Have you ever rearranged your stuff before visitors arrived? Exchanged the lowbrow books on the night table for better ones, reconsidered the bibelots, removed some of the items from the medicine cabinet, and put out better kitchen towels? Knowing full well the detecting habits of dinner guests, and the clues to be found in our things?

Leanne Shapton’s new book—a novelty more than a novel—trades on such powers. It’s a love story (or anyway an account of a four-year relationship) cast as an auction catalog of a contemporary couple’s possessions, joint and separate. A novel notion, yes.

But has there ever been a pair of protagonists more annoying than Lenore and Hal, respectively a New York Times food writer and a photographer? Don’t expect M. F. K. Fisher and Alfred Stieglitz, because you won’t find them here (though Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf makes a cameo appearance).

What you will find are Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. That’s the full name of this book. Also on the cover are the date of the auction—not incidentally Valentine’s Day of the present year—and the name of the auction house: Strachan & Quinn Auctioneers.

Inside, along with their worldly goods, are many photos of Lenore; of Hal; of Lenore and Hal—ostensibly taken by themselves but in fact the work of Jason Fulford, Kristen Sjaarda, Derek Shapton, Michael Schmelling and Leanne Shapton herself. The bespectacled Hal and blond, limp-haired Lenore are cast as one might cast them for a play. They look the part.

As does the very pretty author (photographed for her back-of-the-book bio by James Truman). Ms. Shapton is the art director of the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

I SHOWED Important Artifacts … to two actual antique dealers, whose collection of catalogs dates back some 200 years.

“This isn’t a book; it’s an auction catalog,” said the younger of them, who likes to spend his days reading. He tossed it aside.

“Humpf,” said the older antiquary, after reading it. “A celebrity auction of non-celebrities. Valueless things with nothing but provenance. A forensic novel without a crime.”

Just as bidders at celebrity auctions seem to think that material objects absorb the essence of their owners, Ms. Shapton seems to think that the things she photographs and puts into her book can imbue it with cachet. Include used bookstore volumes of Robert Lowell, and how can you be accused of being unliterary, even if your novel has almost no real writing in it?

Not that there isn’t some writing. It’s what moves the plot along. There are made-up emails; jotted-down thoughts (some culled from a cultish Smythson of Bond Street diary); and letters conveniently unsent, and tucked into books. Not to mention descriptions of the items photographed, as in an actual auction catalog.

Here’s a random sampling: On page six, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, containing an unfinished letter from Harold Morris to his closest friend.

On page 58, a group of five vintage hats, with inlaid photographs of Lenore wearing them.

On page 105, a lot comprising a photograph of Björk, a page from a book about Yoko Ono and a framed postcard of an Edward Weston nude. Also on that page: two first editions, a Faber and Faber Auden, and a Hogarth Press Woolf, from Lenore to Hal, and vice versa. Unbelievably—how dopey are these people supposed to be, anyway?—they’ve written cutesy inscriptions in the books, in the latter case on the flyleaf of the dust jacket.

Page 108 brings us a series of the couple posing as other couples: Hughes and Plath, Hemingway and Gelhorn, etc. And it isn’t even Halloween.

On page 116 (believe me, this is a quick “read,” despite the numbers) is Lot 1293, eight small pots of Farrow and Ball paint with names like “Arsenic,” “Dead Salmon” and “Savage Ground.”

How trendy does it get? Very. How touching? Not at all. How compelling? Unless you are of an age and disposition to use it as a “how to” book, not very. Thus one suspects this volume will be given, read, admired, blogged about and praised by a cultural in-crowd not unlike Lenore and Hal, who snitch salt shakers and display them.

It’s faintly possibly the whole thing is meant to be ironic, in which case I should apologize, because I took this enterprise at face value, and it tried my patience.

If you don’t like it either, you’re obviously just not cool. It’s original! It’s creative!

So don’t tell anyone. Just position it on your coffee table, and you’re good to go. Let the doorbell ring.

Nancy Dalva reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

Yes, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Boston Ballet and Miami City Ballet are all cousins, but only Miami is made in Villella’s image. Its virtues are his virtues, and what virtues they are! The company finally made it to New York last week, after visits to various nearby outposts, and what was not to love? There, on the stage of City Center, the theater in which he grew up and where he danced, was the kid from Bayside, Queens, with his own ballet company. It was a homecoming and a lovefest.

The programming was from heaven—perfectly assorted, logically progressed, thematically diverse, so that from ballet to ballet one met the dancers, got to know them better, and then gloried in the acquaintance, with upbeat, all-hands-onstage finales that sent one out of the theater exhilarated.

One program was all-Balanchine: Square Dance (1957), which is set to Vivaldi and Corelli; “Rubies” (1967), to Stravinsky; and Symphony in C (1948), known to balletomanes as “Bizet,” whose symphony is its perfect container.

The other program—the knock-your-socks-off one—led off with the galvanic Symphony in Three Movements (1972), set to Stravinsky’s score of the same name. Next came Mr. B’s La Valse (1951), to Ravel’s doomy, perfumey, utterly French score. The company’s command of the Parisian idiom—très Dior—came as no surprise to anyone who saw their gleaming, dreamy “Emeralds” in Newark several years ago. How right this work looks on the stage for which it was created. The intimacy, the synchrony, the seduction. Quel intoxication!

