Prose. (PatrickMcMullan/ PatrickMcMullan)

It’s all over. Fashion Week is back in the closet until spring. As this year’s cast of models kicked off their heels and moved on with a shrug of their padded shoulders, there was at least one place where the flame of fashion still flickered: The Museum at FIT. Ivy Style, their latest exhibition, presents an entertaining panorama of college clothing, from rakish raccoon coat to basic Brooks Brothers blazer.

Every preppy should know the classic Fitzgerald line about Gatsby’s “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”; visitors to the FIT exhibit will see emblazoned on the wall a quote from his first novel, This Side of Paradise, less well known but equally unforgettable: “Is your underwear purple too?” Literature can provide the fashion addict with her fashion fix: As New York Review of Books contributor, and fervent fashion writer, Anne Hollander put it, “literature has always been the handmaiden of fashion.”

With our plaid in check, The Observer checked in with a cross-section of the city’s fashion writers and novelists to talk about the ways in which literature—that quintessentially private pursuit—collaborates, clashes and collides with the very public spectacle of fashion. 

Francine Prose, a perennial Fashion week attendee—often there to support good friend and Marc Jacobs CEO Robert Duffy—is not alone in believing that fashion is a fine lens through which to view culture and identity; she and fellow novelist Emma Straub were in agreement that clothes provided a “shorthand” in letting the reader know about a character. Patricia Mears, curator of Ivy Style and deputy director of the museum at FIT, suggested that because writers are “looking for something tactile,” clothes that describe social classes and categories are key. Ms. Hollander elaborated, “They’re a way to signal or signify who you are or who you wish you were.”

Ms. Prose, however, has excised from her pages all brand names, arguing that they “will cease to have meaning in 20 years.” She added, “it’s one thing to describe what a character is wearing, but to say that he or she is simply wearing Prada is too easy a short cut.”

Used with moderation, then, fashion provides clues to characters’ social lives and moral make-up. But Ms. Hollander claims to have found an exception: Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, a classic French novel published in 1816, “doesn’t include one single material object of any kind … there are no descriptions of clothes in it, nor of chairs or tables for that matter.” Ignoring fashion dos and don’ts, Constant tells his story through the sparring of his characters.

For a biographer such as Stacy Schiff, the challenge is to read clues in her subjects’ sartorial choices. “What does it say about a person if he appears in the streets of Paris with a backwoods, marten fur hat (Ben Franklin), if she dresses her American child in lederhosen (Vera Nabokov), or lights up a Cornell classroom with a profusion of pastels (Vladimir Nabokov)?  How does Cleopatra dress if she is going to convince her subjects she is the incarnation of the goddess Isis?”

Clothes and gender is a rich topic in both literary and fashion circles. The most famous initials in fashion may be LBD, but at Ivy Style it was all about OCBD: oxford cotton button-down, the preppy standard. Ms. Hollander said, “Women are the main point in clothes but of course there’s the whole masculine fashion world, too,” and the exhibition proved her point. G. Bruce Boyer, who’s been fashion editor at Town & Country, GQ and Esquire, and who consulted on the exhibition, admitted, “I can’t write about women’s fashion—I’m just like every other guy—with women’s fashion I just know what I like when I see it.”

Ms. Schiff never hesitates to tackle men’s fashion in her biographies. She recalled, “I can't tell you how much time I spent on Franklin's fur hat; was it an accident—he had eczema, was cold, and had just returned from a Canadian expedition—or did he don that hat because he knew precisely how it would read in the fashionable salons of Paris?  He was in any case the worst-dressed ambassador at Versailles, even when he attempted not to be.”

Fashion is fickle: Franklin’s hat would’ve been all the rage on campus, circa 1920. Literature has its fads too, but it helps make fashion less ephemeral by putting it into context, historically, sociologically and psychologically. Ms. Prose pointed out that if you go to shows at the Met, Prada for example, or Schiaparelli, or Chanel, you’re paying homage to iconic designers, as much classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ms. Prose invoked another literary giant, Henry James: “At every dinner party he went to, he either saw or heard something that he thought fit to turn into a novel.” She remarked that writers have to be attentive to what people wear on the streets; it’s like actors watching people’s gestures and how they’re dressed: They have to think about how a character is revealed through timing and how they walk. And designers think this way too; with fashion, there’s a dialogue between what happens on the runway and the street.

And according to Ms. Prose, there’s a way to read high fashion: “You learn to translate what you’re seeing on the runway into something quite different in everyday life—because people won’t be walking down Fifth Avenue with totally backless clothing.”

For the working writer, like the working New Yorker, high fashion is a world apart. But writing and everyday fashion remain as intimately intertwined as the preppy and his penny loafers. Ms. Straub observed, “it’s sort of the same, except writing is less glamorous.” And she’s okay with that: “I don’t do very well in heels.”

editorial@observer.com

Alice Walker supports OWS.

Last week we reported on the launch of Occupy Writers, a web site where hundreds of writers, including Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Neil Gaiman and Alice Walker, have declared their public support for Occupy Wall Street. The site has expanded into literary content, having issued a call for participating writers to visit their local occupation and write about it: "a paragraph, a poem, a comic, a story, a vignette, anything goes." Two submissions have already been published, a short statement up today from the writer Francine Prose and a poem by D.A. Powell.

From Ms. Prose's essay:

I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it.

We called Ms. Prose to ask about her involvement.  "Writing is actually what we do," she said. "It's not as if our lives as writers haven’t been affected by corporate culture." As for publishing more work on the site, she said that "the more people say about it and the more effort that’s made to keep things vital and alive the better." She emphasized that Occupy Writers is not just about famous writers. "One of the great things about Occupy Wall Street is their resistance to celebrity culture," she said.

