Every author has an obligation to the reader's right hand. The left hand already belongs to him: It's holding all the pages that have been turned so far. The right hand, though, is sending electronic pulses back to the reader's fickle brain, precise data on the weight and scale and degree of interest contained in the pages yet to go-and so this hand needs constantly to be comforted and charmed, lulled into forgetfulness about the long journey ahead.

This physics works for thrillers and romances, which are built for speed. However, if you're planning on any lyricism at all-or (almost worse) if, like Jay Cantor, you're an author burdened with a point to make, or a few dozen very pointy points to make-every page has to be good, and many have to be considerably more than good. This is the 21st century, after all, an age so saturated in narcissism you might call it post-narcissistic. We don't need books anymore: We can be online-dating; we can be mashing between our happy molars slivers of tart ginger, slow-burning wasabi and raw tuna like some red cream of the sea while we catalog recent purchases with our good-looking friends; we have 231 channels on the basic plan. No aspect of our lives ever, ever requires us to think. Please us, author, or the right hand shall dispense with your work and return to its, um, usual duties.

Great Neck holds the right hand firmly in place. It's Jay Cantor's third novel in 20 years. The first two were considered brilliant, perhaps even to the point of eggheady. The Death of Che Guevara , which he published in 1983, when he was in his early 30's, is a formally, politically and psychologically audacious re-imagining of the life of a political legend-a man, for most of us, more poster than flesh. Next came Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels , published in 1987, similarly pomo, depicting the famous cartoon character ultimately turning human and working out the psycho-sexual problems of life in the atomic age. Each book marries a libidinal fantasy (Che, Krazy Kat) to the absurd political and social realities of the second half of the 20th century.

The new novel does the same. At 700-plus pages and with a dozen or more strong characters, the story is set first in Great Neck on Long Island's expensive north shore in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when its ensemble cast is growing up together, later moving to Mississippi, Cambridge, Mass., and New York City, among other places. Jumping with astonishing deftness back and forth in time and among their many lives, it attempts-and succeeds-in presenting their full psychological, political, spiritual and erotic development as human beings in the context of the history that put them in that place at that time. It's an amazing achievement and hugely entertaining, even when it sometimes softens and sags under its very large weight.

One of the leading characters is Arkey-Arthur Kaplan. About him it's important to know that, like his creator (whose full name is Alfred Jay Cantor), he's a Ph.D., a university man and an intellectual of the left, and he's writing a book, with various tentative titles, notably Jews with Money , which might well have been the title of the novel containing it. He's an ever more religious Jew baffled by his love for a shiksa. This is a theme for Mr. Cantor, and in fact Arkey's shiksa, Kate, has the same name as the woman that Krazy Kat becomes when she turns magically human.

Other characters (they're all compelling, all painted with minute and careful strokes and subtle colors) include Billy Green, nebbish and comic-book genius whose multi-decade graphic chronicle of a group of leftist superheroes oppressed by the evil forces of government draws distinctly on each of the book's main characters, making them all, in certain circles, uselessly famous. There are two beautiful women, the left-wing Betty-and-Veronica of this world: Laura, whose brother is murdered by the Klan in the civil-rights struggles in Mississippi, and Beth, a member of the Weathermen who is present on the famous day when that townhouse blows up in Greenwich Village. Beth is thereafter on the run, though on the day in 1978 when the novel begins, she's having her bail hearing after finally turning herself in. She won't stay locked up for long.

Jay Cantor grew up in Great Neck and, it happens, so did I. A formative fact about Great Neck, if you grow up there and are infected with the writer's virus: F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there, back when it was a movie mogul's town, and The Great Gatsby is set there. This novel, inescapably because of its name and locale, must be compared to Gatsby : It reveals the same edge of modern self-destruction that comes with a psychic break with the past and a re-creation of self in the form of new money.

There was a gourmet shop in town called Kuck's when I was growing up. (It makes a brief appearance early in the novel.) "Rare and exotic foods," the awning boasted; my mother once remarked that it ought be changed to "rare and exotic treatment of customers." Herr Kuck, round, pink and vile, ran the place like a stalag, screaming anti-Semitic insults at customers who irritated him with questions, which they all nevertheless, with a certain droll self-abasement, persisted in doing at top volume. That the citizens drove Mercedes (avidly) and patronized this guy (just as avidly) demonstrated certain paradoxes that served as a solid introduction to the deeper mysteries of American Jewish life. Only time has now erased what even the Holocaust couldn't, which was the deep desire of those Jews with education and Central European heritage to become, still, upper-middle-class Germans. Mr. Cantor captures this culture and these distinct lives with astonishing affection and detail, with imaginative humor and a nuanced intellectual mastery: He's one of those rare writers who can show credible lives infused with actual ideas.