Finally, the Miami City Ballet took on Twyla Tharp’s epic, idiosyncratic and Edenic In the Upper Room (1992), in which sneakers meet pointe shoes and do battle—which in Tharpdom means that they mate, leaving everyone, onstage, in the house, in the wings, spent but gratified. And all to Philip Glass’ fabulous, heart-grabbing (in the medical sense) score.

HOW FRESH THESE Balanchine ballets are here; how finely detailed, with bits seemingly new, so lost have they been; and correspondences formerly invisible now clear. No smell of mothballs, no sense that the costumes have barely had the dust shaken out of them. No ballets-in-aspic! So lovingly, presently coached, both the steps and the style. To know that these works exist in the world like this—that one might go see them, and live in them again—is to live in hope, and in grace. That is what art is about, not after all, but first of all.

f all the marvelous moments of the company’s final three performances, the greatest—and greatest-hearted—was one of the curtain calls. Tharp, in the house for the Saturday matinee, watched the program and, unannounced, raced backstage, cast aside her winter coat, shawl and hat, and bounded onstage at the Upper Room curtain in her work boots, jeans and a sweater, her silver ponytail flying. She acknowledged the dancers. They beamed back at her. She curtsied deeply to the audience. Then she marched into the wings and came out again, leading Edward Villella. And there they stood, at City Center, where New York City Ballet used to dance, the Prodigal Son and his feisty little sister.

Behind them, the dancers of the Miami City Ballet, who everywhere reflect, refract and reembody Edward Villella’s virtues, if not his unique charisma and physique. (Some things really are once in a lifetime.) I wish I could name every member of the company, from the most polished of the ballerinas, Mary Carmen Catoya, to the most natural, Jeanette Delgado (one of two beauteous sisters, the other being the radiant Patricia). I can only say that I did what I always wish to do at the ballet: I fell in love, over and over. With bodies fully energized, even when still, and right down to the fingertips. And some with technique to spare, with time enough to phrase, to dilly here and dally there, and still arrive spot on the music.

And dancing that reflects the structure of the choreography—in the Balanchine, and, as it happens, the Tharp—when the choreographer carries the arc of the movement over the musical theme and into variation; when choreographer and music are partners, if you will, and the body shows this.

How? By having the upper body dance with the lower. If the melody is in the feet, the harmony is in the arms; or vice versa. Point, and counterpoint. Nothing arbitrarily decorative in the hands, but the various flourishes that are grace notes. And all in perpetual conversation. Thus an ease settled on the hall, a palpable delight. Everyone felt it. How do I know? From the sighs, from the ovations.

Robert Gottlieb, The Observer’s dance critic, is closely involved with the Miami City Ballet, and has therefore recused himself in favor of Nancy Dalva, who has written about dance for The New Yorker, The New York Times and 2wice.

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. —Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The return of The Witches of Eastwick?

If only. John Updike’s weird sisters, returned now as widows, aren’t so much wicked as weary, and wearying.

And yet Updike adepts will find much to admire in this late novel. If you’re happy to ignore certain elements (plot, for instance), you’ll find yourself in descriptive prose heaven. But if you prefer to fall blessedly into a book the way Alice fell down the rabbit hole—that is, if you still read naïvely—you’ll hate The Widows of Eastwick.

Or love it. Welcome to the next little skirmish in the literary gender wars.

SOME 30 YEARS HAVE gone by since Mr. Updike’s juicy trio of hags conjured themselves husbands and skipped town at the conclusion of Witches. And there are 24 actual years between the publication of these twinned novels.

One can only venture that these decades have not been kind to Mr. Updike, because he has revived Alexandra, Jane and Sukie, it seems, for the covert pleasure of hunting them down and stripping them—exposing them to his corrosive eye.

And nose. Mr. Updike’s is a sensory prose: observant, auditory and intensely olfactory. (The sex scenes depress not merely one’s appetite, but one’s appetites.) The weird sisters are in a merciless decline, leading one to wonder who the author’s muse or muses might be. His own self and soul? There’s such disgust here: “Fearful, as she bent over, of releasing a gust of rectal smell, Alexandra …” “[T]heir eyes helplessly fed on the wrinkles, the warts and scars, the … crêpey skin crinkled like smooth water touched by a breath of wind, the varicose veins and arthritic deformations with which time had overlaid their old beauty.”

The Widows of Eastwick is truly scary, but not for its events. I won’t give away what happens other than to say it includes revenge taken upon the witches for their previous magic—a tale of “guilt” and “guilt assuaged”—and involves a more elastic notion of sexuality than that in the original volume.

This polymorphous perversity would be what makes the sequel contemporary, I suppose. It will come as quite a surprise, I expect, to Jack Nicholson, who played the satanic witch seducer Darryl in the larky movie made out of Witches. (Yes, it’s fun to cast this second novel, though there’s no Darryl—you need two actresses who can convincingly be made to appear to be in their 70s, and one in her late 60s, plus some kind of ageless golden boy like Art Garfunkel, but suntanned.)

Mr. Updike seems an almost reluctant storyteller, taking up his first 100 pages or so with juiceless, dispiriting travelogues. It’s only a third or so through the novel that the witches regroup in Eastwick, R.I., in a couple of sad condos by the sea.

