Reading the opening lines of Epilogue, Anne Roiphe’s memoir about the death of her husband, I felt the same exasperation that I experienced upon learning, also via memoir, that Katha Pollitt can’t drive a car. Ms. Roiphe, apparently, doesn’t know how to open the locked door of her own apartment: "For the 39 years of our marriage, my husband always pulled out his key and opened the door when we returned from an evening out. During the day I left the door unlocked. We had a doorman." (Is it possible that over the span of four decades, Ms. Roiphe, a successful, prolific writer—and former columnist for The Observer—never once came home at night by herself, say, from a speaking engagement?) The idea of that learned helplessness rankles. But very quickly she snaps out of it. "I was aware that in this widowhood," she writes a few pages later, "I could use a sharp infusion of feminist pride, a sense of my own power, a disinterest in attachment, a venturesome soul daring to walk my own path."

Unlike Joan Didion, who in The Year of Magical Thinking seems eternally lost in the thicket of grief, Ms. Roiphe at least takes a stab at finding her way out. Not that there aren’t many eloquent passages about the nature of loss, as well as a moving portrait of her husband "H.," a psychoanalyst who, much like John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal heart attack in their apartment building. But Ms. Roiphe is just as intent on portraying how you put your life—including your love life—back together, and those are the liveliest sections of the book. Her daughters placed a personal ad for her in The New York Review of Books, and soon a letter arrived from a 69-year-old divorcé, a retired public relations executive. They met for lunch at a bistro on the Upper West Side and "he told me that customs had changed since I was a girl and asked me if I understood what was expected in today’s dating world," she recalls. "His hand was on my knee. His other hand was stroking my arm up and down as if it were a horse’s nose. We had known each other for exactly twenty-five minutes."

Ms. Roiphe signed up to match.com and more prospective suitors followed, all unsuitable, but she tried to keep an open mind. She entered into a correspondence with an engineer in Pittsburgh. "I think it doesn’t matter that he is a Lutheran and I am Jewish. Those distinctions belong to another time of life. … But then he says that his life was changed by Dr. Phil. I don’t respond. The conversation ends." Online dating, it turns out, is just as horrifically random for the senior set as it is for the rest of us. One of Ms. Roiphe’s potential suitors couldn’t enter the year of his birth on his profile because the program didn’t go back far enough (he was 89); nonetheless, he urged her, "Let’s seize the moment, let’s take advantage of what time we have."

Widowhood brought money problems, too. Ms. Roiphe had to sell her beach house because of a lawsuit brought by someone from her husband’s past whom she can’t identify because of a nondisclosure agreement (but we know the plaintiff is not H.’s ex-wife, who also tried to drain money from his account). Ms. Roiphe has exposed skeletons in her closet before, most notably in 1185 Park Avenue (1999), her excellent family history of jaw-dropping dysfunction featuring a mentally unstable mother, a philandering father, and a brother who for years kept his AIDS a secret—and then died.

H., AND THE MORE examined life she built with him and their children, shielded her from her past—yet another reason to mourn his loss. But by the end of this new book, Ms. Roiphe notes that "widowhood, as I am now growing accustomed to it, can be a calm place." There was something very well-defended about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, even though it read like an open wound. By revealing not just her vulnerability but also her resilience in Epilogue, Anne Roiphe takes far more risks.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a contributing writer for Elle. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

I loved Meg Wolitzer’s previous novels The Wife (2003) and The Position (2005), but when I told a friend that her new book, The Ten-Year Nap, was about stay-at-home mothers who lamented their old selves, and my friend said, “Disenchanted mommies—it’s so cliché to be one now,” I knew she had a point. (She then added, “For the record, I was whining about motherhood before it was cool.”)

