Even a quick study of the cerebral crew known as the New York intellectuals reveals that the female of the species never received the attention she deserves. For the most part, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Jean Stafford, Diana Trilling and Elizabeth Hardwick wrote as much as-and, in the case of Arendt, more and better than-their male counterparts, and yet the women were usually banished to the back room of the Partisan Review clubhouse. Histories of the group have done little to rectify this oversight; while women's names are sprinkled liberally on the dust jackets and in the indexes, even the finest accounts-such as Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals (1987) and Alexander Bloom's appropriately titled Prodigal Sons (1986)-are mostly devoted to the "boys": Daniel Bell, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Dwight Macdonald.

The bias is particularly odd because-as David Laskin points out in Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals -the women's achievements may be the notable feature in this period of American intellectual history. "As a generation, these women had unprecedented opportunities-to write, to publish and edit, to stand up as public figures, to marry multiple times and have love affairs as they desired," he writes. Indeed, among the many reasons the New York intellectuals capture our imagination is that their literary accomplishments didn't preclude equally robust social lives. The "P.R. girls," as their nemesis Diana Trilling called them, "were lucky enough to encounter a generation of men who were interested in their minds as well as their bodies and as eager for their work as their love," Mr. Laskin writes.

Work versus love, writing versus "wifely duties"-herein lies the tension, both for the women and for Mr. Laskin. Any successful intellectual biography strikes a delicate balance between the work and the life. Focus too tightly on the former and you have a dissertation; stick too closely to the latter and you get a cocktail of salacious anecdotes. In order to reconcile these approaches, Mr. Laskin pairs off his subjects much as he did in A Common Life (1994), his book about literary friendship and influence. "As wives and husbands they were most fully and unconsciously themselves," he writes in Partisans . "Marriage was their mode, their stage, their fallback position, their default option."

The concept of marriage has an almost talismanic hold over Mr. Laskin, who argues that the group's serial devotion to matrimony reveals something essential about them as intellectuals. Marriage is crucial to his enterprise not because the New Yorkers married frequently, but because they married badly-a "theme" that gives him an excuse to fill his book with truckloads of gossip.

Think of Partisans as a pointy-head bio-pic, a docudrama about intellectuals that does its best to avoid their ideas. The skittish, clichéd segues with which Mr. Laskin lurches from textuality to sexuality are the stuff of parody. "But it wasn't all high-minded analysis and embattled idealism down at the seedy little P.R. office near Union Square," he reassures the reader after a meager one-paragraph history of Partisan Review . "There was also plenty of gossip, intrigue, and back stabbing, as well as off-hours boozing and competitive sex." Page after page, Mr. Laskin dissects these flamboyantly disastrous marriages-in particular McCarthy's to Wilson, and Lowell's to Stafford and, later, to Hardwick-with the fastidiousness of a Talmudic scholar poring over Scripture. "The evidence is highly suggestive that Wilson did in fact beat [McCarthy] up in June 1938 and that the beating was traumatic enough, whether physically or mentally, to bring on a psychological collapse," he concludes soberly.

Simon & Schuster files this book under "women's studies"; given the author's fascination with marital violence, why not "Comp-Hit"? Not content to describe every lurid episode in detail, he constructs a carefully calibrated hierarchy of wretched behavior. "Certainly there is a stronger case against Lowell for spousal abuse than against Edmund Wilson," he reasons after a particularly spicy passage. It seems that McCarthy got off relatively easy compared to Stafford, who was permanently disfigured in a car crash she believed was Lowell's attempt at murder-suicide. Remarkably, she agreed to marry him after their high-speed "courtship." ("He said he was in love with me and wd. I marry him and to avoid argument I said sure, honey, drink your beer and get me another one," she writes to a friend.) One reads in horror as Ms. Stafford announces their marriage; in the same letter she describes Lowell-accurately, it turns out-as "an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet." Ah, love.