Several survivors of the camps populate the story, most notably Beth's father, a famous psychiatrist named Jacobs. Just as Beth's devolution to criminality in "the struggle" holds the structure of the story together (her bail hearing, her escape, her next set of activities), so her father's experience and work stand as the book's philosophical center. His evolving but ultimately implacable residence inside that 20th-century nightmare is one of Mr. Cantor's supreme fictional achievements. Despite all the adventures of the novel's younger generation in the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 60's and later, the Holocaust is the Political Fact of this story, as it was for those generations of American Jews. It drives the parents' desperate, sad quest for security and the equally desperate attempts of their offspring, as they grow up, to make good a ruined, racist world. As the Cold War is for Don DeLillo, so the Holocaust is (that plus more, of course) for Mr. Cantor, and in Great Neck , with its historical sweep and it's deep American-ness, he's given us what you might call Underworld for the Jews.

There's a meta-within-meta quality to the novel (to all Jay Cantor's novels), if such a thing is possible, most notable in the outlines of Billy Green's comic-book version of the characters' lives and Arkey's never-ending social history. Like Great Neck itself, Billy and Arkey glorify the moment of American Jewish blossoming that so suffused that town in the 50's, 60's and 70's. It's a knowing bit of self-mockery, too, that the politics of the era can be rendered as the stuff of comic books-an admission by Mr. Cantor that his characters' politics, whether in Mississippi, Washington or Israel, are symbolic as much as heartfelt. This purposeful sentimentality is tied somehow to the idea that Great Neck was a sublime and beautiful place back then, when in fact it wasn't; it was the nastiest place imaginable, a breeding ground for the angry rich, the rich-without-manners-which is to say, in every important sense, the worst of both worlds, since manners are the only worthwhile feature of the rich.

But this is a quibble, and a parochial one. The town Mr. Cantor has created, home to his crew of bent and tormented heroes, though gentler and nicer than the one I remember, is nevertheless a real and unforgettable place: Mr. Cantor's language, wit, historical intelligence, technical skill and far-reaching literary philosophy have made it so.

Vince Passaro is the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel

Shales and James Andrew Miller. Little, Brown, 594 pages, $25.95.

Saturday Night , the original name of the show later and better known as Saturday Night Live , had to make do with its shorter name during its first season, despite the wishes of founding producer Lorne Michaels, because premiering that fall on ABC was another show called Saturday Night Live , now long forgotten. Memory can be a great healing instrument: That year's Saturday Night Live was a prime-time variety show, in every sense not live, starring Howard Cosell, who was himself utterly not live, at least not as far as an 18-year-old such as myself could tell. Cosell, a sportscaster with a bad toupée and a Brooklyn schnozz, had built up a small quantity of celebrity juice calling Ali fights and commenting with comical pretentiousness on Monday Night Football opposite Frank Gifford and Don Meredith. Meredith, the former Cowboy quarterback who traded insults with Cosell for 50 minutes out of the 60 in a typical football game, was funnier, smarter and better-looking: They should have given him a variety show. Cosell was too stiff, too out of sync, and too depleted of irony and nonchalance; he made Ed Sullivan look like Robin Williams.

Cosell's show died a quick death, there being some justice in the world, and, as we learn in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live , an oral history compiled and edited by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, young producer Lorne Michaels at NBC insisted for his second season on using the name he'd always had in mind for his own live sketch show. By that time, the show we all know and love was already a smash success, and he could have called it almost anything short of Hee Haw .

Mr. Michaels has produced the show for 22 of the 27 years since its inception; the missing years were an interlude when Dick Ebersol, Michaels' boss at NBC, took it over (think the Joe Piscopo era). The show has made stars of Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, David Spade, Adam Sandler and a bunch of others. Steve Martin, a repeating host, might be the lead among those whose careers were markedly enhanced by the show even though he was never a part of the cast.

Two important traditions came together at the right time to make Saturday Night Live a success. The first was a vein of American political humor that stretched back to Mark Twain and Will Rogers and was heavily influenced in the early 70's by the popular transgressions of George Carlin and Robert Klein (who brought to mainstream cultural commentary what they'd learned from Lenny Bruce). The second was a brand of sketch comedy that was distinctly English and, subsequently, Canadian (many of the figures named above, including Lorne Michaels, come from north of the border: Canada, the comedy nation … who knew?). The English tradition goes back, in recent times, to Peter Sellers and the Goons in the 1950's, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Beyond the Fringe in the 60's, and, of course, the immensely successful Monty Python in the early 70's: All these fed a growing appreciation for sketch comedy that hadn't been seen since the days of vaudeville. The premier venue for this type of comedy was Second City, which brought many young comedy writers and actors to the stage of SNL , and which gave birth to a show that, to my mind, was significantly funnier and more subtle than SNL , Second City TV . To SNL 's credit, the differences between the two are significant: Second City wasn't live and it didn't do politics. These two bits of daring have always been what gave SNL its unforgettable edge.

