During my prenatal tour of Lenox Hill Hospital a few months back, the head labor nurse informed our group of nervous New York City parents-to-be that a private room would cost around an extra $600 a night—which isn’t covered by insurance. Those rooms are in high demand, nurse Terri said of the coveted real estate, “and we can’t promise you one unless your last name is ‘Brinkley’ or ‘Trump.’”

You could immediately detect sparks of anxiety flying among the couples on the tour, everyone performing a silent calculus like bidders at a Christie’s auction. How do we get the private room? Is it worth the money? Is this child going to bankrupt us?

That was only the beginning. Once you bring a squirming newborn home and figure out how to keep it alive, then the real neurosis sets in.

Like everything in New York, having kids has become a status endeavor, defined by an endless series of purchasing decisions. Every aspect of your life needs to be upgraded, and your apartment soon resembles the trash compactor scene from Star Wars, bursting with gadgets and equipment. There are thousand-dollar Norwegian strollers that look like insects and modernist oval cribs to lust after, plus countless plastic items in crayon colors—from swings to baby bathtubs, all made in China—which must be integrated into your living space. Ads for those loathsome Baby Einstein videos suddenly begin catching your eye despite yourself.

In other words, having a kid is all about spending tons of money on stuff. With Parenting, Inc., Pamela Paul has cleverly identified this subset of our consumer culture run wild and given it a catchy name. (Caitlin Flanagan traversed roughly the same territory a few years back during her brief tenure as a New Yorker writer). In her previous book, Pornified (2005), Ms. Paul took a similar approach to smut culture—and baby porn and booby porn have more in common than you might think.

Both of them are huge industries—$1.7 trillion, in the case of the “mom market.” Having a child is now so expensive—a Wall Street Journal estimate puts the cost until age 17 at $800,000 to $1.6 million—that money has become the primary consideration for couples thinking about starting a family. “Often the decision about whether to have one child, or more, pivots on the question: Can we afford it?” Ms. Paul writes, adding that “this just seems wrong.” The author then quotes her friend “Ava,” who wonders, “‘Why can’t we just have a kid the way our parents did in the seventies?’”

AHH, THE 70'S. Despite the horrors of modern-day child-rearing, it’s hard to look back on the disco decade with a true sense of nostalgia. After all, those of us who were born then—to mothers who smoked, fed us formula rather than breast milk and left us teetering toward the stairs in the since-banned infant walker—know we’re lucky to have survived. But Ms. Paul has a point.

Parents (a.k.a. “suckers”) are bombarded from the prenatal stage with ads for products and services that didn’t exist in simpler times, at least not in such pricey form. Ms. Paul has endless examples to choose from, each one promising to improve your baby: There are the formula companies insidiously peddling their breast-milk substitute; parent “coaches” and sleep experts charging by the hour; “Prenatal Education Systems” and other ridiculous-sounding thingies designed to transform junior into a genius; classes on baby sign language and elite health clubs for upscale toddlers. The list goes on. And on.

There are so many case studies that it’s overwhelming, almost transforming Ms. Paul’s book into a catalog of every baby product on the market. (My favorite parts were the brief interludes about the author’s own daughter, Beatrice, and her adventures with baby signing or birthday party etiquette.)

But Ms. Paul does perform a useful service, debunking the most absurd of the baby-marketers’ claims—including those behind the infamous Baby Einstein series. The story behind the line of “educational” videos for babies is well known: In 1997, a “mom-preneur” named Julie Aigner-Clark cobbled together homemade videos of her baby daughter’s favorite toys, set to classical music (because we all know Mozart makes you smarter). The videos, which promised to “stimulate your child in a way that even the most caring parent probably cannot duplicate,” became a sensation, eventually selling more than one billion copies. In 2001, the Disney Company bought Baby Einstein for a reported $25 million, and now the brand is ubiquitous. Fortunately we have Pamela Paul to remind us that “the fundamental problem with edutainment is that there is absolutely no proof that it works.”

The line could be applied to almost every gadget mentioned in Parenting, Inc.; repeat it like a mantra the next time you pass a fancy baby store and feel tempted to go in.

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer at Condé Nast Portfolio. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

It’s a Foerocracy!

Certainly no one could accuse them of being unmotivated. The eldest Foer, Franklin, 31, is the editor of The New Republic; Jonathan Safran Foer, 29, is the author of the literary novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; and Joshua, after interning at Slate and dabbling in freelance journalism, is at work on his book, titled Moonwalking with Einstein, about his descent into the world of memory competitions (the book was already optioned for film).

The intrigue that surrounds the Foers in New York literary circles is such that one editor who considered Joshua’s book proposal whispered a piece of Foer lore: the rumor that when they were growing up, the three boys were required to make presentations to their parents during dinner each evening as a sort of training for the public stage.

“Family dinners were a big thing,” Franklin Foer, who lives in Washington, D.C., said by phone. “You’d turn off the nightly news and then sit down and eat.” Franklin described his father as a highly experimental cook, and mentioned his dad’s “falafel spaghetti sauce” as one particular dish that left an imprint on his palate.

“Dinner-table conversation had its share of current events and historical discussion, and, you know, analysis of French symbolism … but also its share of fart jokes,” he said.

Regarding the story about the mealtime pageants, Franklin said: “I think that was only me, ’cause I was shy.” He explained that he was an “extremely” timid child, and so to encourage him to break out of his shell, his parents gave him historical, philosophical and other kinds of topics to research and present.

The family is based in Washington, where the Foer brothers were born to Esther and Albert Foer. Esther is the founder and president of a public-relations firm called FM Strategic Communications and a former press secretary in Illinois for George McGovern, the onetime Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate. Born in Poland after World War II, Esther spent her early childhood in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. Her parents were Holocaust survivors; later, they immigrated to the United States and opened a small grocery store on North Capitol Street in D.C.

Albert (Bert) Foer is characterized as the voracious reader in the family. A lawyer by training, he now runs a public-interest think tank called the American Antitrust Institute, which seeks to increase antitrust enforcement. He was born in Norfolk, Va., and grew up in D.C. His father ran jewelry shops. His father’s father was born in Bialystok; he was a wallpaper hanger.

According to Franklin, it was all “pretty darn normal,” and—shockingly—the kids were allowed to watch television. Franklin also maintained a collection of political-campaign buttons. All three attended public school until junior high, when they switched to tony-liberal Georgetown Day School. They scattered for college (Frank attended Columbia; Jonathan, Princeton; and Joshua, Yale.)

Now, two of the three live in New York. The semi-reclusive Jonathan is ensconced in the multimillion-dollar townhouse he bought in Park Slope with his wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss (they just had their first child, Sasha, who may or may not be permitted to watch TV). Joshua moved to the city this past summer. That leaves Franklin in D.C.; he has a wife and a 2-year-old girl, whom he described proudly as a “fifth-generation Washingtonian.”

So are the brothers competitive with one another?

“I would say not,” Franklin said. “It’s more like, I like to think of Jonathan as my protégé, and he likes to think of Joshua as his protégé. I would try to foist all my interests on Jonathan, which in turn he rejected.”

“I am sorry for my so-bad English … ,” he began shyly.

Mr. Bouillier’s book, The Mystery Guest: An Account, had just been translated and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The author was seated at a table with his editor and translator, Lorin Stein, and an interpreter from the United Nations. But before things could proceed, Mr. Bouillier had something to say.

“I am sorry to disappoint you … but I am not the writer,” announced Mr. Bouillier, 46, in French. He was looking moody and tan, with sharp cheekbones and squinty eyes and an Army-green wool sweater, collar turned up. His hair was disheveled; a shock of it jutted from the top of his forehead, transforming him into a gray-haired version of the Belgian cartoon character Tintin. “I am merely the representative of the writer,” he continued. “The writer is not in front of you.”

Later, in response to a question about the slightly confusing fact that his book is a memoir but reads like a novel, he elaborated on his philosophy: “I believe that life itself is a novel,” he said. “It isn’t necessary to invent things …. La réalité est une fiction!”

Mr. Bouillier’s existential proclamations didn’t completely get through, even to that evening’s heavy-scarf-wearing audience members. (“Il n’a pas bien traduit,” he would say a few days later over a glass of Chinon.) But that sort of impenetrable Frenchness didn’t stop members of the New York literary establishment—which is almost as rife with cynicism as investment banking seems to be these days—from embracing both Mr. Bouillier’s anti–Bernard-Henri Lévy persona and his seemingly uncommercial little book.

And unlike the 903-page French doorstop that just sold for a reported $1 million in the U.S.—Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell, a novel about a former SS officer, the Second World War, Stalingrad and bizarre family entanglements—Mr. Bouillier’s book is about a broken heart and a party.

The 120-page Mystery Guest was reviewed at length in The New York Times, GQ, Time Out New York and O, the Oprah Magazine. The Times Magazine granted Mr. Bouillier a back-page essay on Oct. 15, which he used to elucidate the fact that he was conceived during a threesome between his mother, his father and an Algerian hospital internist. The St. Petersburg Times of Florida, of all places, recently asked to reprint the essay.

But Mr. Bouillier seemed surprised over the warm reception he’d received.

“Je trouve ca très bien, très rigolo!,” he said, sipping wine and munching on pâté at Café Loup in the West Village. “But I don’t understand why Americans are interested in this story. C’est très mystérieux! It’s a small book, it’s by a Frenchman … so I don’t seen any reason why they find this book not bad. Do you know why?”