It's not entirely fair to say that Partisans is pure gossip. Because Hannah Arendt's marriage to Heinrich Blücher was relatively peaceful, Mr. Laskin is forced to discuss her work, which he does quite well. The connections he draws between the New Yorkers and the Southern Agrarian writers are also intriguing, although one suspects he includes literary critic Allen Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, out of prurient interest in their long, tortured marriage. When Tate accepted a job at Princeton in 1939, he summarily quit both his and his wife's positions. "It was years before it occurred to me," said Ms. Gordon, "that Allen had resigned my full professorship-always a hard thing for a woman to come by-without consulting me." Mr. Laskin affords her only slightly more respect; though he notes that she published nine novels and two story collections, which makes her one of the most prolific writers in the book, he tells us virtually nothing about them.

The stated goal of Partisans is to praise these honorable women ("our teachers and mentors," he gushes, "they were the writers whose words taught us what we were thinking"), and so there's something odd about the author's fixation on the most demeaning details of their tempestuous couplings. Odd, that is, until one understands the book's implicit argument: Rather than celebrate the emerging feminist movement of the late 50's and early 60's, these women chose to define themselves through their patriarchal, exploitative marriages. If Mr. Laskin is disappointed that they were professionally, but not emotionally, "liberated," he is positively outraged that they refused to rise up and embrace their victimhood.

When Ms. Hardwick dares to offer a modest humanistic credo ("I'm a feminist, of course, but it's not my interest to look at things from the woman's point of view. You write as who you are"), Mr. Laskin fairly seethes with contempt. "Hardwick had been one of the boys since the old P.R. days back in the 1940's, and she never really renounced her membership in the club. She'd always gotten too much out of it," he writes. Incredibly, he concludes that it was their antifeminism-not their intellectual accomplishments-which ultimately bound the diverse group together. "They refused to see that they were exceptions. And because they were successful, at least by their own lights, they refused to see the point of feminism. Gender had been no impediment in their own careers, every one of them insisted at various times in her life. So why make such a fuss about it?"

In the midst of his ax-grinding and gossipmongering, Mr. Laskin manages, inadvertently, to pose a genuinely interesting question: Why did the New York intellectuals-male and female alike-lose their relevance and authority in the 60's? The answer surely has something to do with their parochial brand of Cold War liberalism, as well as their inability to appreciate various aspects of the counterculture, of which feminism is one. But to hang so much on their failure to understand the importance of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) is absurd. Mr. Laskin's suggestion that a writer squanders her chance in the great literary sweepstakes if she rejects feminism betrays a naïve, overly politicized notion of how literary canons are formed: "Had Stafford not ridiculed 'women's lib' in the 1960's and 70's," he writes, her novel, The Mountain Lion , "might have found a place on feminist reading lists instead of assuming the shabby-genteel status of a neglected classic."

Though Mr. Laskin makes good on his promise to shine a spotlight on these extraordinary women, his pathographic group portrait is so unflattering that one would prefer the discreet shadows of their erstwhile obscurity. "Neglected classics" never looked so good.

If the Alger Hiss case is any indicator, we'll still be arguing about O.J. Simpson well past 2058. The Hiss case, the "Trial of the Century" in 1948, was a referendum on the "hot-button" issues of the day: the New Deal, Yalta, the United Nations, the Cold War. More important than the question of Hiss' guilt or innocence, the case became a kind of psycho-political litmus test; where you stood said something about who you were and what you believed.

Since his conviction on two counts of perjury, the reputation of Alger Hiss has swung back and forth like a pendulum. Witness , Whittaker Chambers' best-selling 1952 memoir, thoroughly demonized Hiss, whose lawyerly rebuttal, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957), lacked sufficient passion to challenge it. When Watergate ruined Richard Nixon's reputation, Hiss bounced back–until Allen Weinstein's exhaustive study, Perjury (1978), concluded that he was probably guilty after all. Hiss then wrote a slight memoir, Recollections of a Life (1988), which drew on previously unreleased material to demonstrate that his trial had indeed been unfair, and in the early 90's, a Russian army general, Dmitri Volkogonov, searched through the newly opened archives and found nothing to indicate that Hiss had been a spy. This "vindication" was short-lived, however: The general conceded he had examined only a fraction of the vast archives and that relevant documents might have been destroyed. The 1996 release of the Venona files–cables between Moscow and its American agents from 1939 to 1957–included a message about an agent code-named "Ales," who was identified by an anonymous footnote as "probably Alger Hiss." Most recently, Sam Tanenhaus' sympathetic biography of Whittaker Chambers transformed the shadowy accuser into a more credible, three-dimensional character, thereby casting further doubts on Hiss. In addition to dozens of polemics, memoirs and historical studies, the case has inspired two novels, a play and a punk band named "Alger Hiss."