In search of lost brine … There we are in New England, rusting, rotting, putrefying. If this book has a useful unstated moral, it’s that for une femme d’une certaine âge, it’s better to be Parisian than Puritan. Not that Mr. Updike mentions Paris, but one can extrapolate. And plan.

SAD, SAD, SAD. A memento mori is one thing. “The heart beats time. Time beats us.” Constant reminders that we start to decay and molder not merely as a postlude to death, but as a prelude, are another thing altogether. This book will probably be best enjoyed by those not only in the full, smug bloom of youth, but also resistant to the depression triggered by the author’s accurate delineation of a certain male view of women, here sublimated in narrative, rather than embodied in a protagonist.

What are we to make of Jane’s “piquancy as it were, her unseen underside, the darkness she sat on, the heat and dirtiness …” ? And of this about a garden club lady: “[She] knew what women were, dirty and yearning and in need of being controlled.”

And poor Jane again: “She touched her breastbone, between her deflated little breasts; in her nakedness the gesture repulsively roused an image of the lightless world within her. …” Or how about this? “… [T]heir nether parts, hairy and odorous and for many Christian centuries unspeakable.” And this? “… [T]heir nests of once thick and springy curls turned gauzy and grey, pubic clocks ticking unseen, decade after decade, in their underpants.”

I’m no fan of passive aggression, authorial or otherwise, nor of the crone movement, which posits that wisdom replaces beauty and that house pets replace men and children in some sort of satisfactory swap, and that we should, as the years increase and time dwindles, cackle while we work.

FEMININITY RESIDES IN MORE than fertility; it’s a cast of mind and character. One is a woman, and thus all one’s acts and all one’s powers, whatever they may be, are ipso facto womanly, for all one’s life.

“Oh, that beautiful sang de menstruës. Who would ever think we’d miss it?” Jane asks Sukie, whose white roots will later show at the parting of her hair just as Jane’s do now.

“Nature,” says Alexandra, the kindest witch. “I used to think I loved it, but now that it’s chewing me to death, I realize I hate it and fear it.”

“Fear of something,” writes Mr. Updike, “makes it happen.”

The Widows of Eastwick made me afraid to be alive. I did finish the book. (I had to.) But I think henceforth I’ll read John Updike when he supplies the how of things—but the who, what, where and when come ready-made.

Updike on art, on sport, but not on life.

Nancy Dalva reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

IF YOU GO about your daily rounds in New York carrying a copy of David Sedaris’ new book, you will be popular—besieged, even.

"Where did you get that? I pre-ordered it and I don’t have it yet!"

Along the way—having promised to lend the book to everyone at the hair salon, and then spilling coffee on it and dog-earing the pages so frequently that it looks like a small accordion—you’ll meet the fans of Amy Sedaris, who joins her brother on the recordings of his books. These have their own cult following. (Yes, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is out in audio, too.)

You may have heard Mr. Sedaris yourself on Ira Glass’s radio show called This American Life. His voice sounds just like his writing.

It’s a little scary, thinking of people driving around listening to these essays, what with the wincing and cringing—body fluids! bugs! dirty hair! cadavers and cadaver parts!—what with the laughing out loud. Then there are the various pangs of recognition, delight, dismay and admiration.

David Sedaris doesn’t tell jokes. So I can’t simply lift a line or two out of his book and have it represent his humor. The essays are careful accretions of detail and incident that build to some kind of payoff, perhaps a laugh, perhaps a jolt of identification. The Sedaris genius is to be incredibly particular, not to mention peculiar, and yet take fantastic and rapid leaps to the universal.

His writing perfectly illustrates the English teacherish notion that giving specific examples allows the author to draw general conclusions: He’ll be telling some weird story, and all of a sudden, just at the end, it turns out not only to be about him, but also about you. He’s a master at evoking fellow feeling.

You tend to think about words when reading Mr. Sedaris, who himself may have pondered the distance between fan and fanatic, maybe that time in a YMCA dressing room in El Paso when a young man said to him, "Excuse me, but aren’t you …"

At the time, our author was naked. It’s a state you meet Mr. Sedaris in more than you meet, say, James Thurber, another humorist who mined his family for material. Indeed, in Naked (1997), one of his five previous books, Mr. Sedaris writes about his foray into formalized nudism.

In "The Smoking Section," the last essay in the new collection, he travels into territory so ineluctably grim there’s no way out: He goes to Hiroshima, while living in Japan, in order to stop smoking.

He allows us to recover, after a fashion, from that city’s memorial museum by listing some strange English from a hotel pamphlet’s section on safety. One paragraph is headed "When You Are Engulfed in Flames."

THERE ARE, and I am categorizing loosely, four varieties of essay in this collection: recent everyday experiences heightened by acute self-observation; satire; Sedaris family history; and bizarre extended exercises in participatory journalism.

These last would include that trip to Japan. If there’s a fly in the Sedaris ointment—and I’m not saying there is—it would be that his most poignant material comes from the time before he became a writer. Though there are some wonderful essays about his recent life, you can’t help suspecting that some of the time he’s doing things in order to write about them. (But maybe not. Maybe he’s just the kind of guy who feels compelled to try out that "external catheter currently being marketed to sports fans, truck drivers, and anyone who’s tired of searching for a bathroom.")