“I’m so damn, D-A-M-N, nervous,” Ms. Kalman told the judge, Jesse Sheidlower, the soft-spoken editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary.

“If you look at the National Spelling Bee, all of the words are something nobody cares about” Mr. Sheidlower said. “We’re concerned with words everyone knows, but no one can spell.”

The contestants wore sparkly bee antennae and big name tags that hung around their necks. Literary agent Ira Silverberg was the master of ceremonies.

Mr. Burnham—the returning champion—was up first, nailing “leopardess.”

Kenneth Davis—who started the popular “Don’t Know Much About…” series—was knocked out first, stumbling on “bumptiously.”

“Don’t know much about spelling,” Mr. Silverberg said.

“Do these antennae make my butt look big?” asked New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin.

Mr. Frey—who hasn’t made it to the second round for the past two years he’s played—continued his losing streak with “blazonry.”

Then, scandal: Tayari Jones, author of The Untelling, revealed she was using her BlackBerry.

“You were Twittering!” Mr. Silverberg exclaimed, demanding she give up the phone.

“Tweeting,” Ms. Jones said, and handed it over.

“Spell ‘whirlybird!’” Mr. Silverberg yelled. She complied, correctly.

Mr. Musto was not so lucky, putting an “e” in place of the “i” in “dirndl.”

The finalists were authors Ben Greenman, Francine Prose, Ms. Singer and Observer alum Alex Kuczynski. The words came thick and fast: lackadaisical, domiciliary, gazpacho, vilification, brigantine.

“I’d really like to win this award for my newborn baby!” Ms. Kuczynski said frantically. “Oh God! Give it to me!”

But it was Mr. Greenman who prevailed, with an industry term: “colophon.”

During the pre-dinner cocktail hour in the museum’s spacious rotunda, Norton editor Bob Weil said softly that he hoped the big dinosaur skeleton mounted in the middle of the room was not a symbol for the future of the publishing industry. Later, when the dinner bell sounded and the crowd of 500 or so guests started towards the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, E.L. Doctorow pointed at a healthy-looking taxidermied tiger in the Hall of Biodiversity and said, “Maybe that can be a symbol!”

PEN’s World Voices Literary Festival had kicked off the night before and will continue until May 4th. Since a fair number of the events comprising the festival take the form of panel discussions—you can see the full schedule here--the Daily Transom thought it’d be fun to ask some of the gala guests for their thoughts on the form. What makes a good panel discussion? What can ruin one? How does an effective moderator behave?

“I think people seldom know how to condense or get to the point, and they get caught up with their own ego and defending their own reputation even though it might take them very far afield,” said the novelist and critic Edmund White. “You begin to see it as an exercise of competing egos rather than an effort to communicate or focus on the topic. Often people aren’t even clear on what the topic is!”

In England, Mr. White said, it’s all very different.

“In England, I’ve been on panels at the Institute for Fine Arts things like that, and they’re much more willing to intervene," Mr. White said. "Here I think they’re afraid of offending their friends, and they’re sort of grateful that anybody’s even agreed to do this.”

Daniel Menaker, who used to be editor-in-chief of Random House and was fiction editor of the New Yorker before that, said the problem with literary panels is that most writers aren’t naturally inclined to interact with the public, and so end up in a “cocoon” on stage rather than actually in conversation with their audience.

“It’s hard!” he said. “It’s wrenching. It’s like root canal for them–it’s very difficult. They have to go against the grain of their own introspection.”

Q & A sessions, he added, are usually a disaster, as they tend to devolve into chaos at the hands of narcissistic hijackers.

“You always get some guy who weasels his way in and says to, for instance, an editor, with electricity coming out of his eyes, ‘Why didn't you read the manuscript I sent you?' Snd then the moderator, like, if it’s Harold Augenbraum at the New York Public Library, says ‘Yes sir, well, that’s alright sir.’”
 
New Yorker editorial director Henry Finder said it's important to have conflict on the stage, but not so much that everyone’s talking about different things.

“If you have too much conflict, you don’t have any overlap at all,” he said, before recommending that the Daily Transom track down Rhonda Sherman, who organizes the New Yorker Festival every year.

“In general, it’s not a party unless there’s blood on the floor,” Ms. Sherman said. “There needs to be tension on a panel. You need to have some disagreement. If everyone agrees on the panel, it’s a total snooze-a-thon.”

She said it’s up to the moderator to control the proceedings and conduct the orchestra.

“The best moderators don’t feel that the panel is about them,” she said. “It’s about knowing what to ask, shutting people off, getting everyone talking, making sure everyone has an opportunity to talk, and shooting questions at the people who are disagreeing so that the energy happens. The best moderators understand that their job is to keep the action going, get as many points of view across as possible, and keep a little tension in the room.”

She said that after 10 years of the New Yorker Festival, she has a pretty good idea of who’s good at moderating and who’s terrible at it.

“David Remnick is a really great moderator,” she said. “George Packer is an excellent moderator. Adam Gopnik is a good moderator. These are great moderators. Susan Morrison is an excellent moderator. Because they understand the pace of a panel the way they understand the pace of a story. Moderators who let the panel take them over are to be avoided at all costs.”

Francine Prose, the outgoing president of the PEN American Center, said she’d recently served on a panel that lasted five and a half hours because all the participants spoke different languages.

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault--they just hadn’t found simultaneous translators,” Ms. Prose said. “And they had big talkers, which is why it lasted five and a half hours.”