When Hiss died on Nov. 15, 1996, at the age of 92, most obituaries hedged their bets. The New York Times headline identified him as a "divisive icon of the cold war," and concluded that "followers of the case remained bitterly split over whether he was guilty, innocent or something in between."

I have to confess that I've never cared much whether Alger Hiss "did it" or not; by now the case has assumed such cosmic symbolic proportions that factual questions seem almost beside the point. Neither a martyr nor a radical, the courtly old Alger Hiss I met at lefty parties in the late 80's was fascinating precisely because he seemed so ill -suited for the enormous role history had assigned him. In that respect, I'm probably the kind of person his son Tony Hiss has in mind when he writes, "There are still many people who, when they think of him, see a law case and not a life."

Tony Hiss' beautifully written memoir, The View From Alger's Window , has a dual mandate: to capture the complex inner life his famously reticent father was incapable of revealing, and to revisit a painful period from the author's own childhood. At the outset of the case, Alger and Priscilla Hiss decided to keep their sensitive 7-year-old out of it, which left him in a state of muted emotional turmoil. "I was wrestling with the idea that if I thought I was feeling angry, I wasn't really feeling angry, because, as had been explained, nothing was happening that we needed to feel angry about," he writes. "I was lost, totally out of my depth, struck dumb, frozen solid, a real boy transformed into a block of wood." After living "awkwardly and uneasily in the corner of a once-huge event called the 'Hiss case,'" he now wants to stake out a view of his own.

This is actually Mr. Hiss' second book about his father. The first, Laughing Last (1977), is a curious synthesis of family history, political diatribe and sexual confession ("So I decided to get a boyfriend. I found one who hated me, which seemed to me only right"). Written in an offhand, jaunty style, Laughing Last hid more than it disclosed, ringing false from page 1 ("At the age of 72, my dad, Alger Hiss, has never been happier in his life" is the opening line). The author did his best to convince us that everything was rosy in Hiss-land despite the trauma of having a father branded America's No. 1 traitor and locked up for three-and-a-half years in distant Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Composed a year after his father's death, The View From Alger's Window is a much more artful, insightful book that explores the inner tumult Alger and Priscilla Hiss concealed beneath their WASP reserve. Blurring the line between a memoir and a more traditional account, Mr. Hiss eschews historical objectivity in favor of what he calls his "50's/90's vision of events." Rather than argue the facts of the case, he tries to exonerate his father by painting a rich and subtle portrait–a portrait thoroughly at odds with the one Whittaker Chambers produced.

The Hisses were inveterate scribblers, as evidenced by the 2,500 letters and postcards Tony Hiss draws on here. He dwells in particular on the 445 letters his father wrote in prison, which constitute, he argues, "the book he never wrote, or, more accurately, the book that in later years he had already written and couldn't afterwards duplicate." The letters home make wrenching reading: We watch a father desperately trying to raise his troubled son from an impossible distance. "Today, Tony started back to school. I get up at quarter of seven, make my bed, get dressed and finish breakfast before eight–just the way Tony does. So we'll all be doing the same things at the same time each school morning," he writes. "Today is a beautiful sunny day and after two gray days I was able to confirm that my window faces due East–toward New York, toward you." Tony's letters are equally poignant: The adoring young boy tries to reassure his father in the midst of family catastrophe. "Dear Daddy, I have not much to say, but what I have to say is that I think nothing could possibly go wrong at home, and also at the prison, if the walls are painted black in your cell you will turn them white forever."

The book opens with Tony Hiss' 1997 pilgrimage to Lewisburg prison; it was while Alger was incarcerated there, oddly enough, that he and Tony "got to be firm friends." Permitted only a single two-hour visit per month, father and son forged a friendship through letters. The notion that a stint in jail–"a good corrective to three years at Harvard," Alger often joked–should enable him to express his feelings seems less odd when we consider the distinctive synthesis of insight and urgency that characterizes many great prison letters. But why, once released, was Hiss unable to show the world his more human side? "Now that his journey is complete, I think I know," his son writes. "A fast-flowing stream making its way from the mountains to the sea found the middle of its passage unexpectedly blocked by a temporary dam. For 44 months, as it was held in one place for the first time, its banks rose to form a pool, and its purest waters welled up from below. At one edge of the new pool, with their current slowed, they lapped quietly against a beach where I was learning to swim."

