown houselust." They wanted it: Not the three-story, arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it-dilapidated, attached to a "telephone book" of code violations-but as they imagined it once was and could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr. Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir, his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within the city of Cleveland-a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their marriage-already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts to analyze-or at least recognize-a group of interrelated issues that have implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed "exurbs" or "edge cities"? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention of self-so much a part of the American character-ever be reconciled with the larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we bequeath to the future?

Along with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his "sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality"-and yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that "contentedness" will be shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland, where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital, has been in the news recently as "the poorest city in the country," based on the results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31 percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though, is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30 percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning yet also fastidiously documented 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American, and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870, when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his "colored man," the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip as "our Robinson Crusoe life," and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation: He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After some resistance, Baker also reported that "delight has come into my soul," and from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100 years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley establishments that excluded them. By 1924-Asbury Park's heyday as a watering hole for middle-class whites-it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, "more than Alabama, or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia." Thanks to spectacular corruption as well-among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk-the town began to slide into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The one thing that the city fathers never tried-investing in the West Side, where most of the black population has always lived-is still untried. Baker is still being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to a hotel for lunch.

Daniel Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty ( You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke). 4th of July-whose chapters are ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years, and of other watershed events-tenderly intertwines a summary history of American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story of Asbury Park-now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of Bruce Springsteen's songs-is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to freshmen at Barnard College.

The title of All in Good Time, a memoir by Jonathan Schwartz-short-story writer, novelist and the most well-respected radio D.J.-connoisseur of American popular song in the world-is perfectly tuned to the wavelength of his book, which is being republished in paperback this month. The author is the son of the Broadway and Hollywood songwriter Arthur ("Dancing in the Dark") Schwartz and his beautiful songbird first wife, Katherine Carrington, whose "malignant" (pulmonary?) hypertension, diagnosed before their son was conceived, made her a permanent semi-invalid and their child an effective outsider to his own family.

Jonathan was born in 1938, a year before the release of The Wizard of Oz, and one of the earliest stories he tells here is of Judy Garland momentarily leaving one of his parents' parties to sing him to sleep with a lullaby in his bedroom. Garland's personal life, derailed by a variety of factors beginning with alcoholism, isn't rehashed; still, Mr. Schwartz counts on us to remember the tragic details-especially when we learn that young Jonathan, a lonely voyeur of a boy suffering from gross, if privileged, neglect, was spiking his colas with Scotch by the time he was 10 years old.

Indeed, much of his life as a child seems to have been a matter of adding ingredients to experience. Consider Mr. Schwartz's boyhood remembrance of the lyricist Ira Gershwin, a Hollywood neighbor. He paints us a portrait of the living subject, "revered for his authentic modesty, for the brilliance and bulk of his work," and also of the lingering presence of Ira's brother, George, who'd died some years before and whose absence, for those who had eyes to see and the willingness to admit it, modulated the sunshine of the survivor's success:

"The evasion at Ira's house was the only occasionally acknowledged shadow of his brother by his side, close to the easy chair, near his racquet on the tennis court, at poolside next to his glass of orange juice, in the constant sway of the wind. I felt it as a child. Everyone else did, too: The blood rushes to the neck and cheeks. Hands and feet grow warm, though clouds have obscured the sun. Ira survives in the mist, sedentary. The chuckle. The lack of grandiloquence, the soft uncertainty of self, the conviction that the magic lay elsewhere, deceased, silenced well before the war, and, in dying, cutting down everyone's chances, chopping years off the far end of their futures."

"All in good time," the line cackled by Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz as a mortal threat to Garland's Dorothy, has a foreground meaning here of catastrophe in general and catastrophe endemic to showbiz kids in particular. And there's a latent meaning as well: "all in good time" in the sense of musical timing. Beyond the miseries of Jonathan's childhood, and those that the morbidly watchful child sensed in adults, are the deep bonds to his parents and to his own gifts as a writer, a singer and a critic-historian-bonds forged by a family passion for song and, later on, by Mr. Schwartz's exploration of the larger landscape of classical and popular music.

Music saved Jonathan Schwartz's life: It gave his intellect and emotions a focus, it stoked his imagination, it provided him with lines of communication to the world, and, even more than writing, it represented a standard of integrity and purity. Absent any religious upbringing ("My father's Jewishness went unacknowledged. I had no idea I was considered a Jew until high school …. My mother, so clearly Christian, had no idea in the world what she was"), he developed an attachment to music that went far beyond a performer's ambition or a critic's intellect: Music became his repository of the sacred.

When he tells his radio audience-as he did on a recent edition of his radio program The Sunday Show (carried in New York on WNYC-FM)-that the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic "If I Loved You," from Carousel, is "for me … the greatest moment in musical theater," his audience knows that he means it. He's listened to the panoply of songs over the history of musical theater, considered them and chosen this one: a double solo that becomes a duet as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow sing it to one another. Part of his choice can be reasoned, part is entirely intuitive personal taste, and he can both make the distinction for himself and explain it to an audience that doesn't have his mastery of the field.

The amazing thing about his memoir, though, is that all of its seriousness is latent. The actual narrative flies by, conversational in tone, inflected with humor, shockingly open about the author's mishaps and flaws, yet charmingly elusive about such matters as the physical particulars of his lovers-a simple beach read, it would seem. However, when one takes it apart to see how it's made, there's nothing simple about it.

The apparently casual transition between a phone call from his idol, Frank Sinatra, inviting him to come on over for a drink and his analysis of the way Sinatra attempted to exert control over his friends and colleagues has been prepared for 100 pages back: As a boy, Mr. Schwartz himself attempted to control his circle of family and friends with the invention of a primitive yet effective technology to achieve a radio broadcast in his apartment house.