The book is a micro-memoir written in a witty, interior voice. The neurotic narrator, ostensibly Mr. Bouillier, receives a call from a woman who had walked out on him several years back. She invites him to be the “mystery guest” at a birthday party for a famous artist. He shows up, feels humiliated and leaves. “Emo” could be one of the words used to describe it.

Mr. Bouillier’s first book, Rapport sur Moi (Report on Myself), was published in France and won the Prix de Flore in 2002, transforming the author into a mini-sensation; in news clippings, he can be seen scowling with a cigarette, like a Gallic James Dean. A French-American literary agent, Violaine Huisman of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, read the French version of The Mystery Guest in Paris and brought it back to New York with her. The book was lying on her bedside table when her boyfriend, the F.S.G. editor Mr. Stein, scooped it up and read it himself.

“The book of an unknown can still exist, in France and here also. This is reassuring,” Mr. Bouillier said. “The world is not simply a kind of wall, where there are the lucky ones who interact among themselves and then there is everyone else on the other side of the wall. My book is the proof. No one knows me. The New York Times made two articles—I have no friends there.”

The only blemish on Mr. Bouillier’s week was a Tuesday night at the West Side nightclub Marquee. A book signing had been arranged in honor of French Tuesdays, the weekly dance party that appears to cater to French bankers living in New York. As the cavernous club began to swell with financiers ordering bottle service—many of whom bore a striking resemblance to Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH—Mr. Bouillier sat glumly in a corner with a glass of champagne.

Occasionally, one of the mini-Arnaults would drift over to Mr. Bouillier and the stacks of books, both in English and French, and pick one up as if it were an artifact from another civilization. (Perhaps financiers don’t read?) The women seemed more enthusiastic: One with long, curly dark hair and a sparkly black dress that opened to her navel—a big red rose on her belt—twittered hopefully around Mr. Bouillier. He posed gamely for a few photographs. Later, when Mr. Bouillier’s agent and editor, Ms. Huisman and Mr. Stein, left, Mr. Bouillier stayed behind.

A few days afterward, he was reluctant to talk about it. Overall, he seemed content with his visit. “With me, they are kindly and friendly … ,” Mr. Bouillier said of New Yorkers. He added that he’d had a little scare when he returned from his reading in Washington, D.C., and got off the train by mistake in Newark, N.J., at a station confusingly named “Newark Penn Station. “It was very … eh, it was not New York!” Mr. Bouillier said. “Cops with dogs … poor people.”

But rather than leaving him to fend for himself, the information agent led him by the hand to the appropriate train and he made it back unscathed.

“People smile here a lot, I found—they smile easily. I did not find that New Yorkers fait la gueule—arrgh … it’s very agreeable,” Mr. Bouillier said. “There are tensions here and there, one can have a petit-peur in certain areas, but in general, people seem great. There is a rule I heard about New York, that you never look people in the eye. But I did it …. ”

When asked if he’d experienced anything surprising, he said: “New York is incredible. We have the impression it never stops. The light can be very soft and very hard at the same time. Donc, it is full of contrasts. Je trouve ça génial!”

He declared Paris, by comparison, to be “très mort”: “There is no life in Paris,” he said.

Mr. Bouillier had heard all about the James Frey–Oprah “scandal” in France—“a million dollar,” he called it—and he made one other observation about the difference between France and America.

In France, Mr. Bouillier explained, the categories for books are quite different. There are novels, and then there is a category called autofiction. Mr. Bouillier said that autofiction was somewhat new and had become très en vogue.

“We can use real situations of life, but they are a little bit arranged,” Mr. Bouillier said by way of definition. “Sometimes there are invented things, sometimes there are not. It’s a genre that’s become very strong. Autofiction for me is like tele-reality. You have the impression that it’s reality, that it’s real, but everything is fake. For me, autofiction is to literature what reality TV is to television or cinema.”

When he wrote his first book, Mr. Bouillier said, he didn’t want to write a novel, and he “absolutely” did not want to write autofiction. So he wrote a rapport, which, by contrast, is nonfiction.

“What was funny was that journalists said, ‘It’s not real—it’s autofiction.’ I said, ‘It’s not autofiction—it’s events that happened!’“ Mr. Bouillier said. “In autofiction, there is the romanticization of moi. The moi of the writer transcends reality by their subjectivity: You don’t exist unless I make you exist; if I make you exist, you only exist in my gaze. The writer can install elements of reality and do what they wish.

“I think in France, in any case, there is a débat théorique intéressant, about where is the line between fiction and reality, what is reality, all that … ,” Mr. Bouillier continued. “And I was very surprised to find that the debate here does not exist at all.”

The Observer did not have the heart to tell him that this was not surprising in the least.

“I am sorry for my so-bad English … ,” he began shyly.

Mr. Bouillier’s book, The Mystery Guest: An Account, had just been translated and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The author was seated at a table with his editor and translator, Lorin Stein, and an interpreter from the United Nations. But before things could proceed, Mr. Bouillier had something to say.

“I am sorry to disappoint you … but I am not the writer,” announced Mr. Bouillier, 46, in French. He was looking moody and tan, with sharp cheekbones and squinty eyes and an Army-green wool sweater, collar turned up. His hair was disheveled; a shock of it jutted from the top of his forehead, transforming him into a gray-haired version of the Belgian cartoon character Tintin. “I am merely the representative of the writer,” he continued. “The writer is not in front of you.”

Later, in response to a question about the slightly confusing fact that his book is a memoir but reads like a novel, he elaborated on his philosophy: “I believe that life itself is a novel,” he said. “It isn’t necessary to invent things …. La réalité est une fiction!”

Mr. Bouillier’s existential proclamations didn’t completely get through, even to that evening’s heavy-scarf-wearing audience members. (“ Il n’a pas bien traduit,” he would say a few days later over a glass of Chinon.) But that sort of impenetrable Frenchness didn’t stop members of the New York literary establishment—which is almost as rife with cynicism as investment banking seems to be these days—from embracing both Mr. Bouillier’s anti–Bernard-Henri Lévy persona and his seemingly uncommercial little book.

And unlike the 903-page French doorstop that just sold for a reported $1 million in the U.S.— Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell, a novel about a former SS officer, the Second World War, Stalingrad and bizarre family entanglements—Mr. Bouillier’s book is about a broken heart and a party.

The 120-page Mystery Guest was reviewed at length in The New York Times, GQ, Time Out New York and O, the Oprah Magazine. The Times Magazine granted Mr. Bouillier a back-page essay on Oct. 15, which he used to elucidate the fact that he was conceived during a threesome between his mother, his father and an Algerian hospital internist. The St. Petersburg Times of Florida, of all places, recently asked to reprint the essay.

But Mr. Bouillier seemed surprised over the warm reception he’d received.

“ Je trouve ca très bien, très rigolo!,” he said, sipping wine and munching on pâté at Café Loup in the West Village. “But I don’t understand why Americans are interested in this story. C’est très mystérieux! It’s a small book, it’s by a Frenchman … so I don’t seen any reason why they find this book not bad. Do you know why?”

The book is a micro-memoir written in a witty, interior voice. The neurotic narrator, ostensibly Mr. Bouillier, receives a call from a woman who had walked out on him several years back. She invites him to be the “mystery guest” at a birthday party for a famous artist. He shows up, feels humiliated and leaves. “Emo” could be one of the words used to describe it.

Mr. Bouillier’s first book, Rapport sur Moi ( Report on Myself), was published in France and won the Prix de Flore in 2002, transforming the author into a mini-sensation; in news clippings, he can be seen scowling with a cigarette, like a Gallic James Dean. A French-American literary agent, Violaine Huisman of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, read the French version of The Mystery Guest in Paris and brought it back to New York with her. The book was lying on her bedside table when her boyfriend, the F.S.G. editor Mr. Stein, scooped it up and read it himself.

“The book of an unknown can still exist, in France and here also. This is reassuring,” Mr. Bouillier said. “The world is not simply a kind of wall, where there are the lucky ones who interact among themselves and then there is everyone else on the other side of the wall. My book is the proof. No one knows me. The New York Times made two articles—I have no friends there.”

The only blemish on Mr. Bouillier’s week was a Tuesday night at the West Side nightclub Marquee. A book signing had been arranged in honor of French Tuesdays, the weekly dance party that appears to cater to French bankers living in New York. As the cavernous club began to swell with financiers ordering bottle service—many of whom bore a striking resemblance to Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH—Mr. Bouillier sat glumly in a corner with a glass of champagne.

Occasionally, one of the mini-Arnaults would drift over to Mr. Bouillier and the stacks of books, both in English and French, and pick one up as if it were an artifact from another civilization. (Perhaps financiers don’t read?) The women seemed more enthusiastic: One with long, curly dark hair and a sparkly black dress that opened to her navel—a big red rose on her belt—twittered hopefully around Mr. Bouillier. He posed gamely for a few photographs. Later, when Mr. Bouillier’s agent and editor, Ms. Huisman and Mr. Stein, left, Mr. Bouillier stayed behind.

A few days afterward, he was reluctant to talk about it. Overall, he seemed content with his visit. “With me, they are kindly and friendly … ,” Mr. Bouillier said of New Yorkers. He added that he’d had a little scare when he returned from his reading in Washington, D.C., and got off the train by mistake in Newark, N.J., at a station confusingly named “Newark Penn Station. “It was very … eh, it was not New York!” Mr. Bouillier said. “Cops with dogs … poor people.”