The four female protagonists in The Ten-Year Nap don’t so much whine as wonder, somewhat naïvely, how they wound up abandoning their dreams, or at least their careers, to wade into the deceptively placid waters of round-the-clock domesticity. Being a full-time mother is a job for which they are vastly overqualified (as are most women these days) but for which they nonetheless marshal their energies like CEO’s. “You, the brainy, restless female, were the one who had to keep your family life rolling forward like a tank. You, of all people, were in charge of snacks,” thinks one of them. “Your hands tore apart the cellophane on six-packs of juice boxes, while your head cocked to hold a cordless phone into which you spoke the words, ‘Maureen? Hi, it’s Mason Buckner’s mom. I’m calling to set up a playdate with Jared.’ You had to say ‘playdate’—that nonword that had been so easily welcomed into the lexicon—and you had to say it without irony.”

Much has been written, both fictional and non-, about the compromised position of mothers in the 21st century. Rachel Cusk, Allison Pearson, Judith Warner, Linda Hirshman, Leslie Bennetts have all brought their own particular insight to the muddle that is modern motherhood. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for more on the subject, but it raises the bar higher.

And unfortunately, though Ms. Wolitzer’s light-handed satire is always a pleasure to read, the women in The Ten-Year Nap represent such a broad spectrum that the novel winds up feeling at once relevant and diffuse.

There’s Amy, a lawyer-turned-SAHM, despite the fact that her mother held feminist consciousness-raising groups in her living room in the 1970’s; Roberta, who didn’t so much reject her former life as an artist but tire of the constant struggle it entailed; Jill, a former academic who got derailed when her dissertation was rejected; and Karen, the daughter of Asian immigrants and quant jock who doesn’t regret her decision to leave her high-paying analyst job to look after her twin boys one bit.

The SAHM’s compare themselves to the WM’s, especially to Penny Ramsey—mother of three and museum director—of whom they are in particular awe. The men, meanwhile, are semi-present in the whole exhausting venture. “The husbands they lived with were part past, part future. They were not the future itself. They were not, apparently, the fruits of feminism, offered up to the daughters of its founders as a perfect gift.”

Ms. Wolitzer, who is gentle and nonjudgmental with her main characters, sends three of the four back to work, although in lesser capacities—the price paid for the decision to opt out. As the authorial voice in The Ten-Year Nap notes, with a sigh of resignation, “Change always required slightly longer than a generation.”

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a contributing writer for Elle. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

The impulse to lump these two novels together is understandable, since Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida are co-founders of The Believer (a literary journal I’ve written for—just once.) But there’s actually very little evidence to support the notion of a shared Aesthetica Julavida. The Uses of Enchantment, which was published in October, is dense, multilayered and satiric, while Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is spare, linear and solemn.

Readers first became aware of Heidi Julavits in 1998 when Esquire published “Marry the One Who Gets There First: Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding Album,” a short story so vivid that I still remember certain scenes eight years after wolfing it down. But even those of us who’ve been fans of her writing ever since might be surprised by the richness and complexity on display in The Uses of Enchantment.

The new novel opens on the playing fields of a prep school in suburban Boston in 1985, a milieu rendered so precisely that I was slapped back to my own miserable high-school years (Milton, ’86). Mary Veal, a junior at Semmering Academy, goes AWOL during a field-hockey rain delay, gets into a 1975 Mercedes (cue image of the classic bubble-nosed sedan) and disappears without a trace. Six weeks later, she resurfaces, claiming to have no recollection of what happened to her. Psychiatric experts are called in, and soon Mary’s amnesia is seen for what it is—a ruse.

But why would a teenage girl fake her own abduction? One strand of the book is devoted to raising, and then discrediting, possible answers to that question, as Mary’s case becomes a hotly contested power grab between two therapists, each looking to promote their own pet theories at a time when recovered memories of sexual abuse were all the rage. Some of the most hilarious scenes come from the notes of Mary’s analyst as he struggles to pin down his clever, manipulative client. “She made direct eye contact with me—a confusing sign of ego defiance that did not coincide with the earlier abuse theory,” Dr. Hammer writes. “Typically when a patient lashes out at her doctor, she does so without the ability to make concurrent eye contact; to do so would mean taking responsibility for her actions. But Mary suffered no shame; in fact she appeared exultant. You seem to be insulting me, I said.” God knows how many psychoanalytic workbooks Ms. Julavits had to slog through—or how many couches she had to lie on, for that matter—to pull off such a great send-up of the talking cure.