Long-windedness, she said, was especially a problem when you were dealing with people who like to hear themselves talk. One time, she said, she was on a panel with such a well-known egomaniac that all the other participants got together before hand and “conspired so that he couldn’t take over the whole thing."

“It didn’t work,” Ms. Prose said. “But, you know, some panels are really interesting! They are! I like the ones at the PEN Festival.”

Mr. Daldry's film is an adaptation of German writer Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and 18-year-old David Kross. The story focuses on an underage boy's brief affair with an older woman, who he re-encounters years later when she is tried for crimes committed while serving as an SS guard during WWII.

The Transom does not cry, but we noticed that a significant portion of the audience had, in fact, been moved to tears by the film's end. Post-catharsis, the small crowd moved upstairs to dinner, where Ms. Geahan encouraged attendees to "get literary with a little bit of glamour" (a new motto, perhaps?).

We quickly noticed Harvey Weinstein, who was making the rounds in between Blackberry dispatches. "Aren't there smart people you can talk to? I'm going to take you over to someone smarter," he said, leading us across the bar.

We suggested that he might also be smart.

"I'm not smart."

Rather than debate that point, we asked him how he had enjoyed the screening.

"It's my movie. I'm buying it. I love it," he said, depositing us next to Mr. Daldry, the director.

We asked Mr. Daldry how he felt the screening had gone.

"Good. We've only just finished the film, so it's a whole new experience... We're just showing it for the first time so, it's very interesting hearing peoples' reactions to it."

We wondered if he'd noticed all the crying, which seemed to indicate a pretty strong reaction.

"Well, good, I would say! I never know what to expect when people watch the stuff I make, so I'm always really interested to see whether it has an emotional relationship to other people or whether it's just me. Particularly a complicated, ambiguous story full of moral questioning that's hard to fathom. It's not a regular movie--it's a very strange story. It's just such a strange character."

We also asked him what he made of the potential Winslet vs. Winslet Oscar battle (she is also starring in the upcoming Sam Mendes-helmed Revolutionary Road).

"I hope that doesn't happen, but who knows. I mean, Kate's a wonderful actress. I think she's great in this, and she's great to work with. Awards are, you know...Awards are awards. You have to take them with a little pinch of salt."

Also present was the writer Francine Prose, who told us she had "enormous respect for them for doing this film at a point in history when Americans seem to want films about vampires, so it seemed courageous to be doing this now."

Later, Ms. Geahan thanked Mr. Weinstein (who eventually got up to take a call and never returned) for "making films I want to watch."

"He was the one who actually handed me The Reader," she explained. "He said, ‘You haven't read this?' and I read it and thought, ‘How have I not read this?' Literature, charity, morality, that's what we're all about, my nonprofit. But above that, I have to thank the beauty that we have in all of us today. We have so many great writers and authors and people who really believe in literature."

Included in that group were social people Fabiola Baracasa, who was proud she had called the film's final twist (we had not), and Emma Snowden-Jones, who, we learned, maintains a poetry collection on her Blackberry.

Half dialogue and capitalized song lyrics, The Commitments is far bolder formally than the movie (forget the rock group) of the same name. Not even The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), which completed Mr. Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, approached its spareness. Nor were they as funny, though they tried. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), an impressionistic account of a boy and his battling parents, didn’t try and won a Booker Prize for its pains. Too bad, I say, that Mr. Doyle’s most respected novel is also his most conventionally literary. Whether the compulsion is internal or external, this longtime schoolteacher does sometimes strive for respectability, as in the magical realism of his two recent historical novels about the imaginary revolutionary Henry Smart. The same is even truer for the sad story Paddy Clarke has to tell. Funny novels about functional families rarely win prizes.

Then again, problem novels don’t win prizes either, and although the first Paula Spencer, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), was lauded for tackling the vexed subject of spousal abuse, its formal graces went largely unremarked. It’s unusual for a man to write first-person narrative from a female perspective, and although Francine Prose has compared Paula to Molly Bloom, it’s also unusual for any author to risk a voice the lit cops will find inarticulate. Ms. Prose is overstating, but I’m on her side— Paula retains plenty of wit for someone who’s survived 17 years of repeated, repetitive battering, which the back-and-forth confusion of her narrative reflects and represents. In the pitiless Chapter 26, an eighth of the book at 28 pages, sentences and fragments recur like blows. “He dragged me around the house by my clothes and by my hair.” “My back.” “Ask me.”

But The Woman Who Walked into Doors isn’t all brutal blaming—Paula had reason to love her Charlo, and though her alcoholism is understandable, it’s her responsibility nevertheless. Paula Spencer resumes her story 10 years later, with Charlo long since shot dead by the police and Paula four months into her latest attempt to quit drinking. This time the voice is third person. But the language is even more spare and staccato, with everything the narrator reports seen through the title character’s eyes or passed through her mind, which is preoccupied with staying sober and connecting to the four children she’s neglected. The action is stubbornly quotidian, proceeding sporadically with no chapters and few section breaks, and the banal dialogue echoes Paula’s uneducated vocabulary; spoken or thought, casual superlatives—“great,” “lovely,” “grand”—take on the unwilled quality of bodily functions, as natural as breathing or belching. There aren’t many laughs, either—fewer than in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, actually. If The Commitments is realistic, then Paula Spencer is naturalistic, only without the fatalism. Its flat factuality feels scientific rather than poetic, and its plot refuses to crest or resolve. For the few dissenting reviewers I’ve encountered, those qualities spell bor-ing, a judgment that probably conceals a distaste for the character Mr. Doyle chooses to honor. Of course the book moves—his sense of rhythm and pace never abandon him. Finding the character compelling and her story impossible to put down, I experienced Paula Spencer as an audacious experiment in minimalism: Beckett as Vladimir, Robbe-Grillet in love with life.