But rather than leaving him to fend for himself, the information agent led him by the hand to the appropriate train and he made it back unscathed.

“People smile here a lot, I found—they smile easily. I did not find that New Yorkers fait la gueule—arrgh … it’s very agreeable,” Mr. Bouillier said. “There are tensions here and there, one can have a petit-peur in certain areas, but in general, people seem great. There is a rule I heard about New York, that you never look people in the eye. But I did it …. ”

When asked if he’d experienced anything surprising, he said: “New York is incredible. We have the impression it never stops. The light can be very soft and very hard at the same time. Donc, it is full of contrasts. Je trouve ça génial!”

He declared Paris, by comparison, to be “ très mort”: “There is no life in Paris,” he said.

Mr. Bouillier had heard all about the James Frey–Oprah “scandal” in France—“a million dollar,” he called it—and he made one other observation about the difference between France and America.

In France, Mr. Bouillier explained, the categories for books are quite different. There are novels, and then there is a category called autofiction. Mr. Bouillier said that autofiction was somewhat new and had become très en vogue.

“We can use real situations of life, but they are a little bit arranged,” Mr. Bouillier said by way of definition. “Sometimes there are invented things, sometimes there are not. It’s a genre that’s become very strong. Autofiction for me is like tele-reality. You have the impression that it’s reality, that it’s real, but everything is fake. For me, autofiction is to literature what reality TV is to television or cinema.”

When he wrote his first book, Mr. Bouillier said, he didn’t want to write a novel, and he “absolutely” did not want to write autofiction. So he wrote a rapport, which, by contrast, is nonfiction.

“What was funny was that journalists said, ‘It’s not real—it’s autofiction.’ I said, ‘It’s not autofiction—it’s events that happened!’“ Mr. Bouillier said. “In autofiction, there is the romanticization of moi. The moi of the writer transcends reality by their subjectivity: You don’t exist unless I make you exist; if I make you exist, you only exist in my gaze. The writer can install elements of reality and do what they wish.

“I think in France, in any case, there is a débat théorique intéressant, about where is the line between fiction and reality, what is reality, all that … ,” Mr. Bouillier continued. “And I was very surprised to find that the debate here does not exist at all.”

The Observer did not have the heart to tell him that this was not surprising in the least.

It was the eve of the publication of her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, and Ms. Kipnis, who said she’s in her “late 40’s,” seemed a tiny bit nervous about how graciously she, and it, would be received. Ms. Kipnis called the book, which critiques women’s conflicted obsessions with cleanliness, romantic love, orgasms and rape, an “update on the topography of the female psyche.” She described the tone of some early reviews with that dreaded word: “mocking.”

“I’m curious to know if that will persist, and if writing about femininity actually will end up being my intellectual downfall and I’ll never be taken seriously again,” she said, looking austere at the Noho Star cafe for breakfast on Sept. 29. She was dressed for urban combat—or perhaps for battles of a cerebral nature—in a black sweater and pants, her white, almost translucent skin and angular features brought out by pink lipstick and smoky eyeliner. On her feet were tweed wedges with maribou poufs on the toes.

“You know, I think it’s not an unaggressive book, actually,” she continued in her elongated Midwestern drawl, an anxious furrow appearing between her eyes. “And I think any amount of aggression you put out in the world comes back to you.” Although that’s obviously something she seeks out: “I’m maybe playing a bit of a provocateur role,” she said. She took a bite of toast.

Ms. Kipnis, who teaches film production at Northwestern University, is not incorrect in thinking that the media needs more sharp, intelligent female writing. Instead, the proliferation of self-indulgent essays—retro first-person tales of dating, wedding-planning and baby-making—seem to do more for the author than the reader. Both the television and print worlds are crowded with self-important boys fighting amongst themselves, but there’s no Simone, Susan Sontag or even a kooky new Camille Paglia on the horizon. The literary landscape is as uninspiring as a girl’s credit-card balance after a Jimmy Choo sample sale—as Ms. Kipnis herself might write in her self-consciously irreverent voice.

“I did think what was missing was an element of honesty,” said Ms. Kipnis, who criticizes the work of Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Flanagan and Eve Ensler, not to mention most feminist academics and theorists (she does admire Barbara Ehrenreich). She refers to much of what goes on as “you go, girl” culture: “It’s a whole men-are-dogs, men-are-untrustworthy kind of advice literature which acts as if men are de facto emotional incompetents, and women are the ones with the soul and the depth and the emotional awareness,” she said, adding that women need to look inward to find the source of many of their problems. “It does seem so smug.”

Ms. Kipnis, however, doesn’t regard this as an irreconcilable problem; having made her name writing “academically” about subjects such as Hustler magazine and porn (a sure way to ensure that one’s college courses are always full), she seems intent on catapulting beyond the walls of academia and filling the void herself.

LAURA KIPNIS GREW UP IN, and now lives in, Chicago, but she’s openly ambitious about her desire to settle permanently in New York (“It’s fucking freezing there,” she said, among other things, about the Windy City).

She attended art school in San Francisco, became known as a video artist and then went on to publish articles in academic journals, which led to university teaching gigs in Madison and Michigan, as well as at New York University in 2002 and 2003. (Ms. Kipnis holds the title of professor at Northwestern without the coveted credential of a Ph.D.)

After publishing books in the academic world—Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender & Aesthetics—she made her mainstream debut with Against Love: A Polemic, a sassy book-length essay arguing that marriage and monogamy are suffocating and unnatural (“domestic gulags,” in her parlance), which was published in 2003. People—men in particular—seemed intrigued by a single-woman author who made a passionate case for adultery (although she said that she was once in a stable 12-year relationship and isn’t anti-marriage). The book was widely, and for the most part enthusiastically, reviewed.

“I was kind of amazed with that book,” Ms. Kipnis said, marveling at how “intellectually seriously” it was treated. “I thought that it would be polarizing, and I thought there would be some real bashing, but as far as I know, the reviews were just entirely … kinda celebratory and positive to an extent that just ... surprised me.”

Slate’s culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke, reviewed the book and later asked Ms. Kipnis to write for the online magazine. The collaboration led to pieces about Playboy, Deep Throat, Americans’ expanding waistlines and politics. Ms. O’Rourke described Ms. Kipnis as their “maverick voice on feminism.”

Most of Ms. Kipnis’ newest book was written in New York, in an apartment she owns in Chelsea, while she was on a two-year leave from Northwestern. When she’s in town, she hangs out with, among others, Ms. O’Rourke, as well as the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead and her husband. (Ms. Mead reviewed Against Love for The New Yorker and the two struck up a friendship.) In fact, Ms. Mead’s home was the setting of at least one of the dinner parties mentioned in the book, in which Ms. Kipnis described an “attractive successful single professional female in her mid- to late thirties” who was ranting at the table about what wimps most men are. Ms. Mead said that Ms. Kipnis is “excellent” to have at a dinner party.

“She can always defend herself and argue with people who aren’t necessarily used to being taken on,” Ms. Mead said. “And she’s always game. So I don’t think she’s ever declined an invitation.”

The dinner-party anecdote was meant to illustrate what seems to be Ms. Kipnis’ central point: that women have mixed feelings about their own emancipation. “[B]eing female at this point in history is an especially conflicted enterprise,” she writes sagely in the “Envy” section, “like Birkenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown after a Botox injection.”

The 160-page riff that ensues is decidedly less focused than Against Love. Ms. Kipnis divides the female psyche into four quadrants (the “dirt,” “sex,” “envy” and “vulnerability” of the title), and within them covers sexual satisfaction (“orgasms have become an index of female progress”), housework (“it’s unclear whether the real domestic problem between the sexes is that men won’t clean or that women will”), rape (“It may come as a surprise to hear that as many men as women are probably raped [in prison] every year in the United States, and possibly more”) and women’s general love-hate attitude towards men. Freud makes an appearance on page 11, Naomi Wolf on page 145, with Nietzsche somewhere in between.

She pointedly avoids giving any sort of advice, which many women have probably come to expect from their fellow women. When asked what she hoped to accomplish with The Female Thing over breakfast, Ms. Kipnis paused.

“I think my ambition is to—I don’t know how this is gonna sound—but for the world to be a bit more interesting than it is,” Ms. Kipnis said. “So I’m … trying to contribute to making these conversations feel a little more interesting. And also, on a personal level, just kinda have fun.”

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Ms. Kipnis was party to a conversation with a very different tenor. She was the guest of honor at a seminar held at Columbia University to discuss the “Dirt” chapter of The Female Thing. A group of students, many likely from women’s studies (several bandanas and unshaved armpits were in attendance), and a handful of professors gathered around a conference table in a fluorescent-lit basement room. The whole exercise served as a potent reminder of both the perils and the luxuries of academic life.

One of those present, an older woman with short hair and spectacles, was squirming in her seat.

“I still don’t know what this book is about,” she harrumphed, furiously chewing her gum.

Ms. Kipnis swept in and took her place at the end of the table. After a heady introduction by one of the grad students, she explained that “femininity and feminism are in incessant conflict” with one another. She read several passages from the book’s preface aloud (“when it comes to the female situation, contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax,” etc.). While she spoke, her lips pursed into a perfect “O” shape that jutted out in front of her face.

“I loved reading this—it was so much fun, I felt like I was cheating,” gushed one young woman when Ms. Kipnis finished reading.