Imagine the horror vacuum when you have to fill up a blank page with something you first have to go out and do. You become, in effect, your own energetic spectator. It’s enough to send one back to bed.

Mr. Sedaris is much more disciplined than that. He learns languages. He lives on several continents. He undertakes lecture tours. He earns an excellent living, which he no longer disguises, as he tended to earlier on. (How long can one sustain the stance of the dropout, the dope fiend, the innocent abroad, when one is, for heaven’s sake, a regular contributor to The New Yorker?)

A MORDANT CRITIC of others, Mr. Sedaris is more scathing about himself than about anyone else, except possibly his father. All the time, he’s horribly observant. He sees things as they are.

"Most people would have found it grotesque," he writes about a large French spider, "but when you’re in love, nothing is so abstract or horrible it can’t be thought of as cute. It slayed me that she had eight eyes, and that none of them seemed to do her any good."

When all is said or read, there’s this: Mr. Sedaris is good at loving the world and its denizens, despite occasional fits of petty loathing, for which he punishes himself by telling us about them.

As for being loved, there’s his admirable partner, Hugh; his sisters; his friends; and all those people whizzing by you on the turnpike, pedal to the metal, hooting in delight.

"[You] had to laugh," David Sedaris writes about a Kabuki performance called Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, "but at the same time you couldn’t help being moved. And that, I think, is the essence of a good show." Ah, so.

Nancy Dalva reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

Elizabeth Kendall has written a memoir in the voice and guise of her own wardrobe. Individual garments, or outfits, star in each of her 47 short chapters, and then come an epilogue, an appendix—where to shop!—and a bibliography.

Only in the epilogue does the writer I know from her articles and her other books surface. The rest is a disguise, an ingenious way to view her young self, until age 30. The wardrobe is a device, a conceit: "I am B’s wardrobe, her ever-evolving second skin. She is My inhabitant. My partner, My Body—My B."

A way to sneak past the ego, to the id. Beginning with a swaddling blanket, this wardrobe is a psychiatrist who sees its wearer naked. And the wearer sees the wardrobe. For what do we see more often then our clothes, except our hands? At first we see what’s chosen for us to wear, and later, what we choose for ourselves, or allow to be chosen for us. (The surplice, the cassock, the wimple, the crown.) Often we find our wardrobes in old photographs, and those images begin to take precedence, supplanting memory. But memory can be recovered.

Ms. Kendall’s Autobiography of a Wardrobe begins, improbably, in a "Sensitivity Training" class at Harvard, where she was pursuing a graduate degree in education.

"The teacher told them," the wardrobe writes, "to close their eyes, and imagine, in their hands, a book. The book was their own autobiography. …" Ms. Kendall closes her eyes, and remembers "something she had no idea she remembered." Herself, getting dressed, in "small red corduroy overalls." (Corduroy, so common now, but once, in its original French, "the cloth of kings.") Later, Ms. Kendall’s recursive narrative will take us back to the red overalls, but for now, this is her beginning.

And ours, too, because this book serves, incidentally but powerfully, as a how-to. Sensitivity training for the reader. Impossible not to remember your own clothes—what you wore, and where, and when.

You will find yourself remembering occasion outfits, obsessively worn outfits, travel outfits, and then, towards the end, your closets, which guard your outfits. (You ought to lock your closet, really. Anyone who peeks in there can see you naked.) If you wore the kinds of clothes Ms. Kendall wore, or something like, you will be her fellow traveler. And if you’ve seen the author around town, you’ll have met her wardrobe. An outfit Ms. Kendall wore to give a talk at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Crisp blue button-down shirt, man tailored. Short brown leather skirt. And, improbably and surprisingly, black fishnet hose. Flat shoes. Slender legs. Shiny bobbed hair.

Another Kendall outfit, at a downtown book party: black jersey dress, limpid, clinging, longish. Dark hose, dark shoes, dark eyes, dark hair, pale skin: Isak Dinesen meets Claudette Colbert. She is—not after all, but first of all—a writer and a historian. Her first book, Where She Danced (1979), was about Isadora Duncan and her early modern sisters. Her second, a film history, was The Runaway Bride (1990). Her own memoir (not her wardrobe’s) is American Daughter (2000), and if you’ve read it, you know the terrible moment that all her life seems to lead to, and away from: The death of her mother, in a car, in the rain, on a bridge, with Ms. Kendall at the wheel, and her brothers and sisters in the back seat.

It’s no wonder she chooses to write about herself obliquely this time, her prose well-armed with poetic devices. The wardrobe calls her mother "the mother." Not Mommy, not Mother. The wardrobe is dispassionate about everything except clothing.

"I, a spirit, was much freer than she. …"

The wardrobe is all ego. It has no guilt. It’s impatient, it’s accusing. It is, naturally, superficial. And yet—not. At the front of her book, Elizabeth Kendall quotes Edith Wharton, Eugenia Ginzburg, Emily Dickinson. Three women writers also provide the quotations on the back cover. Women writers. This is a feminine text, no matter the occasional androgyny of the wardrobe, with its strong impulse to "resist the demure, the nice, the girly." Ms. Kendall is a woman, and all her clothes are, ipso facto, womanly.