In love with life? You bet. For though linguistic amenities may be few and Paula’s life a rag-and-bone shop of the heart, the outlook here is anything but grim. Paula Spencer is a recovery novel, and who wants to read one of those? But it’s a recovery novel set in a recovering economy, and that’s grand. There’s a political subtext here having to do with the boom the Irish call the Celtic Tiger, and it’s also audacious—Mr. Doyle actually seems to believe that improved access to material goods helps make people happy. Gentrification, that scourge of all that is charming and authentic? Paula loves it. Helped out by her elder daughter and no longer losing hours at her cleaning job or wasting an ungodly chunk of her euros on vodka, she gradually fills the new fridge she’s been given and explores local consumer options. One of the first epiphanies in a novel that has its realistic share comes when her daughter phones Paula just after she’s just ordered cake (“Is there alcohol in that one?”) and coffee (the cup “a beautiful blue. No saucer.”) at a new Italian café. Paula pretends she’s home and says bye. Then:

“She adds her milk and tests the coffee.

“It’s lovely.”

Some of Mr. Doyle’s reviewers worry that Paula could fall off the wagon anytime. But through her creator, she knows so much about one day at a time that I doubt it. Instead, I worry that her back could still go when a life off the books has left her without medical insurance. I worry that she’ll lose her struggle to keep her younger daughter off the booze. I worry that the Celtic Tiger will start ripping up the furniture. But I trust Roddy Doyle to figure out what Paula’s life might be like should any or all of these bad things occur. He’ll care because he’s a realist. Sentimental shite my arse.

Robert Christgau is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone; his Consumer Guide column appears bimonthly on MSN Music.

My husband stole a long, sidelong glance at our neighbors. No, he said, we didn’t know them. But they were, he pointed out, the real-life counterparts of the main characters in Edward St. Aubyn’s extraordinary trilogy, Some Hope (2003), which we’d both finished a few months before, and which we’d spent the intervening time persuading our friends to read.

One hallmark of first-rate fiction is that it reveals the world as being populated by its characters. Something similar occurs with Mr. St. Aubyn’s marvelous new novel, Mother’s Milk, though this time what you keep noticing are not the withholding, sadistic fathers, but rather the besotted mothers whose passion for their children is so intense that it verges on the adulterous, forcing their cuckolded husbands to watch and suffer in approving paternal silence.

At the center of the novel is Patrick Melrose, the hero of Some Hope, which it’s helpful but by no means necessary to have read in advance of this book. Some Hope begins in the South of France, where the Melrose family lives, and where Patrick’s father, David, is first seen methodically drowning a colony of ants and calculating precisely how long he must talk to the maid before her arms start to ache painfully from the load of laundry she’s carrying. As it turns out, David’s barbarous cruelty extends well beyond the insect kingdom and the lower classes. He brutally molests his young son, torments his wife, and serves his guests a heady recipe of charm and humiliation.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker domestic landscape, but what makes the trilogy so extraordinary and pleasurable to read is how beautifully Mr. St. Aubyn writes, his acidic humor, his stiletto-sharp observational skills, and his ability to alchemize these gifts into one quotable, Oscar Wildean bon mot after another. And what makes the book so moving, as a writer friend of mine said, is that you feel that its hero is trying at every moment, and with every cell of his being, not to turn into the asshole that he’s been programmed from birth to become.

That struggle is ongoing throughout Mother’s Milk, in which we catch up with Patrick some years after his marriage to the thoughtful and understandably disaffected Mary. He’s the father of two sons, and his slowly dying mother, Eleanor, has decided to leave his childhood home in Provence to a sleazy guru named Seamus and his sketchy New Age foundation. The book abounds in visions of motherhood gone hideously wrong, either through monumental self-interest (the sheer awfulness of Mary’s mother, Kettle, makes Eleanor seem almost beneficent) or through the sort of quasi-erotic attachment that makes Patrick feel progressively more alienated from that cozy trio composed of his wife and their two beautifully drawn little boys.

No contemporary writer writes more knowingly or eloquently from the point of view of the child who is smarter and more observant than the adults around him might wish to imagine. Mother’s Milk starts, nervily, with what I suppose is called a “birth memory”—in this case, that of Robert, Patrick’s older son, recalling his first experience of wrenching separation from his mother. The novel follows the family as the parents’ marriage unravels, as Patrick initiates a love affair with a witty and unhappy former girlfriend, and as he flirts with the sort of substance abuse that turned Bad News (the middle novel in Some Hope) into a dispatch from the private hell of a damned soul who simply couldn’t get high enough to lower the frequency of his own acute, self-lacerating awareness.

Near the end of Mother’s Milk, the Melrose family decides to cope with their exile from Patrick’s childhood paradise by taking a salutary, restorative trip to the United States. By now, the reader can pretty much predict how well this neat solution will work out, just as we can expect the vacation to provide Mr. St. Aubyn with yet another chance to display his gift for making us recognize a volley of hilariously barbed and enraged perceptions as the flailings of a character struggling not to drown in a sea of despair. Here, to take one example, are the anxious young Robert’s musings on the “hysterical softness” of his fellow passengers boarding the flight from Heathrow to New York, strangers displaying “a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who have decided to become their own airbag-systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?

“Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle.”

I’ve always hated the expression “writer’s writer,” with its implication of an audience even smaller and more narrowly limited than that of the “cult writer.” But Edward St. Aubyn allows the phrase its best possible interpretation. He’s the kind of writer who makes you notice the terrifying family at the next table, and who makes you want to write.