The conversation hopscotched around the table, covering questions of who Ms. Kipnis was hoping to reach with her book (“both academics and readers of Time magazine,” she said); the link between housework and pornography; the question of whether there is a “female propensity to masochism”; and the inevitable theme of ladies’ anatomy: “I kept coming back to the vagina,” Ms. Kipnis declared at one point, by way of explaining why women behave the way they do. “No matter how you get into the theory, it does come back to the fact that you have a vagina. It sounds stupid to say it …. ”

There was heated talk of “cross-cultural claims” and “transformational possibilities,” “social constructionism” and “materiality.” One of the three men in the room piped in that he had had “some impatience with the straight constructionist line” in the excerpt.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to be rather enjoying the friendly banter, until someone put forth a question that demonstrated that even an edgy, feminist contrarian has her limits. A man with a shaggy white mustache gathered the sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him with the efficiency of a government bureaucrat.

“I found it interesting that there was no reference at all to oral sex,” the man began. “Feel-ah-shee-o or coo-ne-linguis raises all sorts of issues that you might have discussed—heh, heh! My sense is that feel-ah-shee-o occurs more and is expected more than coo-ne-linguis.”

Ms. Kipnis was staring at him, and somewhere somebody let out a giggle.

“Do you think that oral sex has any role in this discussion?” the man said.

It was a fair point, but Ms. Kipnis was having none of it.

“Uh … no, I didn’t take that up,” Ms. Kipnis said.

It was the eve of the publication of her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, and Ms. Kipnis, who said she’s in her “late 40’s,” seemed a tiny bit nervous about how graciously she, and it, would be received. Ms. Kipnis called the book, which critiques women’s conflicted obsessions with cleanliness, romantic love, orgasms and rape, an “update on the topography of the female psyche.” She described the tone of some early reviews with that dreaded word: “mocking.”

“I’m curious to know if that will persist, and if writing about femininity actually will end up being my intellectual downfall and I’ll never be taken seriously again,” she said, looking austere at the Noho Star cafe for breakfast on Sept. 29. She was dressed for urban combat—or perhaps for battles of a cerebral nature—in a black sweater and pants, her white, almost translucent skin and angular features brought out by pink lipstick and smoky eyeliner. On her feet were tweed wedges with maribou poufs on the toes.

“You know, I think it’s not an unaggressive book, actually,” she continued in her elongated Midwestern drawl, an anxious furrow appearing between her eyes. “And I think any amount of aggression you put out in the world comes back to you.” Although that’s obviously something she seeks out: “I’m maybe playing a bit of a provocateur role,” she said. She took a bite of toast.

Ms. Kipnis, who teaches film production at Northwestern University, is not incorrect in thinking that the media needs more sharp, intelligent female writing. Instead, the proliferation of self-indulgent essays—retro first-person tales of dating, wedding-planning and baby-making—seem to do more for the author than the reader. Both the television and print worlds are crowded with self-important boys fighting amongst themselves, but there’s no Simone, Susan Sontag or even a kooky new Camille Paglia on the horizon. The literary landscape is as uninspiring as a girl’s credit-card balance after a Jimmy Choo sample sale—as Ms. Kipnis herself might write in her self-consciously irreverent voice.

“I did think what was missing was an element of honesty,” said Ms. Kipnis, who criticizes the work of Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Flanagan and Eve Ensler, not to mention most feminist academics and theorists (she does admire Barbara Ehrenreich). She refers to much of what goes on as “you go, girl” culture: “It’s a whole men-are-dogs, men-are-untrustworthy kind of advice literature which acts as if men are de facto emotional incompetents, and women are the ones with the soul and the depth and the emotional awareness,” she said, adding that women need to look inward to find the source of many of their problems. “It does seem so smug.”

Ms. Kipnis, however, doesn’t regard this as an irreconcilable problem; having made her name writing “academically” about subjects such as Hustler magazine and porn (a sure way to ensure that one’s college courses are always full), she seems intent on catapulting beyond the walls of academia and filling the void herself.

LAURA KIPNIS GREW UP IN, and now lives in, Chicago, but she’s openly ambitious about her desire to settle permanently in New York (“It’s fucking freezing there,” she said, among other things, about the Windy City).

She attended art school in San Francisco, became known as a video artist and then went on to publish articles in academic journals, which led to university teaching gigs in Madison and Michigan, as well as at New York University in 2002 and 2003. (Ms. Kipnis holds the title of professor at Northwestern without the coveted credential of a Ph.D.)

After publishing books in the academic world— Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender & Aesthetics—she made her mainstream debut with Against Love: A Polemic, a sassy book-length essay arguing that marriage and monogamy are suffocating and unnatural (“domestic gulags,” in her parlance), which was published in 2003. People—men in particular—seemed intrigued by a single-woman author who made a passionate case for adultery (although she said that she was once in a stable 12-year relationship and isn’t anti-marriage). The book was widely, and for the most part enthusiastically, reviewed.

“I was kind of amazed with that book,” Ms. Kipnis said, marveling at how “intellectually seriously” it was treated. “I thought that it would be polarizing, and I thought there would be some real bashing, but as far as I know, the reviews were just entirely … kinda celebratory and positive to an extent that just ... surprised me.”

Slate’s culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke, reviewed the book and later asked Ms. Kipnis to write for the online magazine. The collaboration led to pieces about Playboy, Deep Throat, Americans’ expanding waistlines and politics. Ms. O’Rourke described Ms. Kipnis as their “maverick voice on feminism.”

Most of Ms. Kipnis’ newest book was written in New York, in an apartment she owns in Chelsea, while she was on a two-year leave from Northwestern. When she’s in town, she hangs out with, among others, Ms. O’Rourke, as well as the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead and her husband. (Ms. Mead reviewed Against Love for The New Yorker and the two struck up a friendship.) In fact, Ms. Mead’s home was the setting of at least one of the dinner parties mentioned in the book, in which Ms. Kipnis described an “attractive successful single professional female in her mid- to late thirties” who was ranting at the table about what wimps most men are. Ms. Mead said that Ms. Kipnis is “excellent” to have at a dinner party.

“She can always defend herself and argue with people who aren’t necessarily used to being taken on,” Ms. Mead said. “And she’s always game. So I don’t think she’s ever declined an invitation.”

The dinner-party anecdote was meant to illustrate what seems to be Ms. Kipnis’ central point: that women have mixed feelings about their own emancipation. “[B]eing female at this point in history is an especially conflicted enterprise,” she writes sagely in the “Envy” section, “like Birkenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown after a Botox injection.”

The 160-page riff that ensues is decidedly less focused than Against Love. Ms. Kipnis divides the female psyche into four quadrants (the “dirt,” “sex,” “envy” and “vulnerability” of the title), and within them covers sexual satisfaction (“orgasms have become an index of female progress”), housework (“it’s unclear whether the real domestic problem between the sexes is that men won’t clean or that women will”), rape (“It may come as a surprise to hear that as many men as women are probably raped [in prison] every year in the United States, and possibly more”) and women’s general love-hate attitude towards men. Freud makes an appearance on page 11, Naomi Wolf on page 145, with Nietzsche somewhere in between.

She pointedly avoids giving any sort of advice, which many women have probably come to expect from their fellow women. When asked what she hoped to accomplish with The Female Thing over breakfast, Ms. Kipnis paused.

“I think my ambition is to—I don’t know how this is gonna sound—but for the world to be a bit more interesting than it is,” Ms. Kipnis said. “So I’m … trying to contribute to making these conversations feel a little more interesting. And also, on a personal level, just kinda have fun.”

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Ms. Kipnis was party to a conversation with a very different tenor. She was the guest of honor at a seminar held at Columbia University to discuss the “Dirt” chapter of The Female Thing. A group of students, many likely from women’s studies (several bandanas and unshaved armpits were in attendance), and a handful of professors gathered around a conference table in a fluorescent-lit basement room. The whole exercise served as a potent reminder of both the perils and the luxuries of academic life.

One of those present, an older woman with short hair and spectacles, was squirming in her seat.

“I still don’t know what this book is about,” she harrumphed, furiously chewing her gum.

Ms. Kipnis swept in and took her place at the end of the table. After a heady introduction by one of the grad students, she explained that “femininity and feminism are in incessant conflict” with one another. She read several passages from the book’s preface aloud (“when it comes to the female situation, contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax,” etc.). While she spoke, her lips pursed into a perfect “O” shape that jutted out in front of her face.

“I loved reading this—it was so much fun, I felt like I was cheating,” gushed one young woman when Ms. Kipnis finished reading.

The conversation hopscotched around the table, covering questions of who Ms. Kipnis was hoping to reach with her book (“both academics and readers of Time magazine,” she said); the link between housework and pornography; the question of whether there is a “female propensity to masochism”; and the inevitable theme of ladies’ anatomy: “I kept coming back to the vagina,” Ms. Kipnis declared at one point, by way of explaining why women behave the way they do. “No matter how you get into the theory, it does come back to the fact that you have a vagina. It sounds stupid to say it …. ”

There was heated talk of “cross-cultural claims” and “transformational possibilities,” “social constructionism” and “materiality.” One of the three men in the room piped in that he had had “some impatience with the straight constructionist line” in the excerpt.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to be rather enjoying the friendly banter, until someone put forth a question that demonstrated that even an edgy, feminist contrarian has her limits. A man with a shaggy white mustache gathered the sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him with the efficiency of a government bureaucrat.