Little knowledge of these traditions and issues feeds the almost unbearably hagiographic Live From New York . The book, with its breathless claim of being " uncensored," should have been censored a little more: not its scandalous material, but its hundreds of pages of insider-baseball and unpleasant personal complaints and self-justifications. At close to 600 pages, it's perhaps three times as long as there is any conceivable need for it to be, and it takes way too seriously what is, after all, a television show-one that has never faced significant competition in style or time slot. When Messrs. Shales and Miller stop the sometimes funny, sometimes dull, sometimes painful reminiscences of former performers, writers, producers and network execs, it's to add passages like this:

"In the same years that he was getting the most grief from network executives that he'd ever received in his career, Lorne Michaels also got an exquisitely flattering offer [from Howard Stringer at CBS] …. But Michaels, even though under siege-really a constant barrage-turned Stringer down. He still felt a loyalty, if not to NBC, then to the show he had created, a show that even through these tense and turbulent times remained the ultimate, the pinnacle, the bright star-maybe even television's 'shining city on the hill.'" Puhleeze. You have to bushwhack your way through the clichés. The book was excerpted in Vanity Fair , which is the perfect venue for this material. And an excerpt is all you need, even if you're a dedicated SNL fan.

Live From New York 's claim on our attention is the oral testimony which constitutes the vast majority of the text. It reveals what we already knew: The people involved with the show, especially in the 70's and early 80's, did tremendous amounts of cocaine and frequently slept and fought with each other. Duh. This scandalous material degrades as the memories become more recent: You move from Bill Murray's memories of crazed all-night sessions and dawn comedowns to Janeane Garofalo rehashing her well-known complaints about working on the program, while others are called upon to bash her. (You can tell: She still sticks in their collective craw.)

There are certain moments of Saturday Night Live that for people my age linger in the memory: From the early years, Dan Aykroyd's imitation of Jimmy Carter doing a call-in radio show, talking down someone who's called in after taking too much acid: "Was it butterfly or microdot?" he asks, expert as always. "Do you have any Allman Brothers?" John Belushi doing Roy Orbison, brilliantly: He stood stiffly singing the song, oversized acoustic guitar before him, then slowly began to tilt, to an almost impossible angle (perhaps they'd tacked his shoes to the floor), until two stage hands rush out to set him right: then he begins slowly to tilt in the other direction, not missing a beat the whole time. Sometime in the first or second season, Paul Simon sitting on a stool, George Harrison beside him; they're playing guitar and singing together. Later on: Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest's short films; Martin Short as the liar, with the impossibly long cigarette ash. Later still: the brilliant Phil Hartman as Bill Clinton, stopping into McDonald's while out on a run, stealing food off people's trays while he explains about the warlords in Mogadishu. Or the show during the weekend of the Anita Hill testimony on Clarence Thomas, which opened with the Senate Judiciary Committee facing Tim Meadows: "Let me get this right," asks one of the Senators, all perfectly played. "You told her you liked her breasts? You told her about the Long Dong Silver movies? And she still didn't go out with you?" Strom Thurmond pipes up: "Have you tried sawft-cawr pawrn? Women lahk sawft-cawr pawrn." It was the perfect antidote to the unreal shenanigans running 16 hours a day that weekend. The show similarly made explicit the unrealities of the 2000 election.

The kind of fueled intelligence that good comedy requires-the combination of perfect social analysis, tight storytelling and delight in the absurdity of human behavior-usually suffers under long discussion. Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller prove this point, and then some. They've taken something admirable and heaped upon it too much piety and too much praise, and so diminished what they'd hoped to enlarge.

Vince Passaro is the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel (Simon & Schuster).

The dry-cleaner is Le Kang, an Asian name, and the woman who broke the news is the Korean lady who runs the place. She is assisted by an older Asian woman, and another Asian woman her age, as well as one or two or sometimes three Latinos, and on busy Saturdays in the tiny plastic-baggy space behind the counter, the bunch of them crawl and glide around each other like walruses hoisting themselves with fatty grace over sleeping mates to slide from rock to sea.

I walked to the subway in a daze: air-traffic control, I thought. Someone fucked up or went crazy and brought those planes in like that-I was preparing myself for the version of the story that we would all prefer, that there is a Madman, and the Madman does something Mad, because he's touched, irrational or, worst of all, religious, and always alone, oh yes, that's the important one, he's all alone. It's not a movement, it's not a trend, it's not an idea: It's a Madman.

But there are politics in the world-not the politics of bad talk-show appearancesandexpensive orchestrations of the inane, but actual politics, in which what we do, what the state does, what we as a nation do, matters. In which what we do matters even to the degree that others might feel themselves compelled to do something back.

Madison Square Park, along Fifth Avenue at 25th Street, is one of those spots in New York that I long loved (Sixth Avenue around 10th or 11th was another), where you would turn, arrive, look up, and there they were, previously invisible, suddenly lined up with the avenue and looming, enormous silver matchsticks down at harbor's edge. They changed in the light, from blue to pink to iron gray.