Francine Prose’s most recent novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

I’ve always loved summer in New York, ever since I was a child. I like the steam-bath intimacy, the bared expanses of strangers’ flesh, the tattoos blooming everywhere like exotic hothouse flowers. Some mildly thrill-seeking part of me even likes idly wondering if I’m going to pass out from heat exhaustion and crumple to the platform among my fellow martyrs being slowly roasted alive in the roaring furnace of the Union Square station.

But this summer feels different, somehow. I leave the city the minute I can, streaming toward the George Washington Bridge along with all the other drivers telegraphing the Darwinian panic of escapees fleeing the alien-occupied metropolis in a science-fiction film. Though now, it seems, the aliens are us.

If these are the so-called dog days, they’re the dog days on steroids, with the Newfoundlands and St. Bernards panting and suffering with furry, mournful canine forbearance. But New York doesn’t do forbearance. Tempers are notably short, motorists are heavy on their horns, and last week alone I witnessed two unpleasant altercations between pedestrians accidentally colliding as they competed for their little bubbles of sidewalk breathing room.

The London bombings haven’t helped. But New Yorkers aren’t idiots, so it’s not as if we’ve only just this summer realized that the other shoe is going to drop not far from where the first one did—that is to say, on us. In my observation, people don’t seem particularly nervous about the specter of terrorists on public transportation—although, as always, the sight of machine guns in the hands of adolescent reservists in full camouflage drag inevitably makes the heart beat a little faster. In fact, there’s something oddly reassuring about the fact that New York’s Finest have begun to practice a quirky new brand of racial profiling, a triage based on the assumption that the backpacks and bags most likely to contain incendiary devices belong to young, blond white girls with big breasts and low-cut T-shirts.

If there were such a thing as an urban psychotherapist, the good doctor might diagnose our malaise as a citywide case of chronic, low-level depression. Sadness? The faces you see on an average day on the A train look as if they’re auditioning for cameos in a Walker Evans photo. Free-floating angst and rage? I’d bet that if the average household were bugged (which they very well may be, before too long, in the interests of national security), you’d hear a startling number of New Yorkers yelling at their unresponsive TV screens as the network anchormen intone the evening news.

Those nightly wig-outs may turn out to be the key to our diagnosis. Because my guess is that we’re not all simultaneously being flattened, through some miracle of synchronicity, by the recovered memories of our unhappy childhoods. It hardly requires a board-certified psychoanalyst to read the signs and manifestations and to conclude that our malaise is not about past history, but rather about the present historical moment.

Early in the summer, I had breakfast with a close friend, a well-known African-American activist and teacher who’s also the widow of an iconic Black Panther. Her son, in his early 30’s, has converted to Islam and is currently leading a quiet, religious and utterly apolitical life in Qatar. But lately, my friend has just learned, F.B.I. agents have begun contacting the families of her son’s expatriate buddies to inform them that their offspring have been consorting with a young man who, the agents claim, is “just like his father” and whom they have reason to suspect of having ties with Al Qaeda.

As we ate our blini in the pleasant East Village restaurant garden dappled by June sunshine, we discussed my friend’s serious and not at all unreasonable fear that her son could be “rendered” off the streets of his adopted home and wind up in some Egyptian jail or as a prisoner in Guantánamo. We talked about it calmly, though we noted with amazement how strange it was to be contemplating the very real possibility that an American citizen could be kidnapped, interrogated and imprisoned without anyone mentioning those precious but increasingly obsolete two words: due process. And perhaps it was the restaurant’s Eastern European cuisine that made me think that this is what it might have been like to have breakfast with Anna Ahkmatova in the anxious days before her son vanished into one of Stalin’s prisons.

One hallmark of the severely dysfunctional family, a symptom likely to inflict long-term damage on its members, is the insidious way in which the profoundly bizarre comes to seem not only routine but positively normal. Which, I’d suggest, describes the current state of affairs. What would we have concluded if, a mere five years ago, someone had told us that our society would demonstrate only passing outrage and no lasting curiosity about the fact that our soldiers had tortured prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba? How would we have greeted the suggestion that we might lose confidence in the electoral process, in the integrity and courage of our press, or in our own right to express our political opinions without being accused of treason? What would we have thought of the suggestion that the Constitution would be so widely ignored and devalued that a large percentage of the population believes that the separation of church and state is the nutty whim of a gang of godless liberals conspiring to subvert moral values? How would we have responded to hearing that we might find ourselves embroiled in a bloody, costly war waged for reasons that time has shown to be based on complete fabrications? Five years ago, we would have thought—naïvely—that none of these scenarios were likely, or even possible.

If we ask ourselves questions, they only lead to other questions. How did this happen so quickly? Weren’t we paying attention? And what can we do about it now? We e-mail each other and analyze the situation as if we were all on a plane going down with a cabin full of aeronautic engineers noting the succession of alarming engine noises. We preach to the converted and try to make our opinions heard. A few weeks ago, encouraged by a friend, I called my Senators to suggest that they might want to stay focused on getting to the bottom of Karl Rove’s involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. Whoever answered the phone at Senator Charles Schumer’s office politely, if somewhat coolly, took down my name and district and thanked me for calling. Senator Hillary Clinton’s people sounded considerably less interested than they might have if I’d called to complain about a dab of bird shit on the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park.