“I found it interesting that there was no reference at all to oral sex,” the man began. “ Feel-ah-shee-o or coo-ne-linguis raises all sorts of issues that you might have discussed—heh, heh! My sense is that feel-ah-shee-o occurs more and is expected more than coo-ne-linguis.”

Ms. Kipnis was staring at him, and somewhere somebody let out a giggle.

“Do you think that oral sex has any role in this discussion?” the man said.

It was a fair point, but Ms. Kipnis was having none of it.

“Uh … no, I didn’t take that up,” Ms. Kipnis said.

Mr. Hederman, 61, was seated in his office conference room in midtown Manhattan on Sept. 18, speaking about the idea of editorial independence—both from advertising and business pressure as well as from overreaching newspaper owners—which is something that he values highly. Why? “Because I don’t think there’s much of it any more,” he said.

Mr. Hederman’s pledge not to meddle with editors Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers formed the basis of his purchase of the Review in 1984, for approximately $5 million, and he is widely admired for having kept to his word. Twenty years later, print-media folk are running screaming for the bomb shelters and newspaper conglomerates are gutting their properties, but The New York Review of Books has hewed closely to its original mission of publishing provocative long-form reportage and criticism that caters to the smartest readers rather than the dumbest ones. The magazine still publishes many of the most highly regarded writers in the world. Visually, the publication is almost unchanged from its slightly dorky, text-heavy design, first introduced in 1963. And, perhaps most remarkably, it continues to make money.

“[Mr. Hederman] made what to me was quite an extraordinary statement, which I think is a model,” said the former Nation publisher Victor Navasky, who invited Mr. Hederman to speak at a workshop at Harvard’s Kennedy School. One of the students asked Mr. Hederman what his goal was as a publisher. “He said that it was to make more money so that Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein would have more resources at their disposal to put towards their writers.

“That to me is so beautiful and so clear,” Mr. Navasky continued, “it’s so spot-on and it’s so unusual, that it’s a model. It’s extraordinary. And it helps explain the success of their enterprise.”

Indeed, Mr. Hederman was so self-effacing that he didn’t put his name on the Review’s masthead for three or four years after he became the owner, “just to show that there was no change in the publication, that the publication was going to go on” as it was.

“I was very sensitive in the purchase of the magazine,” said Mr. Hederman, who is 6-foot-5 and slender, with watery blue eyes and a hesitant manner of speaking that impels one to lean across the table in order to catch what he’s saying. “The purchase got a lot of media coverage at the time, and there were of course worries …. ”

Mr. Hederman goes into the office nearly every day, where the Review is now edited alone by Mr. Silvers, 76. Co-editor Ms. Epstein died this past June, and the matter of editorial succession is one of several that will demand Mr. Hederman’s attention sometime in the future. But the most interesting question about the Review at the moment might be how, in the current publishing environment, it continues to prosper: a look at Mr. Hederman’s business plan serves as a crash course in the art of survival.

“What we’re doing is just constantly trying to find new ways to expand our reach and to make things work for the Review,” said Mr. Hederman. “They’re just little things … and if you don’t have a personal interest in it, you might not do it.”

THE POWERFUL ATTACHMENTS OF ADULTHOOD can often be traced to the indignities of youth, and Mr. Hederman’s played out in the Deep South during the civil-rights era. It was then, as a young editor, that Mr. Hederman learned about the dangers of editorial interference from above.

He was born into a longstanding newspaper family that owned the daily Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss, among others. His relatives, and by consequence their newspapers, were pro-segregation and rabidly racist (as well as journalistically inept)—all of which mortified young Rea, even as he joined the family business.

“Growing up in Mississippi, I went to an all-white school, and segregation was in full force, and I think at some point you just feel like … you have to make a decision,” Mr. Hederman said of his ideological split from those he grew up with. (Even some of his five offspring veered rightward, with one of his grown sons now ensconced at the Heritage Foundation.)

Mr. Hederman eventually became an editor at the Clarion-Ledger, where he proceeded to infuriate many of his family members by beefing up the news staff and by hiring, and covering, black people. His muckraking tendencies were unleashed on corrupt local figures—and sometimes on friends or members of the Hederman clan itself. Mr. Hederman described the period as “very rough,” among other things: “I mean, the number of death threats I had, and reporters who worked for me had, was enormous. This was through 1982! It was way past the initial integration of public schools.”

The newspaper’s turnaround was widely praised and won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. But all the while, Mr. Hederman had to wage daily battles with an extended network of relatives who felt that they had the right to decide what went into the paper; the affair makes Wendy McCaw and her recent Santa Barbara News-Press shenanigans seem like amateur hour. His family eventually fired him. (The paper was later sold to Gannett.)

The whole experience led to Mr. Hederman’s lifelong horror of editorial meddling, and his ready eagerness not to do so at the Review.

“The thing that informed me mostly was that they were always trying to interfere in stories that we were publishing,” Mr. Hederman said. “It just drove me crazy. You have to have editorial independence. Otherwise your life is misery.”

Despite his struggles working within the confines of the family empire, Mr. Hederman said that private ownership of a magazine like the Review was greatly preferable to the vagaries of the capital markets, which just this past week prompted Time Inc.’s decision to put 18 of its magazines on the chopping block.

“Private owners have more invested,” Mr. Hederman said. “They’re dealing with it because they like the publication, because they want the publication to succeed.”

THE REVIEW IS SAID TO HAVE MADE MONEY from its inception, through a combination of low per-issue costs—it is tabloid-sized and printed on newsprint, on a newspaper press—a small staff, and a strong beachhead in advertising from book publishers and academic presses. When Mr. Hederman took over from A. Whitney Ellsworth (the Review’s previous publisher and founding partner with Mr. Silvers, Ms. Epstein and Ms. Epstein’s husband at the time, Jason Epstein), the circulation was around 80,000, and his hopes were to grow and seek out new readers.

“I thought the magazine deserved that. And with more circulation, we’d be able to pay the contributors better,” Mr. Hederman said. A third goal was “to keep the magazine healthy. If you own a publication and the publication doesn’t make money, and it’s not surviving on its own, I think that has some effect on the publication itself.”

He focused on expanding into Europe: The magazine is available in 30 countries, with the U.K. having the largest presence (around 10,000 subscribers); there is also an Italian edition with several thousand subscribers. Mr. Hederman also funded broader direct-mail campaigns.

The Review is decidedly “not mass-market,” Mr. Hederman said, so subscribers must be hunted down “in little bits and pieces around the country and around the world.” He described the readers as slightly older, consisting of academics and professionals, people on Wall Street and in banking, a “very diverse audience” that skews more male than female, with above-average income. While younger people seem to be reading it more online, the profile has basically stayed the same for “years and years.”

The Review’s circulation is now around 130,000, which is the highest they’ve ever had, according to Mr. Hederman; the conversion rate (subscribers who respond to direct mailings and then choose to renew) is around 40 percent, and the straight renewal rate is 90 percent.

An annual subscription of 20 issues costs $66, and many new subscribers reach them through the Web site, which the Review has been operating since 1997. The site consists mostly of a paid archive of every article the Review has ever published (the company had them all digitized in India). This past summer, they also started selling ads on the Web for the first time.

The company also operates a small book-publishing arm, which produces around 45 titles per year—slim volumes of essays that have appeared in the Review, as well as classics that have fallen out of print (and into the public domain) and elegantly illustrated children’s stories. Many are put out in hardback and typically break even once they’ve sold 2,700 or so copies (which most of them do).

Mr. Hederman said that he came up with the trick when he was at the Clarion-Ledger in the 1970’s. His extended family tried to starve his newsroom of funding as a way of influencing its press coverage. Mr. Hederman started commissioning books that complemented the newspaper content—collections of Southern recipes or football calendars—all of which brought in some badly needed extra cash.

The Review consists of about 40 employees, with the largest chunk of 10 or 12 in editorial, which is lean but hardly cash-starved. All of the magazine’s content is written by outside contributors, who are said to be paid decently but not spectacularly—several thousand dollars per article, according to someone familiar with the fees. (Mr. Hederman declined to name the figure, but said that it was “competitive.”) Other than that, there is Mr. Silvers and his mini-army of assistants. Mr. Hederman said that they speak daily, as he and Ms. Epstein also did, and that he often shares his opinions with his editor.

“Sometimes I have suggestions, and they can take them or not,” Mr. Hederman said. “That’s purely up to them.”

Fretting about what will happen post-Silvers is a common extracurricular activity within the extended circle of Review-watchers, but it’s practically forbidden around the magazine’s fluorescent-lit offices. Mr. Silvers, for one, refuses to acknowledge the question at all and will typically respond to it with an abrupt change of subject. Mr. Hederman would say only that he expects Mr. Silvers to be around “for quite a while,” although he did allow that he expects the Review to persist, regardless of who’s editing it.

“I do think it would continue to go on,” he said, his hands clasped tightly under his chin. “I think it would be a terrible thing if it didn’t.”

The New Republic’s cultural critic was on the phone on Sept. 4, explaining what was coursing through his mind when he fired off comments in the “Talkback” section of his own New Republic blog, “Lee Siegel on Culture.” In the missives, he heaped praise on himself and insulted his critics—all under the anonymous handle “sprezzatura.”

Mr. Siegel’s barely camouflaged Internet self had offered him swift entry into the race to the bottom known as online reader commentary. In a sample posting, from Aug. 27, “sprezzatura” wrote to another poster, a nemesis named “jhschwartz”: “You’re a fraud, and a liar. And a wincingly pretentious writer. You couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces.”