Dr. Hammer publishes a book called Miriam: The Disappearance of a New England Girl, but Mary’s cover is quickly blown and she becomes the pariah of her family, school and town. Fifteen years later, after moving to Oregon, Mary is forced to go back home by the death of her mother, a formidable figure from whom Mary had desperately sought forgiveness. Her crabby, conspiring sisters and her alcoholic aunt make it clear that, in their eyes, Mary will always be the black sheep, but a discovery among her mother’s papers sends her on a search to find out just how well her mother understood her after all. Despite all Mary’s defensive cleverness, her feints and dodges and verbal jousting, her quest for redemption seems real and heartfelt.

IN LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME, Vendela Vida explores a culture far away from Boston’s WASP-y suburbs. The title is taken from a poem written by a Sami, the indigenous people of the Arctic region in Scandinavia where Ms. Vida herself has family and where her protagonist, Clarissa Iverton, goes to track down the secret of her parentage. Clarissa has just discovered that the man who raised her and whom she’d called Dad was not her biological father. What’s more, when Clarissa was 14, her mother, who seemed to love stray cats more than her own children, disappeared from a mall in upstate New York, abandoning her family for good. “In preceding weeks, my mother had been unusually affectionate toward me. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, her warmth, so I followed it like a sunbather at dusk, chasing the sun,” she remembers.

Now a young adult, Clarissa renews her chase all the way to Lapland, where her mother went to research her dissertation before Clarissa was born. The failings of her loved ones, it seems, have hardened Clarissa. “Travel is made for liars. Or liars are made by travel,” she thinks when she arrives in Helsinki and a local asks her why she’s there and she answers that her fiancé just died—a fabrication. “I had given a different explanation to the Belgian deejay sitting next to me on the flight from New York to Brussels. She grated on my nerves, and I wasn’t sure why. She was too eager, too loud, and I decided I could be mean to her. ‘Do you think that’s the Great Lakes?’ she asked, looking over me and out the window. Two hours earlier, we had departed eastward out of Kennedy.”

As Clarissa travels farther and farther north into sunlessness, she begins to uncover clues that her teenage hunch had been true—she had inadvertently driven away her mother. But with these revelations come elisions: At each dramatic moment, more seems to be left unsaid than said.

Harsh, cold landscapes blanketed in snow and Laplanders speaking broken English are a perfect match for Ms. Vida’s economical, though not humorless, prose—more fitting, in fact, than the Manhattan portrayed in her first novel, And Now You Can Go (2004).

Heidi Julavits is a show-stopping maximalist compared with Vendela Vida, whose elegant restraint is sometimes a little too unflinching. If these books are any indication, the artistic reservoir beneath The Believer runs both deep and wide.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg writes for Elle and is at work on her first book.

Some of my favorite books of the last five years have been family dramas told primarily through siblings: Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and its companion, A Family Daughter; Meg Wolitzer’s The Position; and, of course, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Not just two siblings, mind you; at least three or more seems optimal, both for storytelling and character development. After all, children who grow up in large families define themselves in relation to their siblings. Which leads me to wonder: Now that couples are having fewer children, will there be fewer novels about sibling friction?

Eliza Minot, herself the youngest of seven (among them Susan Minot, author of Monkeys), makes a great case for the emotional richness of large families in her second novel, The Brambles. The eldest Bramble, Margaret, is the moral compass of the family, the responsible and slightly overbearing sister who’s always asking incriminatingly, Did you call Dad? Her only vice, it seems, aside from thinking of everyone else’s needs before her own, is that she has an “eBay problem” that her husband Brian tolerates with amusement. Margaret and Brian are old-school breeders, New York City refugees with three kids under the age of 7 and a Honda Odyssey who have settled in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. “The days with small children, she has come to accept, blend. ‘Face it,’ Brian said to her when she complained years ago that she wasn’t getting any work done, ‘you’ve been thrown into neutral.’”