And every time I look at that sky now (I work two blocks from there), I see the drama of an empty sky: That empty sky is a narrative for those of us who live here. Often, as it was that day, it is an intensely beautiful-looking sky: beautiful yet filled with pain. When I got to this spot near 10 a.m. last Sept. 11, after a long, much-interrupted and finally abbreviated subway ride, there was only one tower still standing. It was engulfed in smoke. All along the park we stunned humans stood, alone or in twos and threes, staring and trying to use our cell phones. After a few moments, the smoke kind of lifted in a wind. I will never forget how beautiful a day it was, how blue and cool and filled with a promise of restoration. The smoke lifted and there it was, one tower with a hole of astonishing matte-blackness, jagged and infernal, and my stomach fell away and I thought I would throw up, the bad stomach of a roller-coaster ride taken too late in life. Tears came, and for once I let them: slow tears for all that death. Prayers came-small ones, hardly verbal-and I let them, too. Then I put my head down and walked. I got to my building, and five minutes later the second tower fell.

That evening, back at home, my best friend, a reporter, called with his ghoulish humor to say what he'd been thinking all day and knew he could say only to me, because no one else would understanding jokes at such a moment.

The voice goes Brooklyn-Jewish: "So everybody has to be an architecture critic?" Then he told me that among cops, fire and emergency workers, between 400 and 500 were thought dead. For a good many years and several papers, he had covered cops, fire and emergency; he'd covered corrections; now he covered City Hall. He was at the triage center on Greenwich Street-where, notably, there were no survivors to work on. He sounded different, changed. The other unforgettable and moving thing I learned on television Tuesday night was that, of the many people who jumped, preferring flight to immolation, two were lovers-perhaps they'd only been lovers for a few minutes, in circumstances of emotional and spiritual compression that most of us will never understand, but they were lovers nonetheless-and they elected to depart a high floor together, sailing through blue sky and dust holding each other's hands.

I had been reading Dante on the subway-it was my new pretentious fend-off-midlife project at the time, reading Dante on the subway, working slowly on my abysmal Italian-and before getting out to see the towers, I'd been working on this passage:

And how it is, when one glories in wealth and acquiring, And then the times make for enormous loss So that he weeps with every thought and fills with despair; So it was with me, when it met me face to face, That beast without peace, and little by little Drove me back to the silence of the sun.

The Italian for my awkward "beast without peace" is la bestia senza pace , which would really read more easily in English as "restless beast"-but all day, and ever since, when I heard the words in my head, la bestia senza pace , I thought not about the killers but the killed; I thought, as another friend reminded me, of Malcolm X's chilling remark, when Kennedy was shot, that "the chickens have come home to roost"; I thought about the United States in the world and how our ease and comfort and ignorance come at a price which, like all colonialists, we prefer others to pay. I kept thinking of being "without peace."

We watched though the evening, my three sons and wife and I, and then I put the boys to bed. Paul, the 9-year-old, said he would have nightmares. "You very well might," I said.

"I'll dream that the building next to ours gets hit by a plane, and it falls into our building, and I will be killed but you won't," he said.

"I don't like that arrangement," I said. "You're much better-looking than I am, so you should live."

"You'd be happy to inherit my Mickey Mantle card, though," he said.

"That's true," I said.

In the morning, he told me that it turned out he'd had some other important dreams and so didn't "have time for the nightmare."

Vince Passaro's novel, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster), will be out in paperback next year.

Prompted more by the fact that I'm just about the only person I know who hasn't left town overnight even once during this miserable, heat-stricken summer. I had some lovely invitations, but I had work-but it was more than work.

It has to do with being one of those people who happen to love summer in the city, no matter how oppressive it gets. Even when it gets down to that funky dead-end part of the season which Susan Orlean once memorably called "The Season of Funny Smells." Maybe because my first full summer in the city, I had the quintessential summer street job: hand-truck operator in the garment center, the true watch-your-back king of the road.

Maybe because my second full summer in the city, I was staying in a sixth-floor walk-up in Little Italy overlooking the Feast of St. Anthony, and it was the year every radio at the feast was booming out that Ringo Starr song, "It Don't Come Easy." (You know: "Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues / And you know it don't come easy.") I don't know why, but I loved that schlocky song, or just loved the way it floated out over the feast in this echoey way in the narrow streets. They weren't just playing it; they were playing it incessantly, and I loved it so much that even when my girlfriend at the time left me-I think because she couldn't stand to hear it all night-I didn't feel so bad lying awake at night in the heat and the zeppoli fumes, mesmerized by the song of the summer. Maybe because-and this is the theme of this essay, in a way-"it don't come easy" to love New York. It's worth it, but you got to pay your dues.

I think one component of my emotional reaction to 9/11, and certainly one reason I love the city, has to do with the fact that my father spent most of his working life in the Empire State Building when it was the tallest building in the world. He had much in common with many of the W.T.C. victims-a lower-middle-management guy who could have been a casualty just because he happened to work in a building that was also a symbol.