“It never occurred to me” that it was wrong, the 48-year-old Mr. Siegel said of his frame of mind at the time. “This is really cowboy territory, with very few boundaries. I think now that it was wrong. I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level.”

On Sept. 1, The New Republic concluded that it wasn’t such a gray area after all and terminated the “Lee Siegel on Culture” blog; in its place, an editor’s note apologized for Mr. Siegel’s deception and informed readers that Mr. Siegel had been suspended from writing for the magazine.

“The transcendent rules of journalism apply, even in the ‘Talkback’ section of the magazine,” Franklin Foer, The New Republic’s editor, said. “We don’t let our writers misrepresent themselves to readers.”

Mr. Foer said that Mr. Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.”

Mr. Siegel is known as an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist, whose omnipresence in print sometimes made it seem as if he was monopolizing the review columns at every media outlet in town. In addition to writing for The New Republic, where he was hired by the magazine’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and has been on the masthead since 1998 (as a contributing writer, a contributing editor, a television critic and, most recently, as a senior editor), he was the art critic for Slate and a book critic at The Nation for a year. His own book, Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination, comes out this month, from Basic Books. He’s notorious for engaging in heated, sometimes hysterical arguments with detractors or those whose work he’s already trashed.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Mr. Siegel’s exposure as his own worst self-promoter set off ripples of horror and schadenfreude over Labor Day weekend. In some small corners of the literary-blog community, the reaction was practically giddy: “Well, I was pointing out to people that you obviously needed a long rest in some soothing and undemanding place, and now I am happy to see that you will have more free time, at least. For once you have got something that is well-earned,” Christopher Hitchens wrote to him in an e-mail, following up with a lengthy entry about Mr. Siegel and his comeuppance on Mr. Hitchens’ Web site.

Mr. Siegel was first drawn into Internet anonymity last February, after his condescending column offering advice to Jon Stewart before he hosted the Oscars inspired dozens of nasty comments in response. Under the heading “Siegel is my hero,” the first of 15 posts by “sprezzatura” read: “How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn’t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos …. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” It followed later with: “Groupthink from a mob of bullies cowering behind their user-name aliases. Groupthink! Groupthink! Naaa naaa naaa-naaa naaa!”

Another “sprezzatura” post appeared in June. That comment, on Ruth Franklin essay about the Holocaust, was sweet and flattering, almost out of character in its gentility. Reading the final stream of exchanges leading up to Mr. Siegel’s suspension, however, was more akin to watching a locomotive speeding toward a dog paralyzed on the train tracks.

After several days of debate about Mr. Siegel’s critique of an academic whose essay had appeared on Slate (“Little Miss Sunshine: American’s Obsession with JonBenet Ramsay,” by James Kincaid, Aug. 21), “sprezzatura” got into a tangle with a poster identified as “jhschwartz.” “Jhschwartz” had stepped in to defend Mr. Kincaid at length (“Why is Siegel wrong about EVERYTHING?” he began). Screens and screens of text later, he invoked an essay about the sexualization of children published in the literary journal n+1 and written by one of its editors, Mark Greif.

Mr. Siegel responded with two blog posts under his own name. Just prior, in early August, Mr. Siegel’s wife had given birth to their first child; by this point, the baby was colicky and Mr. Siegel was operating, he said, on three hours of sleep a night. Finally, after a few more days of online back and forth, he obviously couldn’t take it any more, and “sprezzatura” came raging forth:

“You have quite an obsession with Siegel!” he thundered to “jhschwartz” on Aug. 27. “Sounds to me like you’re an envious young writer …. If I had to guess, you’re this person Mark Greif himself. Or someone in his circle. Every young writer in NYC has it in for poor Siegel it seems. They all write like middle-aged hacks. He has the fire and guts of a young man (I assume he’s middle-aged himself, or somewhere near there.) Who am I? Someone who knows who you are.”

After goading his adversary with several paragraphs of accusations, “jhschwartz” finally came back with: “I would say with 99% confidence that ‘sprezzatura’ is a Siegel alias.”

Mr. Foer said that one of the magazine’s writers had been reading the “Talkback” section and brought the recent “sprezzatura”/“jhschwartz” interaction to his attention, which prompted him to investigate the matter.

“I think that it was pretty clear from the ‘schwartz’-‘sprezzatura’ exchange that there was at least the possibility that ‘sprezzatura’ was Siegel,” Mr. Foer said. He determined that the two were one and the same, although he was still looking into the question of whether Mr. Siegel also had help producing the posts. On Sept. 5, he published an open letter to New Republic readers soliciting feedback on where anonymity in the “Talkback” section should be allowed.

Mr. Siegel, in the meantime, seemed convinced that Mr. Greif or someone affiliated with n+1 was out to get him and might have been behind “jhschwartz” and his downfall. The two camps have a history of petty infighting. In its inaugural issue, n+1 printed a manifesto, on behalf of all four of its editors, lamenting the state of criticism in America and naming The New Republic and Mr. Siegel specifically as problem centers. Mr. Siegel later made a bitchy comment in response in The Observer. Despite their rich history, however, Mr. Greif and other n+1 editors denied having anything to do with Mr. Siegel or his blog, although Keith Gessen, one of the editors, acknowledged: “It’s not a bizarre accident that our name got mentioned in this.”

But the mysterious “jhschwartz” turns out to be an associate at the New York law firm Kramer Levin named … Joseph H. Schwartz.

Mr. Schwartz went to Columbia (class of 1998) and N.Y.U. Law School, practices white-collar defense work, is married to a writer, and described himself as “a reluctant lawyer” and a “frustrated” fiction writer. He is friendly with the n+1 crowd (he went to high school with one of the founding editors, Marco Roth, and is a regular at social events with the group), although he said that he wasn’t acting in conjunction with them when he posted on Mr. Siegel’s blog.

Mr. Schwartz said that he regretted his goading of Mr. Siegel online and was horrified when he saw that the blog had been dismantled, an action that he said struck him as “draconian.” When he saw the editor’s note last Friday, he immediately called Mr. Foer, leaving a voice mail and following up with an e-mail, imploring him to show leniency for Mr. Siegel.

“I felt like I had some special responsibility in the whole thing,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I thought it was needlessly cruel.” He said that Mr. Foer responded respectfully that he had to have a “zero-tolerance policy” on such matters.

The young lawyer described himself as “sort of a New Republic fan.” So how much time does the busy attorney spend poking around the magazine’s Web site? “I don’t know,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Don’t damage my law career, but probably too much time.”

Mr. Wieseltier was sanguine about the situation. He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,” and saw the issue more as one having to do with the nature of the Internet itself.

“The larger problem, of course, is that we planted our flag over a piece of the Wild West known as the blogosphere. This left us divided against ourselves,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Since we do make ourselves factually and morally responsible for what appears under our flag, we have to apply the same stringencies to our blogs, too. I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.”

Jon Meacham Wants Newsweek to Be More Like Hayes' Esquire

“I think it’s a good time to be doing this,” Jon Meacham said.

It was the afternoon of Sept. 5, the day Newsweek announced that Mr. Meacham would be its next editor. An incoming editor is required to be excited about new times and new technologies, even if the ad economy is collapsing and the readership is all on HomeStarRunner.com or whatever it is this year.

But Mr. Meacham’s excitement had some specifics theories behind it: For instance, at least he doesn’t have to run a newspaper. A newspaper, he noted, has to put a daily report up on the Web, then figure out some other kind of daily report to put out on paper. A newsweekly, on the other hand, has the luxury of working in two different time frames, leaving Newsweek “institutionally better prepared” for a blended Web-and-print future.

“We now have the means to be a daily part of people’s lives,” Mr. Meacham said.

Newsweeklies? Part of what? The mind drifts through imaginary headlines in an imaginary dentist’s office: TEARS OF A CONTINENT … ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH CORN? … HOW TALL IS TOO TALL?

But the famed ever-accelerating news cycle could speed up the weeklies to the point of relevance again. Follow the moving parts: The Web supplies the breaking news the dailies used to provide. The daily paper, filling in the stories behind headlines readers have already seen, “becomes … what Time and Newsweek were a generation ago,” Mr. Meacham said. And Newsweek brings out a print edition that has, Mr. Meacham said, “production values that we used to associate with the monthlies.”

(And the monthlies would read like quarterlies …. Point to Mr. Meacham!)

But what monthlies of old would Newsweek care to emulate? “Harold Hayes’ Esquire was a little like this back in the day,” Mr. Meacham said. “Was Harper’s like this under Willie Morris? …. I think when Esquire was at its best, when it was doing those iconic covers.”

Newsweek’s eternal rival, Time, contemplated the current pace of things and decided last month that it would switch its release date from Mondays to Fridays. Mr. Meacham said that Newsweek has no immediate plans to follow it. “We’re not dogmatic either way,” he said. “We’ve looked at it in the past …. I can see a case for both.”

With the cycles out of sync, Mr. Meacham said, he expects the news to break in Time’s favor half the time, and in Newsweek’s favor the other half. “On that, it’s probably a wash,” he said.

Time’s new managing editor, Richard Stengel, told The New York Times that he wants to be more like The Economist. Atlantic owner David Bradley has also said he wants his magazine more like The Economist. Is Mr. Meacham joining the Economist parade?

Mr. Meacham laughed.