Next in Bramble birth order is Max, the handsome, slightly wayward middle child who is living on the upper-middle-class equivalent of “the down low”—he’s not gay, he’s just unemployed, a fact that he’s been hiding from his wife, Chloe. Max and Chloe have a kid too, but they have yet to figure out their escape from Manhattan, so little Rex’s crib takes up the entryway to their studio apartment in Chelsea. And then there’s Edie, the youngest sibling, in her late 20’s and supremely sarcastic, yet struggling mightily—with her weight, with men and with her own dark moods.

Ms. Minot handles the considerable angst of her characters with a deft, humorous touch. In a particularly fine section from The Brambles, Edie is on a solo road trip in California, eating bags of candy from rest stops and chain-smoking, when she gets overtaken by despair just as an Eminem song comes on. “She turns the radio up, crying still, and distractedly through tears sings along, shouting, ‘Can I get a witness?’ through her melting, crying face.” Just a sentence or two later, comic relief: “The huge Hearst mansion. Saint Elmo? San Remo? She can’t remember.”

Tragedy has struck the Bramble family: The mother recently died in a plane crash, one of those puddle-jumper flights from Maine to Boston. Now their father is stricken with cancer and moves in with Margaret for his final days. As oldest siblings often do, Margaret hogs the air space; much of the book is told through her frazzled, mother-of-three eyes. Thankfully, she stops fretting long enough to take in the charming interaction between her children and their dying Gramps. (Ms. Minot reserves some of her most beautiful and spare writing for the very young and the very old.) Max is wound up in his own marital problems, but Edie, the youngest, catches wind of a Bramble family secret that she manages to unearth and bring back to share with her sister and brother, a secret that was about to die with the Bramble patriarch.

And isn’t that, really, what siblings are good for—helping to process those scary, twisted moments of family drama that inevitably crop up even before your parents die? Dad’s had a mistress, or Mom gave away a baby for adoption before you were born, and all of a sudden there’s a perfect stranger wandering around out there who’s related to you, for God’s sake. Siblings help turn such revelations into inside jokes and help you take the news in stride, thereby reducing your therapy bills considerably.

The Brambles ends with Margaret, Max and Edie looking on as their father’s coffin is lifted into a crematorium that, they can’t help but notice, looks remarkably like the ovens at the neighborhood pizzeria they frequented when they were kids. “The three of them look straight ahead, watching the digital temperature on the furnace rise. With their mother, they didn’t stay to see this happen. Margaret takes Edie’s hand. ‘Jesus,’ says Margaret softly, squeezing it. On her other side, Edie takes Max’s hand and squeezes it, passing it on.” There is strength, ultimately, in numbers.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg, former deputy editor for features at Glamour, is at work on her first book.

Some of my favorite books of the last five years have been family dramas told primarily through siblings: Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and its companion, A Family Daughter; Meg Wolitzer’s The Position; and, of course, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Not just two siblings, mind you; at least three or more seems optimal, both for storytelling and character development. After all, children who grow up in large families define themselves in relation to their siblings. Which leads me to wonder: Now that couples are having fewer children, will there be fewer novels about sibling friction?

Eliza Minot, herself the youngest of seven (among them Susan Minot, author of Monkeys), makes a great case for the emotional richness of large families in her second novel, The Brambles. The eldest Bramble, Margaret, is the moral compass of the family, the responsible and slightly overbearing sister who’s always asking incriminatingly, Did you call Dad? Her only vice, it seems, aside from thinking of everyone else’s needs before her own, is that she has an “eBay problem” that her husband Brian tolerates with amusement. Margaret and Brian are old-school breeders, New York City refugees with three kids under the age of 7 and a Honda Odyssey who have settled in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. “The days with small children, she has come to accept, blend. ‘Face it,’ Brian said to her when she complained years ago that she wasn’t getting any work done, ‘you’ve been thrown into neutral.’”

Next in Bramble birth order is Max, the handsome, slightly wayward middle child who is living on the upper-middle-class equivalent of “the down low”—he’s not gay, he’s just unemployed, a fact that he’s been hiding from his wife, Chloe. Max and Chloe have a kid too, but they have yet to figure out their escape from Manhattan, so little Rex’s crib takes up the entryway to their studio apartment in Chelsea. And then there’s Edie, the youngest sibling, in her late 20’s and supremely sarcastic, yet struggling mightily—with her weight, with men and with her own dark moods.