The chicken-and-egg question of depression—which are causes and which are symptoms?—tends to revolve around an overwhelming sense of powerlessness accompanied by the absence of hope. And who can blame us for feeling powerless about a seemingly endless war that’s simultaneously bankrupting our country and making us enemies all over the world? Any sentient person would start to feel a little disheartened after being told, day after day, that A plus B does not equal C, but rather X or Y; that the London bombings—as Donald Rumsfeld recently stated—had nothing to do with the war in Iraq? And who wouldn’t be moved to yell at the news broadcast that features the fresh, young faces of newly dead American soldiers and tolls the numbers of their dead without bothering to keep a running count of Iraqi civilian casualties?

Meanwhile, the weather makes us think about what we’d rather not consider at all—that is, the disastrous long-term effects of the government’s environmental policy.

Even here, in tough, resilient New York, we feel the heat, so to speak. And, increasingly marginalized on what Spalding Gray called our little island off the coast of America, we try to think of a way to affect what’s happening on the mainland. Or we try not to think at all; we just try to get through it and enjoy the consoling pleasures that our city still has to offer. In fact, if the ship of state is sinking, I’d just as soon go down here: let’s say on Delancey Street, with salsa music pumping, the whole sidewalk thumping from the bass of a passing car playing hip-hop, a Chinese guy selling animals woven of straw, a group of black-clad Hasidic boys scurrying past like a flock of wild turkeys—and all of it on one block, which is what I love best about this city.

In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon’s “atlas of depression,” a researcher is quoted as saying that the circumstances that most often trigger the illness “typically involve loss—of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself—and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped.” I can’t think of a more painfully accurate description of the way we live now, and of the reason why New York feels, as any victim of depression might, so “unlike itself.” The problem, this summer, is neither the heat nor the humidity. It’s the humiliation of finding ourselves despised by so much of the world for something so far out of our control.

Francine Prose’s new novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins).

A Changed Man, by Francine Prose. HarperCollins, 421 pages, $24.95.

"What did the blind man say the first time he touched a matzoh?"

(Beat.)

"Who wrote this shit?"

Ba-da-bing! It's never a bad sign when a novelist feels expansive enough to toss a couple of irreverent jokes into the mix. In the case of National Book Award finalist Francine Prose, the relaxed confidence is well deserved. She's at the top of her game, with so many books under her belt that galleys of her new novel went out to reviewers with the dedication "TK" ("to come"). After 17 titles, she's momentarily dedicated-out.

Not that the subject matter of A Changed Man is a joking matter, exactly. The premise presented on page 1 may sound like the start of a sick shaggy-dog story-skinhead neo-Nazi walks into an anti-hate group-but Ms. Prose is loaded for bear. Her target is nothing less than sentimentality, whether it's as grandiose as the sort exhibited by the sacrosanct "Holocaust industry" or as small as the "twaddle" syncopated by Simon and Garfunkel.

Hackles go on alert from the opening, when the thunderbolt-tattooed Vincent Nolan marches into the offices of World Brotherhood Watch, a humanitarian watchdog group based in New York. This is a guy, after all, who uses "Jew" as a verb, and this is a season-spring 2001-when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is being executed, his "freaked-out piglet face" playing on barroom TV's across the nation. But Nolan wants to come in from the hate and help "save guys like me from becoming guys like me." Will they accept his offer?

Of course they will: They're do-gooders! Professional hand-wringer Bonnie ("your basic single-mother-of-two foundation fund-raiser nun") even accepts the nervous assignment of taking him under her roof, if not her wing, driving him to her bedroom community to live with her and her two disaffected sons. Never mind that it's implausible; the real reason she accepts her mission is that she can tell that the wolf man is really a pup at heart, and a lovable one at that.

"Though his face is chapped and abraded by years of anger, disappointment, alcohol, and boredom, he looks like a kid," she notes. Yes, it's true that Nolan once dunked a pesky old lady in the shallow end of a swimming pool (she was as weightless as "those balsa-wood model planes he used to make as a kid"), and yes, he does believe that the Jewish media makes sure no straight white guys ever win Survivor. But otherwise his Nazi C.V. is pretty light, with references to "Ricans" and "Jap corporate greed" little more than lip service-conversational tics like a Tourette's of the alienated. His capitalist paranoia is so casual that he's capable of railing against the System's mandatory use of seat belts while buckling himself into Bonnie's minivan. Cozily ensconced in her guest room, he feels like a housefly drowning in honey, shocked by how seductive are the comforts of the middle class. He even reads Dostoyevsky like any good child of the gentry, a white-supremacist cuddlekins.

Which is both good news and bad for our reading pleasure. Good because we can't wait to crawl into bed with this book every night to find out whether Bonnie and her bizarro house guest are going to crawl in together, too. Good also because thereby are some delicious domestic ironies put in motion: As if in a sitcom version of The Producers set in a split-level suburb, the presence of a neo-Nazi at dinner actually improves the sons' table manners. Even better because it gives Ms. Prose a platform from which to skewer the "Shoah Biz," as we watch the reformed redneck perform skillfully among the Redon watercolors of charity dinners. Not since Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" has comedy been so bittersweetly wrung from the drawing rooms of the wing-tipped well-intentioned.

Bad news, however, because Nolan as a character presents no real danger. So safe is he (he restrains himself from going through all the family memorabilia under his bed, judging home photos to be within limits, but not each and every tax return) that the various relationships throughout the novel aren't as charged as they could be; nothing much is at stake; the fictional tension is discharged before it really gets going.

Can the pitch-perfect and nuanced Ms. Prose have it both ways? Creating a housebroken Nazi-someone who relates to Bonnie's boys more than her dolt of an overachieving ex-husband ever did-disables her from giving us a glimpse of the genuine hate that animated him when he was a storm-trooper wannabe. But maybe that's her point: Nolan inhabits a gray zone in the same way as does his counterpart, the saintly figure who steers Brotherhood Watch, a "gleaming knife blade of purity and moral courage," despite being beleaguered by egotism and petty jealousies. Both are equally flawed and noble. It's not that Ms. Prose can't do fangs; she cleverly defangs the Nazi to show us his humanity.