“I read The Economist,” he said. “I am a longtime reader. I think The Economist does what The Economist does very well, but newsmagazines, it seems to me, are not a zero-sum game.” A newsmagazine, he said, should combine analysis with reporting. “I think you have to do both,” Mr. Meacham said, “and The Economist doesn’t even attempt to do original reporting, particularly.”

What about the division-of-labor theory, in which the Web is for breaking news and print editions are for thinking about it? Doesn’t the Web break all news nowadays? “I don’t really accept that,” Mr. Meacham said, “except in the strictest sense, that as the magazine is being printed, we go up online …. I don’t think that every piece of reporting you have has to immediately go up online.”

“I don’t think you only stroke your chin, nor do you only meet people in dark garages,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s both, because both are important.”

Thus the daily and weekly versions of Newsweek, Mr. Meacham said, will be coming out of the same news operation. Mr. Meacham said that “one of the next dramas” will be the full integration of online writing and reporting with the print operations, getting rid of “any lingering stones in the wall between the two that sort of sprang up in the late ‘90s.”

Mr. Meacham was scrupulously polite to Time magazine. “I’m honored to be in the arena with them,” he said, after allowing that he believes “we bring more original reporting to our pages.”

Unlike Yalies who buck convention by saying “Yale and Harvard,” Mr. Meacham consistently spoke of the tandem as “Time and Newsweek,” the way everyone else in the world does. “What Time and Newsweek have always brought to the game [is] important,” he said.

The institutional power of a newsweekly can still make itself felt, Mr. Meacham said. “There’s a kind of attention that, if we rise to the occasion, will be there for us,” he said.

And the occasion, Mr. Meacham said, is ripe for serious news coverage. There is the ongoing multi-front war—“a generation-long struggle that’s not unlike the Cold War in many ways.” Two years from now, there will be a Presidential election with neither an incumbent President nor Vice President in it—the first, Mr. Meacham said, since 1952.

“We will be doing everything we can to try to own that story,” he said. “It’s about what we are.”

—Tom Scocca

“You’ve all heard the story,” said Jonathan Salant, the president of the press club, introducing the Governor. The extremely tan Mr. Pataki looked calm as he listened to the preamble, an uneaten slice of strawberry shortcake on the table in front of him.

“The Governor of New York wins his post,” Mr. Salant continued, “after defeating a heavily favored opponent. He delivers a well-received speech in prime time at his party’s national convention, and in his third term in office is talked about as a potential Presidential candidate, fueling such speculation by traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire. Well … Mario Cuomo couldn’t be here today.”

Awkward laughter flickered through the room. But was Mr. Pataki in on the joke or just smiling, as if responding to a cue?

His thin, silvery hair was carefully combed and looked almost blond from a distance; he wore a navy suit and light blue tie. The comparison to Mario Cuomo was apt in at least one respect: Nobody seems to think his Presidential candidacy will get off the ground.

As one white-haired member of the press club said to another about 20 minutes before the festivities began: “He thinks he’s gonna be President. I’ll be President before he is!”

It was the sort of sentiment that has surrounded Mr. Pataki like a cloud of dust as he heads into the sunset of his 11 1/2-year career as New York’s Governor—and towards the decidedly murkier horizon of his political future.

Reached by phone as he dashed between events in New York City, Mr. Pataki said that he was “very pleased” with the reception his speech had gotten in Washington the previous day. But as far as he’s concerned, whether or not anyone is taking his Presidential plans seriously is of no concern.

“I have never worried about what the experts or the opinion leaders or the polls or others say,” Mr. Pataki said, when asked why he thought people weren’t paying more attention. “If you believe in something, then you just have an obligation, if you think it’s in the public interest, to try to advance that agenda.”

But what agenda precisely, aside from the coy Presidential one?

“He supports abortion rights, and rights for gays and lesbians,” Mr. Salant had said in his introduction. “He’s been described as affable and laconic.”

Or just safe. In fact, safe could well have been the catchword for the entire Washington event, which was as carefully stage-managed as a debutante’s coming-out party and clearly intended to address what is seen as one of the Governor’s greatest shortcomings: the perception that he stands for, well, nothing in particular.

“I don’t identify him with a particular issue,” said Ross Baker, a political-science professor at Rutgers University. “He’s not been terribly outspoken on the issues I think people consider important, like the Iraq war. So it’s hard to know where he fits. He comes across as a rather bland person, both in appearance and demeanor. It’s hard to say—how does a candidate like that catch fire and become a nominee? I have not heard his themes.”

Mr. Pataki seems to have taken this observation to heart, settling—at least for now—on “energy independence” as the mantra that will lift him above the other moderate Republicans, such as John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have well-publicized Presidential ambitions and better name recognition.

On one hand, it makes sense: Mr. Pataki has legitimately solid environmental credentials, and that’s no small distinction among a field of industry-friendly Republicans. On the other, though, it’s hard to imagine talk of cellulosic ethanol rousing the masses.

His constituents in New York have delivered their own verdict on his past and future performance: His approval rating in New York hovers around 39 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll taken in June. And for now, at least, things hardly look better for him on the Presidential stage.

“A President Pataki—I don’t see that one happening,” said pollster John Zogby. “That’s a rough one. He starts with a pretty substantial deficit.”

Such assessments haven’t stopped the Governor from eating his share of shrimp ’n’ grits (or corn dogs, for that matter) on the weekends—and going through all the other necessary motions for any aspirant to America’s highest office. While some New Yorkers have been fleeing the sweltering city for the Hamptons or the Jersey Shore from Friday to Sunday, Mr. Pataki has embarked on an improbably (and perhaps unintentionally) stealthy Presidential campaign.

Another Road Trip

Just this past weekend, in fact, Mr. Pataki went to Keene, N.H., and Columbia, S.C., where he attended the National Governors Conference, as well as a ceremony at the White Knoll Middle School in Lexington, S.C.—he thanked the students for raising money to buy a new fire truck for New York City after Sept. 11—and a photo op with the South Carolina National Guard.

(A planned foray to Dows, Iowa, on Saturday night to pay tribute to former Iowa Senate Majority Leader Stew Iverson, who is working on Mr. Pataki’s campaign there, didn’t pan out.)

Mr. Pataki has brought on board some familiar names for his national venture. G.O.P. strategist Arthur Finkelstein is advising him politically. Leonard Rodriguez, who is described in the press as a protégé of Karl Rove and who has worked on George W. Bush’s Presidential campaigns, was hired as the political director of Mr. Pataki’s 21st Century Freedom P.A.C.—the fund-raising arm of his political operation—in May. Longtime Pataki associate Rob Cole is the P.A.C.’s executive director, and Meridian Communications, a New Hampshire firm, has been retained to help the Governor connect with Republicans running in the state. Mr. Iverson is chairman of the P.A.C. and is leading its activities.

Perhaps tellingly, Mercury Public Affairs, which has worked closely with Mr. Pataki throughout his entire gubernatorial career, is tied up with other Presidential hopefuls such as John McCain and isn’t playing any official role.

Whether the Governor is truly serious about mounting a bid to become President is unclear; the important thing is that he seems as if he is, or might be.

For a lame-duck governor, cultivating confusion might be the best (and only) career move he can make: a way of putting himself in play for lesser national office—Vice President, maybe, or head of the Environmental Protection Agency—raising money for unspecified future ambitions, or simply warding off political irrelevance.

But Mr. Pataki—who has tried his hand at national-policy speeches in the past, with limited success—seems to feel that his current national tour needs no particular explanation. Indeed, he has yet to provide even a hint as to what he’s actually up to.

Asked in the phone interview when he might decide whether or not he’s actually running, Mr. Pataki said, “Certainly not this year.” Rather, he’s spending his time stumping for other Republicans.

“I don’t think anyone doesn’t understand that this is gonna be a tough year, and I’m going to do my best to try to help them win, whether it’s here in New York or in Iowa or in California,” he said, adding that he was attending a campaign event for State Attorney General candidate Jeanine Pirro that evening, and was “setting up an event” for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Faso. “Certainly, post-November, I’ll make a decision as to what the next step might be.”

When asked whether he’d noticed a difference in terms of the way that he’s received in places like Iowa versus his reception in New York these days—his trip was announced in a local Associated Press story with the headline, “Pataki Off on Latest Political Foray; Dems Scoff”—the Governor paused. “No, I don’t see a difference, because strange as it might seem, people respond very positively in New York,” he said. “And last week I was all over New York State doing various events, as is generally the case. It was very uplifting and I enjoyed it very much.”

But it is inarguably in places far away from New York—geographically and culturally—that Mr. Pataki’s national ambitions have been given the most respectful consideration.

Take Iowa, a state that Mr. Pataki has quietly visited several times in the last year alone.

“I was impressed,” said David Yepsen, the Des Moines Register’s authoritative political columnist, who tracked the Governor on some of his recent swings through Iowa. Mr. Yepsen said that politicians from large states often blow through farm country with their big-city airs and entourages, without realizing that they have to modify their campaign styles for the more intimate setting. But he thought that Mr. Pataki—whose family used to raise and sell fruits and vegetables on a 12-acre farm in Peekskill—grasped the difference, comparing him favorably in that regard to Mr. Giuliani.

“I think he understands this is a retail proposition. In caucus fights, it’s one on one, it’s retail, it’s very small groups of people,” Mr. Yepsen said. “He’s also got some good people working for him here, people who know the lay of the land. He’s been spending time here, which is important. Don’t dismiss what he’s doing out here.”

