It's tempting to believe that Michel Houellebecq is not Europe's most widely read and hotly debated contemporary novelist but is, instead, the central character in an elaborate satire of the literary marketplace written by a French novelist a lot like Michel Houellebecq. From his droll pronouncements at the Frankfurt Book Fair ("I don't sign books, only breasts") to his pathetic, drunken come-ons to female journalists from London's Guardian and The New York Times Magazine , Mr. Houellebecq's timing as a lout and a troubled genius has rarely been less than exquisite. His first novel, titled Whatever by his English-language publishers in the (vain) hope of confusing it with the follow-up to Trainspotting , contrasted the doomed innocence of barnyard animals and pets with the empty existence of a "typical" computer programmer on the fringes of a cynical and atrophied French society (rave on!). His second novel, The Elementary Particles , caused an international sensation by dramatizing the thesis that all the ills of contemporary life can be traced back to the indulgences of the 60's generation-meanwhile indulging in scenes of ritualized group sex and lengthy digressions on a variety of subjects, including genetic engineering, quantum mechanics and the hierarchical makeup of animal societies.

Perhaps in an attempt to outdo certain other, more subtle literary defamations of the religion of Islam-touché, Monsieur Rushdie-Mr. Houellebecq's third novel, Platform , features what we might now call a Houellebecqian contrast between a West that has developed beyond the capacity for pleasure and a developing world that has a choice: providing pleasure for Western tourists in the form of economical sex, or succumbing to the privations of the "losers of the Sahara" (i.e., Islamic fundamentalists). Mr. Houellebecq clearly has his own preference: "Our genitals exist as a source of permanent, accessible pleasure," he writes, in what amounts to a statement of the novel's most deeply held belief. (Meanwhile, his penchant for making inflammatory remarks in the press about Islam's lack of tolerance landed him in a French courtroom-charged with inciting violence against Muslims-and for a time threatened the novel's publication.)

It's difficult to predict whether recent global events will render the American reader more or less receptive to Mr. Houellebecq's distinctly Gallic brand of provocation. One shudders to think of Platform resting on the night stands of our most credulous book pundits-or, for that matter, on the sofa in the interrogators' lounge at Guantanamo Bay. Platform is calculated to poke, prod, engorge, enrage and amuse the complacent reader of today. It's dangerous in the way that literature is meant to be dangerous-that is, it awakens neglected sensibilities. So be warned: Read Platform and you just might find yourself thinking fondly of Bastille Days past, raising a champagne toast to President Chirac (that "lanky half-wit") and forgoing underwear.

Michel Renault is a plain and dissatisfied bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture whose only pleasures in life, before signing up for a "Thai Tropic" package tour from a company called Nouvelles Frontières, are taking in a peep show on his way home from the office and eating pre-packaged dinners in front of Xena: Warrior Princess . His father in Cherbourg has just been murdered by the brother of his housekeeper (and lover) Aïcha, a recent Muslim convert. Rather than mourning his father's death, Michel exploits it (à la Camus) for an experiment in racial hatred-mostly failed, it must be said-and as an opportunity for philosophical reflection. "I had a vision of migratory flows crisscrossing Europe like blood vessels," Mr. Houellebecq writes, employing the language that would get him into legal hot water, "in which Muslims appeared as clots that were only slowly reabsorbed." Just when it seems that Mr. Houellebecq's alter ego is about to devolve into the usual logic of European xenophobia, he makes a startling leap with the help of Aïcha's kindness: "On an intellectual level, I was suddenly capable of acknowledging the attractions of the Muslim vagina." It's important to note here that the female sex organ, to Mr. Houellebecq, is not only a source of "wonder" equal to the resurrected Christ, but also a talisman against evil, the answer to the world's social and economic problems, and a legislative body with roughly the same influence as the U.N.

If pornography is sex without motivation, as the usual shorthand definition goes, then Mr. Houellebecq has reinvented pornography as a literature where sex arrives with the force of inspiration and allows for heightened insight into what he calls, without irony, "the human condition." Platform is not easy to summarize (much less to quote) in the polite language of the book review, but here goes: Michel, while enjoying his Thai Tropic tour, meets Valérie, a junior executive with Nouvelles Frontières and that "rare" woman in the West "who feels pleasure and … wants to give it." Over the course of their frequent post-coital conversations, they come up with an idea for revitalizing the ailing travel industry: sex tourism. Valérie's boss, Jean-Yves (his wife is a dominatrix, though he doesn't know it), is hired away by the industry-leading Aurore group and charged with revamping their line of package tours and returning them to profitability. And thus the idea of the Eldorador Aphrodite sex resort is born: "our manifesto, our platform for dividing up the world" between the millions of Westerners who have money but no capacity to feel and the "billion people … who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality." It's hard to tell if Mr. Houellebecq is being serious when he calls this bargain an "ideal trading opportunity," but he does; rarely has the global economy been depicted so accurately in its hopefulness and craven self-interest.