This is a man who's able to wear his heart on his sleeve in middle age-who's comfortable with the idea that flowers are for the living-because, having written a suicide note in youth to his father, he didn't send it but instead filed it in the sleeve of a Sinatra LP. Underneath his response to "Ring-a-Ding-Ding" are the seething emotions of Tosca.

At one point, Mr. Schwartz says to his friend Lester Davis, "I am a disc jockey …. I wish you to feel music the way I do." Mr. Davis: "But Jonno, that's impossible. Your level of excitement is way out of my casual league." Mr. Schwartz counters, "That may very well be … but at least you could have the common decency to listen." And, speaking for Jonathan Schwartz's readers and listeners, Mr. Davis responds, "Oh, but I do."

Mindy Aloff's anthology, Dance Anecdotes, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King was one of them. In freshman English, along with Joyce and Kafka and Alain-Fournier, we were assigned Bellow's The Victim. In freshman philosophy, we read The Ethics of Spinoza. In later poetry courses, we read the work of Denise Levertov and Muriel Rukeyser. Not one of my English teachers in all four years was Jewish, and, with the exception of Levertov's poems about her family, I don't remember that the subject of whether the assigned writers were Jewish, Jewish-Dutch or Jewish-American was ever discussed. (Indeed, in Levertov's case, the discussion hardly rivaled those in senior year about the significance of Judaism to Leopold Bloom, who was neither a writer nor even a real person.) We were simply reading literature, good literature, which stood up well next to James and Chekhov and William Carlos Williams; that was why it was being taught.

You may notice that I haven't mentioned Philip Roth, who, when I was in college, was creating a stir in American letters with his short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus and, more sensationally, his novel Portnoy's Complaint. That's because no one mentioned him, at least in class. Indeed, the first book I acquired with his name on it was a copy of Tadeusz Borowski's permanently searing collection of short stories about Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, whose English translation was published by Penguin as part of a series of Eastern European writers for which Mr. Roth served as the overall editor. It would be 20 years before I discovered Mr. Roth's own brilliant fiction-and when I did, I simply classified it for myself as world literature, like that of the writers he served with such sobriety of purpose as an editor. Mr. Roth, like Bellow and Spinoza, writes for the world.

I happen to be the granddaughter of a rabbi and of a carpenter whose reading consisted almost entirely of Hebrew prayers in the synagogue, but my own identity isn't really germane to my reading. Isn't that what reading is all about-to transcend one's identity, to learn what one doesn't already know? This comes directly from my rabbi grandfather, born in Katzenellenbogen-by-the-Sea, whose favorite authors were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Browning.

So you can appreciate what a simple-minded soul-what a "Western secular humanist," as Chaim Potok might put it-your reviewer is. And how old.

Time to unscroll the 30 personal essays that comprise Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. "Unscroll" is the operative word. Of course, this adventuresome collection could be plundered arbitrarily, to find, for instance, which books have meant the most to Grace Paley, or what Art Spiegelman thinks his Jewish-American (or American-Jewish) identity is and how he's passing it along to his kids, or whom Allegra Goodman believes is her core audience, or how Leslie Epstein views his father's screenplays in light of the anti-Semitism underlying the HUAC investigations, or what Erica Jong thinks a Jew is. ("A Jew is a person who is safe nowhere.")

You can dip into this collection according to byline, but it isn't meant to be read that way. Its editor, Derek Rubin-a native of South Africa who grew up in Israel and now teaches American studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands-has carefully chosen his roster of contributors (all living at the time the book was put together, approximately half of them women) and then arranged their contributions in chronological order of their birth years. None are survivors of the Holocaust; all but three were born in the United States. However, several are children of survivors, including Melvin Jules Bukiet and Thane Rosenbaum, to whom Mr. Rubin offers special thanks for help.

The first half of the collection is overshadowed by Irving Howe's prediction that, as Steve Stern puts it, "with greater distance from the immigrant experience and without some authentic connection to community, so-called Jewish American fiction would become attenuated … in short, dry up." The second half is overshadowed by the concerns of the postwar generation, who feel the need to rebuild a sense of Jewish identity in a country that turned away many of the Jews fleeing the Nazis.

Who We Are is intended to be perused in sequence, as a symposium, and if you submit to that didactic process, the book suggests-with astonishing force-that the currently young generation of Jewish fiction writers, such as Ms. Goodman and Dara Horn, have rejected the austere distinction between Judaism as a faith and a tradition and writing as a universal activity unbounded by considerations of origin-the view articulated by Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Mr. Roth, E.L. Doctorow and, perhaps most persuasively, Alan Lelchuk.

Mr. Lelchuk writes: "Literature is a force for disturbing the complacencies of our reason, the prejudices of our emotion, the formulas of our language. In other words, it is a force for restabilization-at times revaluation-all in the interest of removing our bondage to the received wisdom of family, country, religion, whatever tyrannizes us in the helpless years of childhood and youth."

This is passionate, heady stuff, and Who We Are is richly endowed with it. The singular virtue of the collection, apart from the connoisseur's charm it offers of comparing the writing styles of 30 authors from four or five generations, is that the writers care about the issues they argue, and they make the reader care, too. Many readers will respond to Ms. Jong's anxiety about what it means to be Jewish; however, if there's one sentence to carry away, it's Philip Roth's: "The solution is not to convince people to like Jews so as not to want to kill them; it is to let them know that they cannot kill them even if they despise them." Whatever it means to be a Jewish writer, in America or elsewhere, below that statement one cannot go. Everything else is commentary.

Mindy Aloff, whose book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to freshmen at Barnard College.