By the time she gets around to offering us a real villain in the form of Nolan's cousin, someone who means it when he spews invective about the "Jewdicial system" and the "Holo-hoax," two-thirds of the book is gone and laughter has drained the threat. Sure he stalks the house, but Glenn Close did it better: No way is this loser going to stew the pet rabbit.

Quick, before the orchestra warbles me from the stage, three last points: For a book that targets sentimentality in all its forms, things come a little too easy-too easy how Nolan falls in love with the head of Brotherhood Watch, too easy how everyone falls in love with Nolan, like the girls falling all over Captain America in Easy Rider. (Is it also offensive that in this Jewish milieu he's the point of attraction, as though the dowagers have never before felt a bulging bicep beneath the sleeve of a tux? A real man at last?)

Also, it's worth noting that for all her lighthearted lampooning, Ms. Prose-she of the regally sad face-always manages to convince me that she has known her share of suffering. When she talks of the "spongy exhaustion that follows hours of weeping," I trust that she's been there. Jokiness aside, she knows a poignant moment when she sees it, as when the "heartbreakingly wobbly" high-school band strikes up "Pomp and Circumstance" badly-"sour notes make it soar," "rhythm mistakes make it all the more wrenching."

Finally, if in A Changed Man you occasionally find yourself hungering for less-less discourse, less internal monologuing, fewer stretches where the actors get mired down by conscience the way a video figure periodically slogs through muddy patches-console yourself with the thought that this is kind of a Jewish book, after all, not kind of a Nazi book: more talk than action. You'd want it the other way around, maybe?

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

For a particular sort of female writer-one plugged into the appropriate social network, with multiple glossy magazine features on her C.V. and a few novels or a memoir in the can-a curious new task has arisen in her professional life: anthology-request management. It involves fielding e-mail solicitations for stories about [ insert life crisis here], producing said story and then trying to keep track of all the anthologies one's work appears in.

"Remind me again of what I wrote in there?" said the fiction writer Pam Houston, sounding a touch bleary-eyed while speaking by phone from Iowa City (the latest stop on a book tour for her novel Sight Hound), when asked about her essay in Sex and Sensibility. Ms. Houston strained to recall the other essay collections she'd surfaced in recently. There was one on women and aging, another based on a Bruce Springsteen song, another called Dog Is My Co-Pilot. "I do get asked at times when I have to say no, either because my schedule's too busy or there's no compensation involved. Sometimes it's about sisters or whatever. And I don't have any sisters."

Ms. Harris also found herself eluding anthologizers on occasion simply because her résumé didn't fit the mold. "Not every writer will both be in an interfaith relationship and have had a miscarriage and have been an only child and have been single," she said. "I don't feel like, ' Ugh, this is so oppressive,' because they don't all apply to me. I like to play the game of 'Who can I forward this to?' It's fun."

Readers might want to prepare themselves for the conclusion of the anthology e-mail-forwarding cycle: The coming months will see a flood of essay collections-mostly nonfiction-subcategorizing every aspect of the feminine (and the odd masculine) experience. It could all be a sign that the confessional personal essay has reached the peak of its power, culminating in a breathless surge of self-help chick-lit-a combination of memoir, therapy and girl talk.

The anthology frenzy also suggests that the publishing industry is furiously trying to replicate one huge success by producing countless imitators. The collective rant The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, a best-selling and hotly debated anthology published by HarperCollins in 2002, alerted book mavens to the fact that women were itching to read about the grievances of other women just like them-almost 100,000 copies each of hardcover and paperback are in print. ( The Bastard on the Couch soon followed.)

"[At first] it was, you know, 'Ugh, this is too hard to sell. Anthologies-what a yawn,'" said Elizabeth Kaplan, the literary agent who represented Cathi Hanauer, the editor of The Bitch in The House. "The biggest thing was not that it sold so well, but that it was an anthology that sold that way. It changed everyone's mind about anthologies-both the publishers for doing them and writers for being in them. Personally, it'll be interesting to see how the others do."

According to Marjorie Braman, the vice president and executive editor at HarperCollins who published Bitch, the book had the right attitude. "It was one of those books I had a lot of confidence in from the second I got the proposal and read it. I just knew," Ms. Braman said. But she's not sure what Bitch's popularity means for similar collections in the future. "The problem with trends is, a book works and we say, 'Wow, that's great-let's do more.' It's kind of like the sequel to a Hollywood movie: Maybe you'll get lucky, and maybe you won't. Just because one book works doesn't mean that others will work. And publishers tend to either create or jump onto a trend and then exploit it so much that it goes bust."

The success of Bitch has spawned offspring as varied as an upcoming anthology about in-laws, edited by New York Times Magazine editor Ilena Silverman (Riverhead); It's a Boy! and It's a Girl!, two separate collections edited by Andrea Buchanan (Seal Press); Party of One, about "the single transformative episode that defined [the writers] as only children," co-edited by Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller (Harmony); an anthology on the decision to have children or not, by Salon editor Lori Leibovich (HarperCollins); The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, by Ruth Andrew Ellenson (Dutton); About What Was Lost, 20 women writers ruminating on miscarriage, edited by Jessica Berger Gross (Chamberlain Bros.); Tales from the Scale, about women losing weight, edited by Erin J. Shea (Adams Media); and reflections of women in their 30's (Tarcher/Penguin), as well as meditations on insomnia, "pilgrimage," suburbia and manhood. Women writers and agents have also reported recent solicitations for essays on caregivers, interfaith love affairs, interracial friendships, dual-faith parents, cooking, stepparents, jealousy and divorce.