Mr. Pataki, certainly, seemed sincere—if simultaneously safe and vague—while addressing his itinerant tendencies with a small handful of reporters after his speech in Washington.

“It’s been very good,” he said in response to a question about how his reception has been in places like Iowa. “I’ve enjoyed having the chance to meet people and hear about the things that affect their lives.”

He said that he was able to “do some events to help candidates from my party,” and described the Lexington fire-truck ceremony as “emotional” and “really touching.” And he said that he would be returning to Iowa soon to help with some of the “hotter” Congressional races: “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, before his people bustled him into the elevator and out the door.

But his speech to the Washington press corps was another thing entirely. Could a President Pataki make good copy? Could a Pataki campaign possibly be worth the time to cover?

The timing of the presentation was fortuitous, coming on the same day BP announced that the Alaska oil pipeline had to be shut down after springing a leak, sending crude-oil prices to $77 a barrel. Not that Mr. Pataki altered his script to make mention of it. Rather, after polite applause, he roused his hulking frame and curled himself over the podium.

“Energy dependence is a threat to our freedom,” he began darkly, with the touch of an odd, leftover South Carolina drawl to his voice. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, he explained that “it’s time to break free from foreign oil’s dangerous influence once and for all.” He proposed a 10-year “national energy plan” that included tax incentives, the reduction of gasoline use and the creation of a “national center for alternative-fuel technologies,” while making frequent mention of the helpful role that the free market would play in such a project. At times, he strayed into definite Al Gore territory, railing against harmful greenhouse gases in an understated monotone. As he spoke, his forehead creased like a piece of paper.

The most excited he got was when he mentioned Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (whom he described later as “Fidel Castro with oil money,”); the most excited the audience got was when three members of the Transport Workers Union started yelling about the M.T.A. strike and the fact that they still don’t have a contract.

“You can’t even win your own state! How could he be President?” screamed one of them as she was manhandled out the door.

A Consistent Performer

Just a few days earlier, at the premiere of World Trade Center at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld Theater, Mr. Pataki’s propensity for delivering carefully worded sound bites had also been on display.

It was an unpleasantly hot evening, and the atmosphere under the blue tent was frenzied and moist—like a circus staged in a rain forest. Mr. Pataki drifted steadily from one media outlet to another with a sizeable pack of hangers-on—including his security detail, press secretary and Charles Gargano, the head of the Empire State Development Corporation—in tow.

“Everybody has to make their own determination as to when the time is right,” Mr. Pataki intoned, in almost identical form, to CBS News, a British TV network and the local New York papers, speaking of the movie. “I think it’s important that that story be told again to America, and that people remember the courage and the unity that Americans and New Yorkers showed on September 11th.” Beside him was his 21-year-old daughter, who looked slightly stunned, with glossy lips and big eyes, nodding somberly each time her father spoke.

His lines were so perfectly rehearsed that it took a fuchsia-lipped German broadcaster in a white T-shirt—who asked a surprisingly existential-sounding question about the “political context of this movie”—to trip him up.

“Der denken [inaudible German] September 11th …, ” Mr. Pataki began awkwardly. “Because this day was—” He paused. “I’m switching into Spanish, I’m sorry,” he said. “Der zichete del … I’m sorry. The story of the firefighters and the heroes is important to tell. I don’t think this is a political story. I think it’s a human story that should be told.” During the long red-carpet procession, Mr. Pataki and his posse posed for some photographers.

One of the cameramen said, “He’s supposed to be the next President of the United States!”

Without a moment’s hesitation, his colleague responded: “That ain’t gonna happen."

While Mr. Clegg’s partner in his literary agency, Sarah Burnes of Burnes & Clegg, struggled to sort out their collapsing company and move on, his authors scattered and eventually landed at agencies all over town. The flurry of activity was a feeding frenzy that bordered on the unseemly, according to several publishing insiders, most of whom requested anonymity.

Over the course of the last year and a half, however, Mr. Clegg has resurfaced, dusted himself off and found a job as a literary agent at William Morris, where he started on Feb. 1. Since then, he’s coaxed several of his former authors to rejoin him at his new, decidedly fancier firm. While publishing-industry observers seem relieved that Mr. Clegg appears to be recovering from what are commonly thought to be personal problems, some are surprised that he’s successfully poached writers back from agents who had taken them in and helped out during a time of crisis. But for a short list of authors, the experience of abruptly being left to fend for themselves wasn’t scary enough to keep them from running back to Mr. Clegg.

Nick Flynn, the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, left Amy Williams of McCormick & Williams to go back to Mr. Clegg at William Morris; Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father, left David McCormick of McCormick & Williams; Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby, David Gilbert, author of The Normals, and the fiction writer Heather Clay have all also returned to Mr. Clegg. (It isn’t known which other agents they were working with, if any.)

“I’d rather not get into it all, except to say that [B]ill is a passionate and brilliant agent and reader,” Mr. Flynn wrote in an e-mail.

“He got me good money for my book, probably more money than I deserved,” said Mr. Sharma, referring to Mr. Clegg. “That’s a great thing.” (He added that it wasn’t money that was “life-changing,” but a sum that he could live on “for a year or two.”)

The most recent defection was Heather McGowan, author of Duchess of Nothing, who announced that she was leaving Ira Silverberg of Donadio & Olson to return to Mr. Clegg last week. (Mr. Clegg confirmed that he’s again working with the above mentioned authors, but would not otherwise comment for this story.)

Three of Mr. Clegg’s biggest names, however, have remained with their foster agents: Ms. Krauss, author of The History of Love, is represented by Melanie Jackson, while both Ms. Choi, who wrote American Woman, and Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, are signed up with Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit.

In a few instances, the abandoned authors arrived at their new agents’ doorstep with loose ends to tie up in addition to their unpublished manuscripts—contracts to be sorted out or foreign royalties to be chased down.

In the case of Ms. McGowan, her contract for Duchess of Nothing became slightly more complicated than expected. Mr. Clegg sold her novel to Colin Dickerman at Bloomsbury in January 2005—one of the last deals he did before he temporarily left the business. Later, after Mr. Silverberg had agreed to represent Ms. McGowan, Bloomsbury complained that Mr. Clegg had negotiated overly aggressively for the book, according to a person familiar with the events, and asked to renegotiate the advance (said to be around $75,000). Ms. McGowan’s new agent argued with the publisher, and the contract was left unchanged.

Mr. Silverberg said that he was “annoyed but relieved” when Ms. McGowan told him she was leaving. “I think that writers who flit about from agent to agent and publisher to publisher just make it harder for everyone,” Mr. Silverberg said. (Mr. Dickerman declined to comment on the incident.)

Mr. Clegg’s reputation in publishing circles is as an attentive agent who garners significant (sometimes inflated) advances for his authors, but who was perhaps less focused on the nuts and bolts of his writers’ careers. (“Sometimes they were better-known for the advances they got than for their sales,” joked one editor.) One of Mr. Clegg’s former authors described him as good at “holding your hand, calling you and telling you you’re fabulous and that no one’s more talented than you ... he was almost like a personal manager. He was a cheerleader. I think that’s what a lot of people miss.”

He is described as a charmer who could be very aggressive in business dealings and who was, at one time, a fixture on the social circuit, known for hosting parties at the apartment he lived in on lower Fifth Avenue. His tastes in books tilt heavily toward literary, sometimes highly noncommercial works (for example, he represented at least two well-known poets). It makes him a less-than-obvious fit for the literary department at William Morris, which is dominated by the agents Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Suzanne Gluck, who usually traffic in high-volume fare.

“All of his authors are flocking back to him, which I think is the greatest testament to him,” said Ms. Rudolph Walsh. When asked whether Mr. Clegg’s seeming flakiness last year gave her pause, she said: “I think that people’s lives are very complicated, and generally the more complicated a person’s life is, the more interesting they are and the more interesting their outlook on literature can be. I believe that everybody deserves a second chance.”

At the time of his disappearance, Mr. Clegg’s author list was circulated around town and literary agents held beauty contests to scoop up the most lucrative or prestigious clients. The movements of Ms. Krauss and Ms. Choi were tracked closely. The panic that seemed to drive much of the activity struck some people as overblown—in between book deals, most writers are toiling at home and might not need an agent’s services for months. “Publishing is a slow-moving business,” said one publishing executive who remembered feeling “sort of disgusted” by it all. “If you have something to sell tomorrow, then yes, you need a new agent.”

Mr. Sharma said that initially, the loss of his agent had little impact on him. “There was no real reason for me to find anybody else at that point,” said Mr. Sharma, who is working on his second novel, Mother and Son. “My book was sold. I didn’t really need anybody while I was working on my novel. He vanished; I peacefully continued my thing.”

Eventually, Mr. Sharma wanted to try to secure some magazine assignments to supplement his income, so he looked around for a new agent to help him. He signed up with Mr. McCormick, whom he said he “liked very much.” Some time ago—Mr. Sharma thought that it might have been around six months—Mr. Sharma got an e-mail from Mr. Clegg letting him know that he was at William Morris. They met for lunch, and Mr. Clegg brought up the idea of coming back. Mr. Sharma discussed the idea with his wife, who was “leery.”

“I felt that he had done a good job with me the first time and, you know, I felt a strong desire to help this guy who’s in a difficult situation, trying to reestablish himself,” said Mr. Sharma, who is a former investment banker. “I’m not really looking for him to be my editor or my friend. I’m looking for him to sell these things for the greatest amount of money possible.”