Life is tragic, of course, in that it flowers so expectantly and then dies with a common whimper, often extinguished by forces not of its own making-just ask any first-year student at the Sorbonne (and be grateful that I don't quote Saussure). Valérie's demise at the opening of their first sex resort in Thailand has its tragic qualities-enter the Muslim menace-and so does Michel's own less dramatic exit among the pleasures being hawked at Pattaya Beach. But most tragic of all, according to Mr. Houellebecq's incomparable Platform , is the fate of those of us who count ourselves as children of the West. "We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live," Michel concludes, "and what's more, we continue to export it." An idea that's convenient to dismiss, like so much of what comes before it, and harder to forget.

Benjamin Anastas' most recent novel is The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance (Picador).

If books were shelved according to the cadence of their titles rather than by the names of their authors, Benjamin Anastas' new novel might find itself wedged between Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony and Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England. Both of those were written before 1695. Who publishes "faithful narratives" any more? Who still writes about pastors? Mr. Anastas' title sounds lifted from the syllabus of a graduate seminar on the social history of 17th-century Puritans.

Colonial authors wrote "faithful narratives" and expected to be taken literally. But in 2001, no title containing the word "faithful" can ever be transparent. Mr. Anastas knows this, and the novel he has written (set in present-day New England, but fully conscious of its heritage) is as skeptical as those earlier works were devout. Mr. Anastas' novel questions anything promising complete fidelity. So if his theme is faith, in most senses of the word–spiritual, social, sexual–his lesson is that faith is as elusive as any narrative that purports to plot its course. In his first novel, An Underachiever's Diary , he evoked this quite literally: The object of the narrator's affection–the girlfriend of his own twin brother, the intelligent and beautiful ideal always beyond his grasp–was named Faith.

That earlier novel was a slim, first-person account of a well-meaning but mediocre hero who could not live up to the high standards of his angelic brother. For his second book, Mr. Anastas has broadened his scope: His frame is no longer the complaint of one protagonist, but rather the cross-section of a whole community. Here the main figure is Bethany Caruso, a frustrated and lonely wife living in an unnamed suburb near Boston. She has two children and a devoted husband whom she no longer loves. Bethany has exiled him to a room above the garage where, ensconced with his soft-core pornography collection, he pines for the wife who will not have him.

For years, Bethany has been suffocating from boredom. In the past, her only anodynes were Zoloft and marijuana supplied by the local teenage dealer. But everything changes when the local Pilgrims' Congregational Church imports a new pastor, Thomas Mosher, who is black (or half-black–his father was white). Immediately, Thomas becomes a subject of fascination for the community: The congregants struggle to interpret his esoteric sermons, the local women swoon and Bethany Caruso falls furiously in love.

But this isn't at all how it happens in the novel. A faithful narrative would probably tell the story sequentially: Bethany is miserable, Reverend Mosher arrives, they fall in love, he disappears. Instead, the novel opens with one long sentence–spanning four pages and comprising the entire first chapter–which anxiously recreates the parish's confusion in the wake of the disappearance. The narrative voice of this opening chapter is hardly the official record we might expect from a faithful narrative; it is, rather, the language of gossip. As the first sentence spirals on and on, we begin to realize that if this narrative is going to be faithful to anything, it will be only to the frantic and chattering energy of a town consumed by the mystery of its pastor's disappearance.