In his final year at Lewisburg, Hiss wrote, "Letters are, for me, the most effective biographies." Tony Hiss has put his father's letters to good use. While no memoir could possibly succeed in clearing his name, The View From Alger's Window provides such a vivid portrait that perhaps one day Alger Hiss will be remembered as a person as well as a court case.

In all the trips I've made to the Strand bookstore, I don't think I've ever failed to find at least one copy of Norman Podhoretz's 1967 memoir, Making It , somewhere on a dusty shelf. I've considered several theories to explain its cut-rate ubiquity. Perhaps Random House, anticipating a best seller, printed an enormous number of copies, a reasonable proportion of which were subsequently discarded. Or maybe thousands of readers threw their copy across the room in disgust and packed it off to the used book store. I like to imagine that Making It was snapped up by hordes of enthusiastic readers who at first appreciated Mr. Podhoretz's audacious chest-thumping and then, as his politics grew more reactionary and his prose more leaden, came to so loathe him that they simply had to banish his book from their homes.

Aside from being the most emotionally satisfying, this last theory has the advantage of mimicking the pattern-infatuation, gradual disappointment and, finally, outright contempt-by which Mr. Podhoretz says he lost most of his friends over the past 40 years. And quite a group of friends they were, as we learn even before we open the third volume of his memoirs, Ex-Friends -the subtitle lists the companions with whom he has "fallen out": Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer. The notion of a memoir organized around the principle of mutual antipathy has its own peculiar charm, and since Mr. Podhoretz has never been a particularly subtle hater, one opens Ex-Friends confident it will be free of the winsome nostalgia that usually plagues the genre.

Moreover, Mr. Podhoretz has lived through genuinely interesting times-about which a more candid, forthcoming book should one day be written. A student of Mark Van Doren's and Lionel Trilling's in the 1950's, he attended Columbia University along with the editor Jason Epstein and the poets Allen Ginsberg and John Hollander. After studying English literature with F.R. Leavis at Cambridge University, he returned to America to write literary criticism for The New Yorker , Partisan Review and Commentary , of which he eventually became the editor.

Taking over Commentary in 1960, Mr. Podhoretz transformed a cautious, parochially Jewish magazine with a dogmatic pro-America, anticommunist agenda, into a provocative, liberal literary monthly that published some of the most controversial political and social criticism of its time. He serialized Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd in the first three issues of the "new" Commentary ; he ran essays by Norman O. Brown, as well as by the group Mr. Podhoretz calls "The Family," established New York intellectuals like Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe. Although I've always been skeptical of Mr. Podhoretz's insistence that he was a "radical" during this period (a claim that conveniently lends authenticity and drama to his "conversion" from left to right), it's certainly true that he edited a scintillating magazine.

In fact, I'd argue that one can't really understand the state of so-called highbrow culture today without first coming to terms with the career of Norman Podhoretz. Along with Jason and Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and a few others (the "children" of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv), Mr. Podhoretz reconceived the very idea of what it means to be an intellectual. The sense of urgency and expectation that swirled around this third generation of New York intellectuals is often overlooked by historians who view the late 60's as the end, not beginning, of a grand New York tradition. Victor Navasky, in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article, "Notes on Cult: How to Join the Literary Establishment," quoted one critic's bold prediction: "There's an intellectual revolution going on and we're about to see the emergence of a new intelligentsia … Guys like Epstein and Podhoretz are riding herd on the hurricane. They are giving direction and shape to this revolution."

For their elders, an intellectual was first and foremost a thinker who lacked power; for Mr. Podhoretz's generation, the duty of the intellectual was to come to terms with cultural and even economic power itself-whether by starting a magazine like The New York Review of Books , establishing ideologically oriented think tanks, advising businessmen or protesting U.S. Government policy. This generation realized that power, unless it was embodied in institutions, would simply fade away. (The intellectual's lust for success-the "dirty little secret" Mr. Podhoretz trumpeted in Making It -was taken more or less for granted by his peers; what dismayed them was the unironic, artless way he announced it.) The period during which Mr. Podhoretz ran Commentary (1960 to 1995) might be thought of as a cultural test tube in which two elements-power and ideas-were combined and shaken up. The experiment may be too recent for us to judge the results with any accuracy; but it's clear at least that the revolution in the culture industry which took place during this time was as momentous as the battle for modernism and against communism that had preoccupied the previous generation. For better or for worse, this is Norman's and Jason's world; we just live in it.