Ms. Minot handles the considerable angst of her characters with a deft, humorous touch. In a particularly fine section from The Brambles, Edie is on a solo road trip in California, eating bags of candy from rest stops and chain-smoking, when she gets overtaken by despair just as an Eminem song comes on. “She turns the radio up, crying still, and distractedly through tears sings along, shouting, ‘Can I get a witness?’ through her melting, crying face.” Just a sentence or two later, comic relief: “The huge Hearst mansion. Saint Elmo? San Remo? She can’t remember.”

Tragedy has struck the Bramble family: The mother recently died in a plane crash, one of those puddle-jumper flights from Maine to Boston. Now their father is stricken with cancer and moves in with Margaret for his final days. As oldest siblings often do, Margaret hogs the air space; much of the book is told through her frazzled, mother-of-three eyes. Thankfully, she stops fretting long enough to take in the charming interaction between her children and their dying Gramps. (Ms. Minot reserves some of her most beautiful and spare writing for the very young and the very old.) Max is wound up in his own marital problems, but Edie, the youngest, catches wind of a Bramble family secret that she manages to unearth and bring back to share with her sister and brother, a secret that was about to die with the Bramble patriarch.

And isn’t that, really, what siblings are good for—helping to process those scary, twisted moments of family drama that inevitably crop up even before your parents die? Dad’s had a mistress, or Mom gave away a baby for adoption before you were born, and all of a sudden there’s a perfect stranger wandering around out there who’s related to you, for God’s sake. Siblings help turn such revelations into inside jokes and help you take the news in stride, thereby reducing your therapy bills considerably.

The Brambles ends with Margaret, Max and Edie looking on as their father’s coffin is lifted into a crematorium that, they can’t help but notice, looks remarkably like the ovens at the neighborhood pizzeria they frequented when they were kids. “The three of them look straight ahead, watching the digital temperature on the furnace rise. With their mother, they didn’t stay to see this happen. Margaret takes Edie’s hand. ‘Jesus,’ says Margaret softly, squeezing it. On her other side, Edie takes Max’s hand and squeezes it, passing it on.” There is strength, ultimately, in numbers.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg, former deputy editor for features at Glamour, is at work on her first book.

Back in 1999, Melissa Bank's first book, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, filled entire windows of Barnes & Noble with its rear-view image of a young woman in galoshes. Since then, Ms. Banks has been blamed-unfairly-for helping to launch "chick lit," the trend that continues to compel publishing houses to take any crap with an unattached female protagonist, slap a kicky cover on it (preferably pink) and sluice it down the production line.

In fact, Ms. Bank's fiction belongs to a different tradition, that of the precocious underage narrator. Literature is littered with them: Pip in Great Expectations, Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and his female equivalent, Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar. These young characters see things that adults can't, or don't, want to see; they're pint-sized bullshit-detectors, spotting hypocrisy and phoniness everywhere. There's just one problem with them: They get older.

When we first meet The Wonder Spot's Sophie Applebaum, she's a 12-year-old wisenheimer already capable of sophisticated aperçus. The novel opens on the unwelcome occasion of a cousin's bat mitzvah. "We were on the exit ramp for Chappaqua when my mother turned around and smiled in a way that had nothing to do with happiness. It was her way of saying, Smile, without risking the opposite, at least from me," Sophie observes. A typical preteen girl, she reserves most of her well-developed sarcasm for her mother: "[She] told the same stories over and over-maybe twenty-five in all; if you added them up, there were only about two hours of her life that she wanted me to know about."

Girl's Guide also opened with an old-for-her-years narrator, but Sophie seems a bit meaner, more barbed, perhaps because of the particularly heavy burden placed on her by her parents. "Unfortunately, we all had to face that I was not the person they wanted me to be," says Sophie. You can't help but admire her repeated attempts to bring this to their attention.