"I'm having a great run with them," said Sally Wofford-Girand, a literary agent who just helped sell three anthologies, all to Doubleday.

One of Ms. Wofford-Girand's projects, The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women Tell the True Stories Behind Their Blowups, Burnouts, and Slow Fades, is a high-profile entry due in May, co-edited by novelist Jenny Offill and Vanity Fair contributing editor Elissa Schappell.

According to Ms. Wofford-Girand, Ms. Offill and Ms. Schappell first concocted the book (about women's friendships imploding- Catfight might have been an apt title) two years ago. They penned a six- or seven-page proposal and attached their own personal essays on their former chums. They included a list of possible contributors such as Francine Prose, Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth McCracken, Heidi Julavits and A.M. Homes (Ms. Prose, who wrote the introduction, was the only one to appear in the final book).

"We had 10 publishers vying for [it]," said Ms. Wofford-Girand. "Some publishers said, 'It sounds great, but it's too speculative.' Then there were 10 other publishers who just got it and were really excited."

The Friend is rumored to have sold in the low six figures, although Ms. Wofford-Girand wouldn't confirm this. (Most anthology advances are in the low five figures.)

Ms. Braman, who appeared on many agents' submission lists in the wake of her success with Bitch, said that the Friend proposal had crossed her desk and that she liked the idea so much that she actually bid on it.

"I just felt that I didn't want to overpay to get on the bandwagon of a trend," said Ms. Braman. "I thought it was a great project, and I hope it does really well. I just felt that at whatever point I dropped out, they had exceeded my comfort level …. I think that's part of the boom and bust that we create. We not only publish too much of whatever the trend is, but we pay too much for it, and then who suffers?"

Once the deal is made, anthology editors might revel in the prospect of getting a book published. But the process of hunting down talented writers who also have the desired sub-niche of womanly life experience can be an administrative nightmare. Some editors pointed out that many collections had only one or two very strong essays because it was almost impossible to get 27 or 30 submissions edited to the same level of quality. Exceptions were sometimes made for lower-caliber writers who had compelling tales to tell. And then there were the agents to deal with; it was possible to end up negotiating with 10 or 20 agents individually over a standard contract.

Even so, according to Genevieve Field, "it's an editor's dream job: You get to edit the best writers in a format that lets them shine.

"Sure, there are a lot of anthologies out there," Ms. Field wrote by e-mail, "but the best ones, in my opinion, aren't super-specific. They're not collections by women about their type-A grandmothers, they're collections that illuminate a topic most everyone can relate to."

From a writer's perspective, the reason to say yes usually isn't financial. Advances are famously low (for all but a handful of books); contributors typically receive between $500 and $1,500 per essay, although reselling essays to magazines can net a few thousand more. ( The Friend Who Got Away is filling the women's-magazine first-person lineup for several months: Pieces have been excerpted, or are expected to appear, in Real Simple, O, Organic Style and Good Housekeeping.) The decision to contribute often has more to do with an interest in the topic, or because someone prestigious is involved, or because the writer already has written an essay that's gathering dust in a drawer.

"First of all, there's no reporting, so it takes much less time to write," said Ms. Harris. "But I also feel like you have fewer opportunities to write personal essays. It's not just résumé-padding; it's nice to see your writing on a matte page rather than a glossy one."

Some writers seem to have mastered this art. Flipping through a cross section of anthologies reveals a remarkable amount of overlap in the names, with certain writers clearly on more e-mail lists than others. One who is said to be in high demand, for example, is Rebecca Walker, whose multicultural background (the daughter of Alice Walker and Mel Leventhal, she is at once black, white and Jewish) and credentials as a feminist and mother allow her to fit into many categories. But not all.

"I get at least two requests a week," Ms. Walker wrote in an e-mail. "I say no to most of them because I don't feel connected or interested in the subject, or because I don't have the time or the energy to write another essay. Anthology essays can be a real distraction. I have a book due in June, 10 lectures to give by May, and a newborn baby."

But Ms. Walker also understood the impulse on the part of writers-particularly female writers, who seem drawn to the company of other women.

"An anthology can feel like a whole community, and no matter how independent and powerful we are, women still want to feel connected to others," she said. "In terms of deepening one's humanity, reading an anthology has got to be at least as beneficial as watching Fear Factor or Project Runway."

Another writer who has developed something of a cottage industry out of anthologizing is Ms. Schappell, who didn't respond to requests for comment from The Observer. In addition to co-editing The Friend Who Got Away, she and Ms. Offill have another anthology in the offing, about money, on top of Ms. Schappell's own essays in The Bitch in the House ("Crossing the Line in the Sand: How Mad Can Mother Get?"), Sex and Sensibility ("Confessions of a Teenage Cocktease"), Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother ("In Search of the Maternal Instinct") and the forward to Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters.

But who will read all of these confessional collections before the trend burns itself out? Aside from the inevitable graduation gifts, are there enough biracial divorced women who love dogs, hate their in-laws and listen to Bruce Springsteen to buy all these books?

"My sense is that people are so isolated these days, for some reason we've reached this new low of isolation and confusion," said Francine Prose, who wrote the introduction to The Friend Who Got Away. "I think maybe the market for these books does have something to do with people who are either experiencing a certain crisis or know someone who is. It used to be something people could get from their neighbors and friends-but now that community has completely disintegrated, we have these books to help us through.

"Listen-a glut of books?" Ms. Prose continued. "At this point, I think that's the last thing we have to worry about."