"I am magic and the possibility of transformation," says the wardrobe.

But that’s a fairy tale, along with the pumpkin coach, the rodent footmen, the glass slipper, and the prince. It’s writing—and reading—that is magic, and possibly, transformative. We know this. And so does Elizabeth Kendall.

Nancy Dalva reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

Okay, I confess. I Facebook-stalked Sloane Crosley, and she has some very cool friends, including Leon Neyfakh, who profiled her for The Observer (“The Most Popular Publicist in New York”—Nov. 27, 2007). So believe me, I was totally psyched not to like her book of personal essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. I’ve never had this problem of instantly wanting to hate Nora Ephron (my goddess), or David Sedaris, or even Cynthia Heimel or Fran Lebowitz, and I’m basically too in awe of Adam Gopnik’s organizational skills to begin to check him out on the Web. But this is different. Just for starters, I can’t decide whether to identify with the author or with her parents. I might even have been Sloane Crosley, if I’d had a better work ethic, straighter hair and a different life.

Or at least I might have been one of her friends. We could have hung out at book signings. Maybe she’d have been my publicist, and I’d have had excellent quotes on the back of my book, from some of the authors she represents. She’s got Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Ames, Meghan Daum, Colson Whitehead, Andy Borowitz and A. M. Homes on the back of hers. They call her “charming, elegant, wise and comedic,” “bright and funny and enchanting,” not to mention “hilarious” (twice), “affecting” and “wry, generous, knowing.” How great is that? She also has awesome eyebrows, as you can see from the author photo.

But I can’t hate her—because, let’s face it, this is a funny book, and also a wistful book and a touching book. I don’t get all of the references, which makes me feel out of it, which I guess I am, and I deplore some of the grammar and usage. For instance, you’re the “younger” of two sisters, not the “youngest.” This is kind of like Facebook, actually, where “their” is always used instead of “his or her.” (See “Fuck You, Columbus,” where one sentence starts “Anyone who has endeavored to transport themselves. …”)

Mostly what I deplore is the insidious and instinctive ageism that underlies I Was Told There’d Be Cake. It’s cruel, the same way life is.

And I remember feeling the same way, back when miniskirts were news, and—to borrow a line from Wendy Wasserstein (whom I loved too much to envy)—Dinah Shore roamed the earth. So I felt old, and over, not only reading about Sloane Crosley, but also reading her.

Except when I was laughing. Or relating. Hers is a good book to read while eating breakfast some time in the afternoon, in a diner, in Manhattan. It’s totally a New York book, except when it’s just outside New York, trying to get here.

THERE ARE 15 essays in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, and my favorites are a long one about being a bridesmaid, and anything that includes the author’s father. I just love Mr. Crosley, who’s got a mordant sense of humor and can stalk with the best of us. He once tracked Sloane down by calling everyone in her old address book. You can tell Sloane (I should call her Ms. Crosley, I suppose, but it’s hard, because when you’ve read about her, you have the illusion you’re friends) loves him, too. And her mother: In “Fever Faker,” Mrs. Crosley takes Sloane to lots of doctors, right before she leaves for college. “Her empty-nest insanity had gotten the best of her and she temporarily forgot that Connecticut wasn’t Calcutta.”

One of the great things about Sloane Crosley is how unapologetically girly she is. Hers is a generation that doesn’t feel obliged to apologize for shaving (uh-oh, here comes a grammar issue) its legs. Nora Ephron said it best: “The only lasting legacy of the women’s movement is the Dutch treat.” But it’s also true that these 20-somethings are feminism’s daughters. Or nieces. Smarter, more accomplished sooner, less conflicted. Taller. Maybe it’s something we ate, but my generation can be proud.

In some of these essays, Ms. Crosley makes a big deal of her own solipsism. But she’s a nice person, and not the only one who doesn’t want to share her good shampoo with a significant other. Also, she has a conscience, and she’s hyper self-aware. And what used to be called “in the know.”

Sloane Crosley knows, for example, exactly what kinds of feelings her book will inspire, which you can tell by reading her interviews, which you can find on Google.

Or you can just read her book.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, and then a member of that pride of boomers who came of age in the 70’s. And so he’s concocted an unlikely tale whose true arc is to get out of the range of Bloomingdales and into the wilds of Queensland, which he portrays as a ramshackle redoubt for the most disenfranchised of the pot-addled, dropout generation. Here, far from the chic haunts of what used to be called “Bergdorf Goodman hippies,” he elaborates a lengthy double kidnapping.

First our feckless heroine, nicknamed “Dial” (short for dialectic), inadvertently abducts our hero. He’s 7-year-old Che (a child of SDS lefties), and theirs is an Oedipal folie à deux. Dial intends to take him for a visit with his mother, Susan, only to discover that Susan has been (rather conveniently) blown up in some radicalism-gone-wrong in Philadelphia. (Mr. Carey mines actualities of the day for ballast, and for leverage.)

When Dial discovers pictures of herself and the boy broadcast on television, she panics, and goes, as the boy hears it, “on the lamb.” The author transports them, via the left coast underground, to Australia. Along the way, he kidnaps the reader, who spends much time yearning for release from the overripe vegetation and meager cerebration of their eventual hide-out and its unwashed inhabitants.