The problem is that Sophie not only deflects her parents' oppressive expectations, but as The Wonder Spot progresses, she also unwittingly sheds friends, suitors and jobs because of her unflinching resistance to change. As she reaches college and enters the working and dating world, what was a premature astuteness in her as a child begins to seem naïve, an emotional stunting that she is at least partially aware of. After several false career starts, Sophie is convinced by her mother to go for an interview with a family friend who runs a Jewish newsletter. "The fifth grader in me knows that however desperate I am to get a job I am more desperate not to have this one …. [O]ut of my mouth these words come: 'I don't know anything about Judaism-is that a big part of the job?'" Sophie ages, but she doesn't really grow up.

Ms. Bank's humorous wordplay-one of the many things that should have elevated Girl's Guide in the public perception above the excruciatingly simple-minded Bridget Jones's Diary-is again on display in The Wonder Spot. Sophie's older brother Jack, who goes through one girlfriend after another, begins dating a psychiatrist named Mary Pat. When Sophie joins them for dinner one night, she watches closely, then flashes her wit: "When our burgers arrive, Mary Pat ignores the extra plate brought for sharing and eats right off Jack's. Instead of cutting the cheeseburger in half, she takes a bite, and then he does. She even uses his napkin to wipe her mouth. I am reminded of the aid organization Doctors Without Borders."

The novel is broken into titled chapters, most of which could stand alone as discrete stories. Because of this episodic setup, many of the major events in Sophie's life take place "offstage," including the death of her father. Though Sophie is paralyzed by this event, other members of her family are transformed. In one of the most moving sections-called "The One After You"-Sophie realizes that her widowed mother has fallen in love with a married man, and her adolescent hardness toward her finally melts away.

Yes, there are boyfriends, too-many of them, though none threaten to alter Sophie's personality or her addiction to nicotine (with the exception of a younger guy in a band who makes an appearance in a saccharine and unnecessary postscript). Another quibble is that although Ms. Bank only has two books under her belt, she keeps dipping back into the same autobiographical well for her setting and characters: a Jewish family from Pennsylvania, the unexpected death of a father and so on. Then again, no one gives a hard time to Rick Moody for strip-mining suburban Connecticut, or to Bruce Wagner for cruising up and down the same Hollywood boulevards, or, for that matter, to Jonathan Lethem for his love affair with Brooklyn. If only everyone were as generous and forgiving with Melissa Bank.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is deputy editor for features at Glamour.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner. Riverhead Books, 327 pages, $23.95.

When I first read Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, a week after giving birth to my first child, it registered as little more than a theoretical exercise. Being a parent was an intensely physical state-postpartum fluid was still being flushed out of my body in night sweats, and I was so painfully constipated that on doctor's orders I had to send my husband down to the corner for a Fleet enema (a household first!). Between our baby's circumcision wound and his umbilical-cord stump, his needs, too, seemed limited to those of the flesh.

Six weeks later, I reread Perfect Madness in short, hungry bursts, occasionally calling out to my husband passages such as this: "Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy." I was hurling these declarations from my once-pristine Ultrasuede couch, where hour upon hour of breast-feeding had created an outline of my posterior in spit-up, sandwich crumbs and newsprint-all of which made even more convincing Judith Warner's argument that motherhood in America has become dangerously all-consuming.

Ms. Warner-a journalist who has written quickie bios of Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich-came to this conclusion after moving to Washington, D.C., with her husband and two young daughters. They'd come from Paris, where they'd lived for six years. While she was in France, she writes, she "never met a mother, working or otherwise, who didn't have the 'time' to read a book, or have lunch with a friend, or go out to dinner once in a while." Not so in the U.S., where mothers seemed to her both miserable and maniacal. So she began interviewing them to find out what lay at the heart of this widespread malaise.

We're in familiar territory, of course, traversed in 2001 by Naomi Wolf in Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood and Ann Crittenden in The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is the Least Valued. (Both of those authors were also living in Washington and interviewing local residents-maybe the nation's capital isn't such a great place to raise kids after all.)