Part of the contour of my love story has to do with separation and return. I was born in Manhattan, but my family moved out to the south shore of Long Island shortly thereafter. So Manhattan was always the Emerald City for me, some distant place I had a dreamy connection to, some place my father disappeared to every day (he commuted on the LIRR every work day for 40 years, poor soul), some place I would occasionally be taken to as a child for an excited visit, like to see the first run of the film Around the World in Eighty Days .

Don't laugh; it was a big deal to me-as was the cheesecake at Lindy's afterward. All those clichés thrilled me. And then there was taking the train in to visit my father and have lunch in that smoky businessman's restaurant near the Empire State Building, the one that was located below the sidewalk, the one I've convinced myself was the model for the one in The Great Gatsby where Nick meets Meyer Wolfsheim. Yeah, I did the Garden for the circus and the Knicks, and I did the Planetarium and the U.N. on school trips, but it was the subways I loved most. You know the deal: riding in the front car, the stations flashing by on the express, the secret underground metropolis. But all this was as a daytripper, and a daytripper under supervision of some kind. The trouble started when I reached the age when my friends and I started to go in on our own.

There was the time one of my best friends from high school, Bob Metcalfe, and I went into the city to look for beatniks. Bob, as techies out there may well know, went onto become a big-time computer whiz (invented Ethernet), but at the time, as I recall, we were both the sort of suburban kids who carried around those great-looking New Directions paperbacks, like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind , in the optimistic if deluded belief that this would impress beatnik-inclined girls, of which there was a dire shortage in Bay Shore.

But we were sure we could find beatniks who would appreciate our paperbacks, and we thought we knew where we could find them: We had, of course, listened to that Peter, Paul and Mary version of "Freight Train," the one that had the verse:

When I die

Please bury me deep

Down at the end

Of Bleecker Street.

So it should have been easy, we figured. Only we picked the wrong end of Bleecker Street. Not only that, we picked the wrong time: Sunday morning, when any self-respecting beatnik would be sound asleep, recovering from the previous night's bongo-crazed revels.

When I say we picked the wrong end of Bleecker Street, I mean that when we reached Penn Station, we were given directions to the Bleecker Street subway stop-which, as you know, is on the East Side near Bowery.

So when we got to the Bowery end of Bleecker Street, we found many guys with beards, but we didn't think these were the kind of beatniks we were looking for. Still, the sight of guys stumbling along with a bottle in a bag in the glare of Sunday morning always and forever attuned me to the fact that it wasn't the Emerald City for everyone. And to an emotion more universal than the Bowery-end-of-Bleecker locality: that sorrowful, somehow beautiful and painful remorse Kris Kristofferson captured in "Sunday Morning Coming Down":

And there's nothing shorta dying

That's half as lonely as the sound

Of the sleeping city sidewalk

And Sunday morning coming down.

Now I should probably tell the story about the fake pimp and The New York Times , and how I got conned by one of the oldest con games in the world: the notorious "Murphy game."

Somehow I suspect it was, if not invented, at least perfected in New York. It may not sound like a romantic story, but I think it's a kind of metaphor: Love affairs with New York are often complicated matters that involve false starts and costly learning experiences, all to help prepare you to get beyond naïve, blind love.

Anyway, I'm walking through Times Square on one of my high-school-era expeditions into the city (probably to buy some more New Directions paperbacks), and a skinny guy comes up and whispers in my ear, "You lookin' for a girl?" There followed a quick negotiation and a complicated transaction in which he folded my two $20 bills (basically a week's take-home pay from my dishwasher/donut-maker job in a Woolworth's at the South Shore Mall) into a newspaper (I think it was The Times ) and told me he would arrange everything with the lovely young lady in question, and then meet me at the Times Square Buitoni restaurant to give me directions to her room nearby.

A half-hour later, sitting over a cooling plate of spaghetti and meatballs at the Buitoni counter, my bud, the fake pimp, came in and told me sadly that the woman was nowhere to be found, so he was going to give me my money back. He handed me the folded-up Times and disappeared into the night.

Needless to say, no matter how many ways I unfolded the newspaper, the bills were gone, and I was left with a learning experience, not least of which was: don't put your money (or your faith) in a newspaper. They fold; they break your heart.

So I'd been misled, conned, deceived by the city, and was later to be fleeced again in the bargain (one of those carriage-horse drivers took me and a college date on a ride wrapped in a smelly flea-bitten blanket, during which he seemed to stop every few clip-clops to clip me for another $20, until I had nothing left and we had to escape the park on foot). If it wasn't for bad luck, I woulda had no luck at all.

It was about this time that the city, which I think of as a kind of hypersensitive organism with a finely balanced awareness of the rewards and punishments it dispenses-not the Big Apple so much as the Big Karma-began to realize that it had put me through sufficient preliminary quests and tests of my love (there would be more, believe me, there would be more) and began to feel sorry for me and offer me a reversal of fortune. If you want to come to New York, "you have to be willing to be lucky," E.B. White famously said-but you have to put up with a lot of bad luck until you get lucky, I think.