Alas, this is not the tale Mr. Podhoretz chooses to tell in Ex-Friends .

Instead of a genuinely searching exploration of a few unlikely, intense friendships, Mr. Podhoretz has chosen to write a memoir whose covert function is to assure himself that he's better off as he is: "I was who I was in some part because of my friendship with them, and I am who I am in larger part because we ceased being friends."

One often wonders how much self-deception was involved in these friendships. Mr. Podhoretz writes that he was dazzled by Lillian Hellman's "easy references to legendary literary characters" until he wearied of her intellectual hypocrisy. There is no one for whom he has higher regard than Hannah Arendt-until she writes about Adolf Eichmann and he realizes "there was nothing admirable about brilliance in itself." For Mr. Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling was "the most important literary figure on the Columbia faculty." Trilling tells him he was "the best student he ever had"-then loses his nerve when faced with the naked honesty of Mr. Podhoretz's first memoir.

Making It is a tremendously vital book that burns with the yearnings of a brash 35-year-old. Breaking Ranks is the wistful political memoir he wrote a decade later. Ex-Friends is a new departure: By now, Mr. Podhoretz fancies himself a neoconservative éminence grise ; his high-minded tone is designed to convince the reader that he has written a more important, more sophisticated book than he actually has. The deadly sobriety makes one long for the jaw-dropping egotism and forthrightness of his earlier work.

The new book rehashes-and often outright cannibalizes-his previous memoirs, with certain episodes tweaked or, "filled out," with details Mr. Podhoretz may have hesitated to include while his "ex-friends" were still alive. But a hint of déjà vu is not necessarily fatal when your stories are as good as some of these are: the disastrous, and ultimately humiliating, orgy Mr. Podhoretz joins in his Maileresque quest for sexual liberation (Mr. Mailer later tells him it was "a concentration-camp orgy" and that he was lucky to have gotten out alive); Ginsberg's parting threat to Mr. Podhoretz that the Beats would "get you through your children!" (judging by the hard-right politics of Norman's son John Podhoretz, the Beats failed miserably); Lionel Trilling's advice to conclude Making It with a mealy-mouthed final chapter, a play-it-safe retraction; Mr. Mailer privately telling Mr. Podhoretz he admired Making It , and then denouncing it in the pages of Partisan Review as "a blunder of self-assertion, self-exposure, and self-denigration."

The only ex-friend about whom Mr. Podhoretz seems to have genuinely unresolved feelings is Norman Mailer; at one point, he even compares their friendship to the one between Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. "I felt a certain proprietary interest in Mailer-he was my tiger," Mr. Podhoretz writes. Fellow son of Brooklyn, fellow "nice Jewish boy," Mr. Mailer still casts a spell over Mr. Podhoretz-never mind the nasty comments about recent Mailer novels. One wonders how different literary history might be had Mr. Mailer given Making It a good review. Would Mr. Podhoretz still have taken his right turn? Might "The Family" have held together?

The two Normans once had an extremely intimate bond, traces of which sneak into the book. In the wake of the "concentration-camp orgy," Mr. Mailer attempts to soothe Mr. Podhoretz's disappointment. After a dinner with one of Mr. Mailer's girlfriends, the three return to her hotel room for a nightcap. The atmosphere is charged and Mr. Mailer gets up and goes into the bathroom. "A few minutes later he returned stark naked and directed a very serious look straight into the eyes of his girlfriend. It was as if he had decided to make up for having inadvertently misled me by demonstrating what a proper orgy was like." Unfortunately, the girlfriend simply laughs Mr. Mailer off and apologizes to Mr. Podhoretz for the misunderstanding, leaving the reader to ponder another great "What if?"

"I must admit that I was more disappointed than relieved," Mr. Podhoretz writes.

Me, too.