While Ms. Wolf targets the medical establishment and workplace values, and Ms. Crittenden looks at how government policies and the economy penalize moms financially, Ms. Warner's analysis is both wider-ranging and more pointed, and in the end she arrives at the controversial conclusion that mothers are not victims of outside forces but rather their own worst enemies. "The desperate, grasping and controlling way so many women go about the job of motherhood, turning energy that could be used to demand social change inward into control-freakishness, is our hallmark as a generation," she writes. "We have taken it upon ourselves as supermothers to be everything to our children that society refuses to be: not just loving nurturers but educators, entertainers, guardians of environmental purity, protectors of a stable and prosperous future."

Ms. Warner traces the origins of the über-mutter trend to the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, whose theories about insecure attachment introduced the possibility that you can psychologically damage an infant for life. (This paranoia about attachment, I learned as I read various how-to nursing books, is echoed by La Leche League's term "poor latch," meaning, quite literally, an incomplete, inadequate or imperfect fit of baby's mouth to breast.) Ms. Warner also catalogs the wild swings in child-rearing practices and points out that being a mother in the 1950's, when most women didn't breast-feed and there was no such thing as the family bed, was actually less enslaving than it is today.

Along the way, she attempts to slay a few contemporary myths-namely, that the problem women with children face today is the work-or-stay-at-home debate. In fact, she says, most so-called stay-at-homers work part-time, as do most back-to-workers (and Ms. Warner's not even talking about middle- and lower-class moms who have no choice but to punch the clock.) The bigger issue, Ms. Warner argues, is that whether working or not, moms are consumed by what she sees as a new, "soul-draining" perfectionism that's turned parenting-from the first ultrasound to the last college application-into a competitive sport. Hence the overscheduled, overprotected child who knows no boundaries and rules the roost.

Ms. Warner's observations inject new life into what has become a long, tired debate. There's now undoubtedly a culture of maternal martyrdom, and it seems oddly out of step with the times. I know one mother of a toddler, a lawyer in New York, who boarded a train from Penn Station to Chicago, alone, for the sole purpose of getting some uninterrupted sleep. Ms. Warner argues that women today are running themselves into the ground because they're afraid that their children will slide down rather than climb up the socioeconomic ladder. Or else they're making up for their own childhood wounds. Both of which are plausible explanations, but I'm not so sure it's fair to lay all the blame on mom.

Perhaps the anxiety Judith Warner accurately describes is simply the result of wanting to do right by one's children in an environment that doesn't exactly make it easy. As Naomi Wolf points out in Misconceptions, mother love is the reason why women put up with "the juggling," "the imbalance," the not having "the time" to read a book and other clichéd phrases of modern motherhood. (That and a steady supply of women from the Caribbean and West Indies willing to work as under-the-table nannies so they can send money back home to their own kids-more mother love.) Why do I wrench myself out of bed several times a night to soothe my wailing little angel? Mother love, I think. Then again, he's only 11 weeks old. I may have to get back to you on that.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is about to return to the workforce as the deputy features editor at Glamour.

Having sold 1.4 million copies of The Nanny Diaries, you'd think Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus wouldn't need to resort to the infantilizing gimmick of using the word "girl" in the title of their second novel. ( Girls' Poker Night, Dirty Girls Social Club, Gossip Girl, Metro Girl …. Gag me with a girl.)

But Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus had a surprisingly rocky time with Citizen Girl: The manuscript was rejected outright by the original publisher, Random House-a rare humiliation. It was subsequently picked up by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, and Atria's marketing department obviously decided not to take any chances with brand recognition. They needn't have worried: Citizen Girl doesn't stray far enough from the Nanny Diaries template to risk alienating the authors' core constituency.