I'd date my change of luck to the summer after I'd flunked a Yale course known derisively as "physics for poets." (I stopped going to class because I couldn't handle the calculus, and read a huge John Barth novel, The Sotweed Factor , instead.) So I went to summer school at N.Y.U. at night while supporting myself working as a hand-truck handler in the garment center. I stayed in an N.Y.U. dorm on Washington Square and hung out a lot at the Cedar Tavern under the delusion it was the Cedar Bar, where the Abstract Expressionists and the Partisan Review writers once hung out, but which, alas, no longer existed. (Remember the scene in Casablanca where Rick says he "came for the waters"-and then, when told there are no waters, says, "I was misinformed"? Story of my life at that point.)

But as I said, I think my luck began to change that summer. One night, coming back from another fruitless avant-garde vigil at the Cedar Tavern, I saw a notice on the dorm bulletin board: a woman had an extra ticket for Bob Dylan at Forest Hills, the night he brought his electric sound into the heart of folkiedom. More important, more earth-shaking, more groundbreaking to me, it was the night he introduced "Desolation Row"-which if not one of the all-time great New York songs is one of the all-time great Downtown songs. That was the summer the Byrds cover of "Tambourine Man" was in the air, even at the St. Anthony's Feast. What's that Wordsworth line, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive"?

Something was happening and I didn't know what it was, but as I returned to New Haven that fall, I knew I wasn't going to find it there. I'm glad I stayed to graduate (the 17th-century Metaphysical poets had their own thrills to offer), but I'm glad I didn't overstay at grad school.

I'd had a taste of the thrills of reporting at the Chicago Democratic Convention riot my previous year, and I left a graduate fellowship at Yale with no plan except to see more of life than faculty sherry-parties had to offer.

And then my New York City luck really changed.

Maybe the way you fall in love with the city has something to do with the imprint of the first time you fall in love in the city. The first time I fell in love in the city … it's a long story that has to do with the Episcopal Theological Seminary, a classified ad in the Voice (not that kind), the rivalry between the Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais dance companies, dancers in general, leg-warmers in particular, an apartment in Crown Heights, Jamaican beef patties, dancing with the Torah and an epic struggle with a mouse.

Faithful readers will recall I'd led up to this story in a column about the night I left grad school (in The Observer for Nov. 12, 2001), but broke off the narrative of that night to pay tribute to a host of Lingua Franca writers who exemplified the grad-school-dropout-wised-up outsider take on scholarly controversies I love. Faithful readers will also recall that my own decision to drop out had a lot to do with love (well, love as a concept ) : with some smart-ass Yale English Department pet who scornfully reproved me for asking a question about the conception of love in Chaucer's "Love Vision" poems, when love was "so uninteresting ," he said, "compared to the true subject of the poems: the making of poetry." Uninteresting to you, buddy. In short order, the following things happened, which I will compress as much as possible:

-That night I started scanning the classified ads in the Voice, looking for anything nonacademic: my first preference at the time was a traveling salesman job. Since I probably would have been the world's worst Willy Loman, it was particularly fortunate that luck stepped in and directed my eyes to an ad for an assistant editor position at the Fire Island News , a summer-only weekly whose offices in Ocean Beach were a short ferry ride from my hometown of Bay Shore. In short order, the editor quit, I got to move into his princely apartment in the back of Karl the Barber's shop, and I stayed on to edit and write most of the paper's features, including an incredibly over-earnest English-major analysis of Dylan's new country album, which found Seven Types of Ambiguity in the "Nashville Skyline" cover photo alone. (Is he tipping his hat hello or goodbye?) Anyway, my work came to the attention of Dan Wolf, the legendary founder of The Village Voice , who spent weekends in Seaview, the next burg over on the island, and I covered an anti-discrimination march led by Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who led a raggedy, barefoot throng down the Fire Island beach to protest the no-blacks-and-Jews policy of the Point o' Woods WASP enclave.

Here's where the luck begins to display several types of ambiguity: At Nat Hentoff's suggestion, I wrote to Dan Wolf at the end of the summer to ask if there were any kind of opening for me, and I was stunned to learn that there was . Only later would I learn about the misfortune that made my good fortune possible-the curse upon the job.

Which began when the legendary gifted Voice writer Don McNeill, walked into a pond on a commune in Vermont (called, I think, "Total Loss Farm") and didn't come out alive. A death that left ripples in its wake: grief, uncertainty, all kinds of theories (accident, suicide, love tragedy, acid tragedy-we may never know). But a curse seemed to fall on his successors: one of the two that succeeded me ended up joining a cult that regarded a banjo player in a jug band as God. I kid you not; they once tried to recruit me on a long evening that involved a beautiful blonde and many jug-band records.

But I didn't know about that history then, when I came in for my interview at the old Voice offices. I couldn't even find Sheridan Square without asking directions; that's how much a Village Person, so to speak, I was.