Soon Bethany emerges from this morass of confusion as the novel's main consciousness. Since the narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time, we meet her at the moment of Thomas' disappearance–long after the two have begun their affair. It is Mr. Anastas' skill that we accept and identify with Bethany immediately. She is a restless wife, beleaguered mother, minor wine addict and clandestine lover of the leader of her congregation: all at once, yet authentic in each. But as with Emma Bovary, everything about the heroine seems at the service of her vigorous will, specifically her will to love. In the fictional world of the bored small-town or suburban wife, the only possible flight is through the imagination towards passion. In Emma's case, the tragedy of this passion is gradual: We are subjected, step by step, to her abandonment by one lover and her disillusionment with another. But in Mr. Anastas' version, since he begins at the end–after the pastor has disappeared–we first encounter Bethany already bewildered and lonely: "She missed the pastor terribly, and wanted, if nothing else, just to hear his voice …. Suddenly, with this last thought, it dawned on her maybe, just maybe, weaning herself from the Zoloft had nothing at all to do with her volatile mood (although it couldn't help matters); it had been years, of course, since she had known anything to compare her desperation to, but wasn't she in love?"

Mr. Anastas makes a point of sketching in the small-minded congregants and busybodies of the community; he has a gift for rendering minor characters as something more than caricatures. But the center of his suburban world is his confused suburban wife. Bethany is the only major figure in this novel; although we meet the pastor in numerous flashbacks, his mysteriousness and ultimate disappearance make him a void in the middle of the novel. (The fact that he's black is a bit puzzling, too. Mr. Anastas wants to lay bare the true attitudes of a "liberal" white community towards its black pastor, but this is never quite fulfilled: One forgets about his race altogether.)

The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance places an unhappy and faithless suburban wife at the heart of a suburban novel in order to ask certain questions about suburbia. What is the role of the church in a landscape of banality? Can we transcend monotonous drudgery through love–even when that love is transgressive?

Bethany's condition is not only suburban desolation, but an acute awareness of that condition. Often it seems as if she knows not only Emma Bovary and Hester Prynne (another Massachusetts woman with a clergyman lover), but also Cheever, Updike, White Noise and the rest of the suburban canon. Bethany's will and intelligence are precisely what give this novel life, but at times her extreme self-consciousness, her realization of herself as an archetype and a figure, cause some suspicion in light of her station.

This is mediated, however, by a real generosity and tenderness on Mr. Anastas' part. Though there are certainly satirical elements in the book–mainly in the form of foolish minor characters–his comic vision is primarily a charitable one. So although his epigraph comes from Jonathan Edwards, you get the sense that his characters are condemned not so much to hell as to a sort of purgatory of fitness classes, Nintendo and Count Chocula. Mr. Anastas zeroes in on people who have lost faith–an adulterous wife, a pastor whose devotion to God is fading–and nevertheless shows them to be more heroic than their circumstances might normally permit. In fiction, it's often when a character's faith begins to wane that our faith in that character as somehow real is born.

Aaron Matz has reviewed fiction and literary criticism for The Observer and The American Scholar .

The blessing and the curse of the memoirist is that the story will be familiar to readers before the book is even cracked: parents growing older and stranger before they die; life presenting a bewildering array of choices; love proving itself, in practice, to be both more and less than advertised. No matter what the specifics of the writer's life, no matter how one memoir differs from the next in style and literary aspiration, it all comes down to a reckoning with those forces that shape the multitudes from infancy to death rattle. I don't mean to say, for example, that we respond to Martin Amis' brilliant memoir Experience because we were all raised by Kingsley Amis, lost a cousin to a serial killer, and found our marital and dental problems on the front page of the Daily Mail . I mean to say that the memoirist speaks a universal language–literally, as opposed to the universal symbolism employed by the novelist–and that, because we are all memoirists at heart, no experience is so private that we can't sympathize. This is why we readers come to the memoir as if in a dentist's chair: powerless, the bright light of experience shining in our eyes, knowing full well what's about to happen but unable to delay the inevitable.

I wish Dorothy Gallagher were my dentist–she's sure-handed, lively, self-deprecating and very, very funny–and her memoir, How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories , is a small but by no means minor revelation of the form. The subjects of these 14 interlocking essays may be a tad too easily chosen (sick parents, degrading entry-level jobs, etc.), and their idiom at times may err on the side of informality ("He comes home with tubes sticking out of everything. A tube out of you-know-where for his urine, a tube from his gall-bladder"), but Ms. Gallagher's touch as a writer is engagingly light, and her vision of the world is as generous as it is unsparing of the quirks, prejudices and frequent missteps of the fiercely independent–and fiercely loving–members of her Ukrainian-Jewish family.