MR. CAREY HAS written nine novels, two of which have won the Booker Prize: Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). His gift for vivid description includes a kind of noxious genius for the olfactory: for scorched toast, for vomit, for armpits. His writerly gifts also encompass an ability to slip inside the heads of his characters, and then out again, into authorial omniscience. But although he himself was, obviously, once a 7-year-old boy, his Che seems not so much precocious as improbable—fictional, but not in a good way. Or at least so it seems to someone who’s been the mother of such a creature.

A mother is what Che wants, and a father to rescue him. When Dial, who was his baby sitter in childhood (and whose only lover has been his father), appears at his grandmother’s upscale door, he hurls himself at her, in the conviction that she’s the mommy he’s been waiting for. She looks different from her pictures, but that’s pushed aside. Longing triumphs in His Illegal Self, which is a fantasy of wish-fulfillment. For Dial, in turn, loves the child.

The plot proceeds not so much in flashbacks as in switchbacks—a zigzag progression that involves flash-forwards to events that will occur after the book’s ending. Thus the author makes sure we know the boy will be safe. Indeed, we know he will end up in analysis in Manhattan. Mr. Carey wants our attention on the present, without too much worrying about Che’s ultimate safety.

Will the boy realize that Dial isn’t his mother? Will their nudist lawyer get them back to New York? Will the largely unappealing Trevor, the book’s significant adult male—unlettered, paranoid and outlawish—turn out to be friend, or foe? Is he a Caliban or a Ferdinand? Just when we think we can’t stand it anymore, Mr. Carey feeds us backstory, enlists our sympathy, invites us to care. Che wants to be loved, and so does this novel.

EARLY ON, THE author introduces the notion of the “DP,” or displaced person. For a while, wondering what inspired this thinly motivated story, I had the idea that Mr. Carey himself felt displaced, perhaps unloved. Awash in the novel’s soup of parent-hunger and child-longing, carried deeper and deeper into a landscape I neither recognized nor enjoyed, I began to feel displaced myself, the unwitting captive on a heedless and bizarre hegira. Looking back—the novelist does it all the time—I see now that Mr. Carey’s Queensland is a green world, a wilderness, one of those places where ordinary rules don’t apply and true natures are revealed.

Alas, the novel is compromised by its own primary conceit: that abduction is adoption. It is not. Mr. Carey gives short and unsympathetic shrift to Che’s grandmother (who calls him “Jay”) until very late in the game, when we learn about the nice “Victorian” desserts she used to serve. Meanwhile, though her pain remains conveniently off the page, her wealth and high-handedness do not. She’s more caricature than character. (It’s possible that the least sympathetic reader of this novel would be a mother, for whom kidnapping is a particular horror.)

The end of His Illegal Self is a last-page triumph of Freudian triangulation and future-flash so brilliant it knocks you out. Peter Carey can dazzle. He can write. But whether you will like this book is another story, as much yours as his. Objectivity may be desirable, but subjectivity is all.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

In her second novel—the first was the very well-received The Seas (2005)—Samantha Hunt has used her quite singular voice to animate a crowd of characters. The Seas was more or less a work of magic realism, a very grim fairy tale, with a feeling like (though none of the particulars of) the movie Edward Scissorhands. Creepy, disturbing, poetical. There was one main character, a young woman.

The Invention of Everything Else is infinitely more complicated, combining that same magic realism with historical fiction, science fiction, the history of science and architectural history, not altogether smoothly. It gives one pause, all this combined fact and fancy. Is genre fusion the hallmark of postmodern literature? At times The Invention of Everything Else reads like several books at once.

The heroine of this novel is the fictional Louisa, a nosy 24-year-old hotel chambermaid who, while living with her mournful, widowed father, works and snoops at the Hotel New Yorker. This towering edifice, itself extensively anatomized, was the last residence of the visionary electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. He’s the novel’s central figure, if not exactly its hero.

The inventor of alternating current and the radio, Tesla was of course an actual person, albeit one who has enjoyed a lively postmortem life as a character in a congeries of cultural items. These include not only books—both biographical and fictional—but also movies, comics, radio and television programs, video games and contemporary music. Born in Croatia in 1856, he really did live in the Hotel New Yorker, where he died in 1943, the year in which this novel is, for the most part, set. Brilliant but impractical, he was considered eccentric, being, among other things, a celibate vegetarian gripped by obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Other principal figures include a rather enchanting time traveler named Azor, and a tall, dark stranger he may have brought from the future for purposes of romance with Louisa. The tall, dark stranger’s name is Arthur. There are also guest appearances in fictional scenes by real people who really did cross paths with Tesla, among them Albert Einstein and Mark Twain.

And there’s a talking pigeon who’s Tesla’s love interest. He thinks of her as his wife.

Actually, The Invention of Everything Else is lousy with pigeons, in coops on roofs, and on the hotel ledge. Tesla’s sweetheart pigeon first appears in a characteristic early scene that also includes, on a speaking basis, a “real” policeman, a bust of Goethe (a talking head) and a personified (slithering) “question” that settles down next to Tesla on a park bench and is left undescribed. Thus is thought made visible, at least to the thinker. Much more concerns the invisible—namely, electricity and its powers.