But to my astonishment, they offered me a job if I could start immediately: 95 bucks a week, and I was suddenly a staff writer for the paper. But I had to find a place to live immediately. I'd been staying sort of illicitly in the Episcopal Theological Seminary on Ninth Avenue, by the grace of a high-school friend who was studying for the priesthood. But suddenly I had a full-time writing job, if I could get a place to live. I tried living in a sleeping bag on the floor of the Voice office (I was the "writer in residence"), but I couldn't sleep, and the Rikers coffee across the street was so deeply depressing that I despaired I was blowing this opportunity.

This is where the sandwich-board sign and the girl in leg-warmers come in. Desperation and a measure of unaccustomed chutzpah drove me to craft a sandwich-board-type sign of white cardboard and Magic-Marker it "I NEED AN APARTMENT," and start walking around Washington Square on a cool, late September night. After weary hours and few offers (most of them unsavory), I was heading back up to my theological-seminary crash pad when I passed the Riviera café and a girl sitting at one of the outdoor tables stretched out a long leg, clad in the first leg-warmer I'd ever seen, to stop my weary progress and tell me that she was looking for an apartment, too! She was a dancer, she said, making a big philosophical career switch from the Merce Cunningham to the Alwyn Nikolais/ Murray Louis school of dance theory. Who knew that such a schism existed? Anyway, she suggested we merge our apartment searches.

She had just come back to the city from some summer-retreat thing where she picked mushrooms with John Cage and got into a Zen thing, so maybe that was why she trusted a stranger in a sandwich board as a potential roommate. She was the one who found the place. Some dancer was leaving town and giving up a great two-bedroom place "right over the bridge" in Brooklyn. Well, right over the bridge turned out to be a 45-minute ride on the New Lots line to Crown Heights, where we found ourselves looking at a big old apartment building at, I recall, 711 Crown Street (7-11: had to be lucky). And we found ourselves there on Simchas Torah, when the Hasidic types who lived in the brick single-family homes across the street danced with the Torah. Our side of the street, our building, was (except us) American and Jamaican-immigrant black, and it seemed to us that Crown Heights was a beautiful vision of racial harmony.

Meanwhile, it wasn't all harmony inside our new shared digs. We became roommates, as in " just roommates." This turned out to be more complicated than we blithely thought it would be. There was tension, there was jealousy, and finally there was the mouse that brought us together.

I think we'd been living together in separate bedrooms for a couple of months, sometimes telling each other about our dates but never bringing anyone home-a kind of unspoken understanding. But we did spend a lot of time together cooking and eating, and exploring the wilds of unknown Brooklyn together.

I've written about the dancer thing of buying 50-pound sacks of millet or some kind of cheap grain and boiling it for days into a barely edible mush, usually doused with toxic amounts of soy sauce to make it marginally palatable. I personally preferred neighborhood takeout Jamaican beef curry patties and coconut cake. So, too, did the mouse. We weren't untidy-we'd steel-wooled every crevice in the place when we moved in-but this one mouse had defeated us.

Then one night we got it, after an epic chase, and that night we got each other. I think it was the breathless ferocity of the chase that brought out a primal hunter/huntress thing. Anyway, as I recall, she finally administered the coup de grâce , violently slamming the rodent with a heavy frying pan. I was in awe. We were both breathing heavily. That's how things started.

They lasted less than a year, alas. I think the spirit of the mouse we killed put a bad spell on our future somehow. But anyway, the first six months we spent seeing so much of the city for the first time through each other's eyes, from the Botanical Gardens to Brighton Beach. And I got to meet, through her, that whole wonderful underground of aspiring dancers, and the whole artist-writer-bohemian world it was entangled in, and all those sometimes-impractical dreamer types I've been drawn to ever after.

It's been a while since I lost touch with the dancer. After her Buddhist phase she left the city, and then there was a born-again-Christian phase that led her to marry a minister in the Midwest, last I heard. But I learned a lot from her brave, hopeful spirit. Each of us was lucky in our own impractical way. Each of us was lucky to fall in love with the city while first being in love in the city. Even with the fear of another attack-it's Sept. 10th and they've just announced an elevated "Orange Alert"-I still feel lucky to be here.

Catherine Millet's astonishing memoir of physical desire, frequent orgiastic sex and rich psychic debasement, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. , was first published in France last year as La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M . It was greeted with praise, shock, anger, droll and incomprehensible commentary by Baud-rillard (always a sign of "making it" in France, akin to being a joke on David Letterman here), and huge sales: more than 300,000 copies. If French critics-that's French and critics ; one cannot decide which most deserves the italics-thought Ms. Millet's adamantly frank look at her sexuality was an outrage against morality, against decency, and against some putatively more noble tradition of French porn, well, what are Americans going to think? We don't even have a putatively more noble tradition of porn. We don't have any "tradition" of porn at all; what we have is an endless stream of dull product and, somewhere in Joseph Biden's safe, Clarence Thomas' video-rental records.

Which is to say that to be an American reading the book, slightly in awe of it as well as entertained, is to spend part of one's literary energy rotating around it, looking for, pardon, the proper position.