The book's opening salvo ("How I Came Into My Inheritance") deals with just that, a court battle over Ms. Gallagher's inheritance, and introduces both the comic tone of the ensuing essays and the major players in her family drama. "It wasn't easy to tell when my father began to lose his marbles," Ms. Gallagher writes, but it might have been around the same time he took the water heater out of his upstate home (this at the age of 90) and replaced it with a wood-burning model. Or the time, to demonstrate to Ms. Gallagher that he could still take care of her mother–a stroke left her, among other things, unsteady on her feet–he waited until she fell again, stuck his cane out and ordered, "Belle! Grab the cane!"

A self-styled real estate developer, sleazy Roy, ends up milking the elderly couple out of the better part of their hard-earned savings. Finally Ms. Gallagher is forced to take her own parents to court to stop the bleeding (Roy hires an attorney on their behalf) and a judge, taking note of her father's "filthy rags," names her the estate's conservator. And her thanks for rescuing the family jewels? " Oh ," her mother says, "t hat I should live to see you and Daddy quarrel. "

Here, with a brief discussion of Roy's relationship with her father, Ms. Gallagher's insight shines darkly: "Roy understood … the greed at the heart of his parsimony, the same greed for life that makes old men hunch deep over their plates and shovel in the food. Roy flattered him … Roy praised his shrewdness…Roy promised him fabulous profits from their 'development' that would materialize years in the future–years in my father's future." It remains unspoken that these are all things–flattery, empty praise, the promise of eternal life–that a devoted daughter would find impossible to match.

The inspired idea behind the memoir's construction is that, as the essays accumulate (most of them are around 10 pages in length), Ms. Gallagher's inheritance is shown to be infinitely richer–more nurturing and troubling both–than a disputed bank account. "No One in My Family Has Ever Died of Love," the second essay, deals with her mother's emigration from Brailov in the Ukraine and her courtship, in the New World, with the dashing Isidore Rosenbloom. (Lest anyone feel confused, Ms. Gallagher's surname is the result of a brief marriage.) The essay concerns the ins-and-outs of growing up in a Communist family in New York City during World War II and makes plain, with some hilarity, the divided loyalties of immigrant children. ("We still read the Daily Worker , but … I have to walk blocks to buy it at a distant newsstand and spend an extra nickel for the New York Post to wrap it in for the dangerous walk home.") Race is a particularly thorny issue–according to Party ideology, the Negro is the most oppressed of all the workers in the world–and, though a young Ms. Gallagher is encouraged to fight "White Chauvinism" and sing the blues, her experience with black schoolmates is mostly limited to taking abuse for being white.

In one of the book's more poignant moments, Ms. Gallagher recalls attending a rally for Henry Wallace in Madison Square Garden (the year is 1948) and instinctively rejecting the collective spirit of the whipped-up crowd. She gazes at her chanting mother and wonders, "Who was she now?" In posing this question without a hint of childish accusation, and in devoting herself, with this essay and others, to unfurling the "mystery at the center" of her parents' long and eventful life together (they were married for 72 years), Ms. Gallagher has made a real contribution to the literature of immigration in America. And she doesn't stop with her parents, either: There's Aunt Rose and Uncle Albert, also settled in the Bronx; cousin Meyer, who survived the Cossacks, the Depression and a return trip to Brailov, and who finally committed suicide at the age of 87; Aunt Lily, a door-to-door lingerie saleswoman (her clients were mostly prostitutes), her maudlin husband Ben; and headstrong Aunt Frieda, who refused to meet anyone inside a restaurant and, on the afternoon of May 23, 1957, was killed by a stranger's car–you guessed it–while waiting outside for Ms. Gallagher's mother, who was late for lunch.

"I was grief-stricken," Ms. Gallagher writes in the book's final essay, "Night Falls On Transylvania," having made peace with all of her departed. "Who would have thought? I'd complained so bitterly , and they'd been so old ." It's a characteristic moment, the deadly serious remark followed by a flip one–a privilege of the genuine mourner, familiar to anyone who's attended a large and colorful family wake, or who's lost someone they loved and struggled to find a language equal to death's absurd finality.

How I Came Into My Inheritance may not be the perfect memoir, technically speaking, but it surely boasts what many other, more presumptuous memoirs lack: an author worth rooting for. Ms. Gallagher's got brains, guts, talent, insight and a heart the size of the Ukraine. By any measure in the book of family-memoir writing, this brave American daughter has done her forebears proud.

Benjamin Anastas' second novel , The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance, will be out in May from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.