The author is rapturous, vividly in love with her subjects and her characters—the reader will either share these enthusiasms, or not. She’s in love, too, with literary devices such as alliteration, rhyme, metaphor and anthropomorphism. And she’s given to annoyingly oddball descriptions, and to using words in unusual contexts, as when the young Tesla yearns to “hide away ... in the fronds of breakfast.” Her plot includes multiple flashbacks. Further, there are fragmentary interpolated scenes of Louisa’s interrogation by federal agents.

To find a single overarching theme for this tricky book is tempting. Time travel, with its inherent desire for transcendence and recapture is, I think, an alluring red herring. We all want death to have no dominion. But the pigeons are our surest clue. They do what humans have always yearned to do, and still cannot: fly. Early on, the young Tesla jumps from a roof. Later, Louisa and Arthur jump off a cliff. All three expect to fly, and all three crash to the ground.

Those jumps are leaps of faith. As is writing a novel and sending it off into the world. Reading is yet another leap of faith. We open the cover, and fall into another world.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

According to Bill Bryson, “The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. … The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day.” Yet here’s another, written by Mr. Bryson himself, “not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare,” he candidly admits, “as because this series does.”

The series in question is Eminent Lives, which describes itself as “brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” (The general editor, James Atlas, is the matchmaker.) Thus, Mr. Bryson sets off on a mission: “[To] see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.”

The short answer to this is not much. We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. “His sexuality,” Mr. Bryson deduces, “is an irreconcilable mystery.”

On and on go the disclaimers: “We know precious little ….” “We hardly know what he was as a person.” “Ever a shadow in his own biography, he disappears, all but utterly ….” And yet Shakespeare: The World as Stage is not an ongoing discouragement, because Mr. Bryson is so cheerful as he goes about debunking received wisdom, cockamamie theories, eccentric research and serious but flawed scholarship. Like Show White sweeping up for the Seven Dwarfs, he whistles while he works.

Mr. Bryson begins by telling us what Shakespeare did (or did not) look like. Here’s his very first sentence, about the onetime owner of a Shakespeare likeness now in the National Portrait Gallery: “Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.” Right off, the author’s established his blithe and sunny tone: If a trio of witches were cooking up this book in a cauldron, there’d be a pinch of P.G. Wodehouse, a soupçon of Sir Osbert Lancaster and a cup of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One can be firm of purpose and blithe at the same time, it turns out; one can write a seriously entertaining book.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is aimed at general readers, not Shakespeare scholars, though the latter do make appearances now and then, not always is a flattering light, but always entertainingly. It will be up to academics to re-ravel what Mr. Bryson has unwound. Along these lines, the last chapter—“Claimants”—is particularly pleasurable, as the author trounces various theorists of alternative authorship of the plays. The Bard could hardly have a more devoted advocate. For instance, there is Mr. Bryson’s marvelous and succinct rebuttal of the Christopher Marlowe claim: “He was the right age … had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.” How nicely ironic it is that Mr. Bryson is now himself a kind of über-academic, having been named chancellor of Britain’s Durham University in 2005, and being very active in the preservation of the “rural life” of Merrie England.

Which, according to Mr. Bryson, wasn’t so merry in Shakespeare’s day. For after he tells us what we don’t know about Shakespeare, and some few facts that we do, Mr. Bryson proceeds to contextualize his subject by depicting his time. Here, where facts abound, the author is in his element. He gives us pages and pages of lists about Elizabethan, and then Jacobean life: about food, clothes, printing methods, theatrical practice, language and its orthography, usage and evolution, and much, much more. It’s as if you came to visit me, and when someone said, “What’s she like?”, proceeded to describe my apartment in detail, including an inventory of its contents, a description of the original floor plan, and a copy of the co-op bylaws. We learn about Shakespeare, sometimes minutely—but we’re never, as it were, in the room with him.

Mr. Bryson goes off at times on amusing tangents, makes pointed parenthetical remarks and is otherwise completely charming and conversational, like a good host. The pleasure of his company cannot, to borrow a phase from him, “be emphasized too strenuously.”

He’s neither a literary critic nor an English professor, yet one wishes, at times, that he’d written a bit more about the writing rather than the writer. Only here and there, as in the chapter titled “The Plays,” do we have a sense of the deep pleasure he takes in reading Shakespeare, as opposed to sleuthing around after him. “It is often said,” Mr. Bryson writes, “that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language.”

Just as we know to some degree how Shakespeare knew what he knew, we also know the same to some degree about Mr. Bryson, for he provides a Selected Bibliography listing “principal books referred to in the text.” There are some three dozen of these, the earliest dating from 1910, the most recent from 2006. But just as significant as these sources are the people Bryson visits (among them an expert in portraiture, an archivist at the National Archives in West London and an assortment of scholars) and the places he goes. As you may know, in addition to being the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), Mr. Bryson is a very well loved travel writer, and what he’s done here is not so great a departure from that genre.

In this book he time-travels. An American expat born in Des Moines, Iowa, a Briton by choice, Bill Bryson is an intentional and perpetual tourist, and it’s a great pleasure to accompany him on his foray into the 16th century.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.

… Enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. —Steve Martin

Being funny isn’t fun. At the height of his great success as a stand-up comedian (crowds of 45,000), Steve Martin suffered from depression, exhaustion and the loneliness of the road. In 1981, at the top of the roller coaster, he walked away, into the movies. And into writing for them, and for The New Yorker, among other things. He’s very good at it; he’s a pleasure to read. But this memoir, one suspects, is something of a magic act. As if Steve Martin had reached into his magician’s top hat and instead of a rabbit, pulled out “Steve Martin.”

“In a sense this book is not an autobiography, but a biography,” he tells us, “because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else.” Indeed, Mr. Martin used his own archives (he has a professional archivist) and interviewed old friends while writing, as if researching somebody else—a somebody who wouldn’t always talk to him. Born Standing Up isn’t a tell-all, it’s a tell-some, a controlled and elegant act of revelation. Now you see him. And then, when he doesn’t want you to, you don’t.

“Yes,” Mr. Martin would tell his audiences, “I am … a wild and craaazy guy.” Yet Mr. Martin was never wild and crazy, only “Steve Martin” was. He’s the visceral creation of a cerebral Geppetto. What looked like spontaneity onstage, we learn in this book, was the result of endless split-second calculation, constant self-spectatoring and accountlike after-the-fact analysis. Indeed, as a young magician, he kept “scrupulous records of how each gag played after my local shows for the Cub Scouts or Kiwanis Club.”

He begins his look back on “a humid Monday night in the summer of 1965” in San Francisco, when he was 20 years old, and from there doubles back to his childhood, introducing the people to whom this book is dedicated: his father (an actor manqué who harbored an irrational anger towards the son who closely resembled him), his mother (a clotheshorse who adored fashion) and his sister. “I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian,” he writes, using humor to damp down distress.

His mother (called “Mama”) and father (called “Glenn,” even by his children) will remain in the background after the opening chapters, but resurface from time to time, just as they might in psychoanalysis. “When I moved out of the house at eighteen,” Mr. Martin writes, “I rarely called home to check up on my parents or tell them how I was doing. Why? The answer shocks me as I write it: I didn’t know I was supposed to.” Nonetheless, over time he reconciles and more, delighting his mother with his celebrity, if not talent. “He writes his own material,” she said in an interview. “I’m always telling him he needs a new writer.” His father, in turn, told a local newspaper that “Saturday Night Live is the most horrible thing on television.” Sour grapes, for sure. When he hit the big time, Mr. Martin hired his father as his realtor, and gave his mother a clothing allowance that made her “ecstatic.” Later, he will recount his last visit with each of them, so by the end of this memoir, his stand-up act is over, and his parents are dead, too.

HIS FIRST EXPOSURE to comedy was in the family car, listening to the radio, and in the family living room, watching television: Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Amos ’n’ Andy, Jack Benny, Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton. At age 10, he had his first employment in showbiz—selling guidebooks at Disneyland—where he eventually landed his dream job: working in Merlin’s Magic Shop, where he put together an act. It was in the back of Merlin’s Magic Shop that he saw an Japanese postcard captioned “Happy Feet” (it showed the feet of a couple making love, one pair pointing up, one down), the name he would later give his marvelous nutty dancing. By then, physicality has become as important to him as cerebration.

Meanwhile, it was on to vaudeville, and teaching himself the banjo by “slowing down banjo records on my turntable and picking out the songs note by note,” and thence to college, where he studied philosophy and considered becoming an academic. At night in bed, he listened to comedy records: Nichols and May, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer. And so Mr. Martin became a theoretical comedian. He discovered “that comedy could evolve.” His formal concepts included the notions of total originality, the premise that everything in the act happened to him, and the notion of being “avant-garde.”

“The act tightened,” he says. “It was true I couldn’t sing or dance, but singing funny and dancing funny were another matter.” In sum, he was a writer and choreographer working for an actor who played a comedian: “I was an entertainer who was playing an entertainer.”

Along with great success, for which he worked like a demon, love came calling here and there. Mr. Martin has only kind words (and the occasional wonderful description) for his attachments, holding merely a mild animus toward the late John Frankenheimer, who stole Mr. Martin’s delicious girlfriend Mitzi Trumbo—and, 20 years later, hit on his then-wife, the dishy Victoria Tennant. In the interim, Mr. Martin wrote for TV, did comedy on afternoon talk shows, and broke into the limelight via The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.

The latter was a rare source of delight for him, as was working with the director Carl Reiner, with whom he made his first film, The Jerk (1979). “The world of movie making had changed me,” he writes. “Carl Reiner ran a joyful set.” At last.

If I were going to give someone this book, I’d be tempted to include a DVD of All of Me, the movie Mr. Martin made in 1984 with Lily Tomlin and Ms. Tennant, with Mr. Reiner directing. The concept is that Ms. Tomlin, a spoiled, whiny, and deceased heiress, has inhabited Mr. Martin’s body—exactly half of it. His physical comedy here is truly marvelous. At the film’s very end, he and Ms. Tomlin dance together to “All of Me,” and the sequence is as happy and romantic as anything you’ll ever see. It looks, of course, spontaneous. You cannot read this book and not wish for Steve Martin the same thing in real life: joy, and happy feet.

Nancy Dalva, senior writer at 2wice, reviews books regularly for The Observer. She can be reached at ndalva@observer.com.