Ms. Millet is a respected figure in the Paris art scene, a curator, founding editor of Art Press , and author of eight books of art criticism, including one that is reputed to be the "standard" French guide to contemporary art. She begins her memoir with a snapshot or two of what one senses was a difficult Catholic girlhood. As a teenager, she read Hemingway (presumably The Sun Also Rises ) and was shocked to find a female character that had many lovers-so shocked that she put the book aside. Clearly, however, the notion stuck with her, for shortly after losing her virginity at age 18 she began a life of frequent group sexual activity, in arrangements both spontaneous and organized. She did it in sex clubs, at what the French call, roughly translated, "dirty" parties, in parking lots, alongside roadways, at the Bois de Boulogne, even in the back of a municipal van with a line of men waiting outside-and to judge by the narrative of detailed encounters, she might at any one of these encounters accommodate from 10 to 20 to 40 men, and sometimes a woman or two as well. Thus it is natural to estimate that she has had some form of sexual congress certainly with hundreds and perhaps even more than a thousand people. But in her memory, she says, she can put a name or some signifier of identity to only 49 of them. The rest are faceless.

From the early 1970's until today, she has lived with the French writer and photographer Jacques Henric, who has published over the years many nude photographs of Ms. Millet.

What is truly extraordinary about her story, however, is how she tells it, the profoundly rattling self-confidence and psychological depth with which she examines her desires, her inclinations, her sensations and her satisfactions. What makes the self-confidence and depth even more striking is that she deploys them in the face of an incomprehensible need, and a vast sense of sadness. She describes minutely, carefully, coldly: What we can tell of her language, through a truly awkward and bloated translation, evokes the painful dispassion, the distance, and the melancholy and grim wit of Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet and the films of Godard. There is not a little of the pretentiousness of those figures as well, but one is not certain how much to blame her for that-she is an art critic, after all-and how much to blame the translator, Adriana Hunter, whose tumescent Latinates and grammatical clumsiness must be all her own.

Ms. Millet spends a great deal of time describing the sheer physicality of sex, but through the lens of an erotically tense and desperate imagination: Her body is like a sexual filament, a carrier of electric pleasures, and in sex she sees a vast landscape of personal disintegration, an explosive escape from self that she greatly longs for. She does not apologize for this near-suicidal eroticism, and she is adamantly unashamed. The ultimate liquid animalism of sex, the sense of melting and heat, the stains and drips (which she describes with a particularly loving attention), are for her an integral part of the pleasure of the act: As a result, her descriptions either will strike you as being among the most effective erotic writing you have seen, or you will find them fabulously disgusting. Quite often she walks the line between the two, a zone between pleasure and horror where she has, for many years, and with some unexplored sadness, lived:

"The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to brace the shocks to my rear end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face that-quite unlike my lower half, which is totally mobilized-is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for the eyes, which are intolerably listless .... Sometimes I bring myself to this peak of pleasure all by myself, as an interval in my bathroom routine. With one hand on the edge of the basin and the other one masturbating, I watch myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye.

"A particular porn film made quite an impression on me. The man was taking the woman from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forward and distorted, as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man's orders: 'Look! Look at the camera!' and the girl's eyes looked directly into yours, the viewer's. I thought he might well be pulling her hair to force to raise her head. This scene has given me a lot of inspiration for the little scenarios that nourish my masturbating. In real life, a man I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of the encounter, and this was because with every thrust, he would order me to 'Look me in the eye.' I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the disintegration of my face."

The French publisher and writer Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published The Story of O and Emmanuelle , called Ms. Millet's memoir "the end of eroticism." It is, in fact, the end of a certain kind of eroticism: the kind in which the woman is an instrument of male sexual desire and sexual fantasy; the kind in which the woman's own pleasure is derived in part from her exposure and shame, and in part from the desire a man has revealed to her. Ms. Millet brings into the equation of literary eroticism a modern pathology of narcissism and self-debasement that simply hasn't existed before.

Ms. Millet is uniquely feminist. It will be interesting to see how the more desiccated schools of American academic feminism react to her work. Her entire sexual stance, her story, as it were, is an impudent and fundamentally inarguable challenge to the assumptions about female sexuality on which most of the world's social arrangements are built. Back at least to the story of The Bacchae , social convention has feared, detested and suppressed the truly explosive possibilities of female sexuality, with its vastly greater capacity for orgasm and for sustained activity-and, we ultimately fear, with its vastly greater depths of desire. Once these are unleashed, a single man is not capable of fulfilling them. Much that men and women are taught (and come to believe) about sex and courtship, about love and marriage, has been constructed to evade these simple facts.

For this reason, Catherine Millet's book strikes me not only as provocative, but dangerous. In this country, we succeed best in neutralizing dangerous ideas either by ignoring them or by a process of bland absorption: mild approval, a spot on the Today show, and bye-bye idea. So what will it be?

Vince Passaro is the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel (Simon and Schuster) .