As a social satire, The Nanny Diaries had excellent timing, appearing just at the moment when the hyper-parenting trend (time outs, Baby Einstein, etc.) collided with the high-end consumerism of the early 2000's. It featured a wealthy Manhattan mother, Mrs. X, who only allows her 4-year-old son Grayer to eat cookies if they're unsweetened, and to drink milk if it's soy. Mrs. X is so busy trying to get Grayer into Collegiate (unsuccessfully) that she doesn't notice that her husband is having an affair at the office. Nanny, an N.Y.U. senior majoring in child development, goes to work for the Xes and gets chewed up worse than the plastic caps on Courtney Love's medicine bottles. The detail was deliciously spot-on-music lessons at Diller Quaile, lavender linen water from Gracious Home-a felicity that more than made up for the canned dialogue and the unnecessary boy-meets-nanny subplot. Mrs. X and her ilk were fine fodder-fish in a barrel, well shot. Nanny Diaries wasn't subtle, but it was satisfying.

Citizen Girl takes the same basic formula-young female gets abused by her employers until she finally tells them to shove it-but instead of overbearing Upper East Side parents, the oppressors are chauvinist male bosses, a far less culturally specific target. This time around, our gal heroine is a recent graduate of the women's-studies department at Wesleyan, even though the book is set in the era of the dot-com bust, a full 10 years or so after most liberal-arts colleges stopped churning out old-fashioned Movement types. The fact that this supposedly orthodox adult feminist lacks a proper name and is called "Girl" throughout (just as the nanny was called "Nan") is one of several of the book's misguided ironies. (About as clever as if, instead of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth had named his alter ego "Jew Boy.")

Girl (the character) enters the working world as a research associate for a nonprofit and discovers-surprise!-that entry level sucks. Then she gets fired, and discovers that unemployment sucks worse. So when she senses opportunity at a women's Web portal called My Company (think IVillage), she puts aside her scruples about using breast cancer to sell mascara and jumps at the job.

Citizen Girl is strongest when milking such postfeminist incongruities. As the book's promotional materials tell us, Girl "isn't afraid to ask some tough questions. Mainly: Have any of us come a long way, baby?" And indeed, in the age of Girls Gone Wild, much can-and should-be said about the current notion that turning the female body into a sex object is an act of "empowerment," so long as it's the woman herself doing the objectifying. I remember going to a fiction reading a few years ago and being asked to make a donation to an organization that purported to help prostitutes-not by getting them off the street and into better jobs, but by trying to improve their working conditions. (Health insurance for hookers-there must be worthier causes!) Further convoluting the original feminist message, young women now ape bad-boy behavior by going to strip clubs and having sex parties, a trend New York magazine identified a few years ago as the advent of the Female Chauvinist Pig. Yes, there have been backlashes before-just ask Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf-but never quite as disheartening as seeing the Playboy Mansion made cool by the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow, or Meredith Vieira taking pole-dancing lessons on The View.

Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus grind this legitimate ax quite noisily. I will allow them the improbability of My Company being run by a bunch of male yobbos, even though a ball-busting caricature of Candice Carpenter, the real founder of IVillage, would have worked better. Girl (the character) fights the good fight for as long as she can, but eventually becomes a pawn in the commercial scheme of the Man. She conceives of a bang-up proposal for how to sell My Company users more stuff by "reconfiguring and relabeling what some would call sexist content under a feminist banner, thus encouraging them to embrace the term." Not that she doesn't feel horribly conflicted: "I continue nauseously on and on, uninterrupted. On and on and on, through a list of ideas, which, upon hearing out loud, should revoke my NOW card." Are there any 22-year-old members of N.O.W. these days? You certainly don't need to be one to know that the mass media is still sending out mixed messages to women, and that Cake parties ("female-focused events that provide women with the opportunity to experience sexual culture as entertainment") are retarded.

Unfortunately, the authors have once again larded a perfectly fine send-up with an inane romance. This one begins when Girl meets a guy named Buster at a job fair. "We take each other in, smiling, the creases around his lovely eyes bringing a tingle." It goes downhill from there, with a very strange detour into an ambiguous date-rape scenario, from which Buster somehow emerges as a viable long-term prospect. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus should stick to satire, and leave the relationship stuff to Helen Fielding and Anna Maxted. After all, as a real dyed-in-the-Donna-Karan-pantsuit feminist would say, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Not that any of today's girls could tell you whose line that is.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a freelance journalist in New York and a former deputy editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.