LaValle.

After the National Book Awards finalists were named last week, Laura Miller wrote a column for Slate called "How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant." Calling the award "the Newbery Medal for adults" she stated that "whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention." (She was talking about the fiction category, not the scandal-plagued young people's literature category).

We were wondering what exactly is wrong with the Newbery Medal, which as far as we're concerned has a sterling reputation. Is Laura Miller calling Susan Cooper's The Grey King undeserving of an award? Or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH?  Because we might need to have some words. But Victor LaValle, a judge for this year's award, has responded with more pointed criticism. Writing for Publishers Weekly he begins by calling her column "bonkers."

Then he goes on to say:

There are many problems with Ms. Miller’s assessment of what’s wrong with this year’s picks but the first has to be that we, this year’s judges, have been put through some secret National Book Awards ceremony wherein we agree “that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” The Masonic Order of Underdogs! If such a thing ever happened then the NBA are really nefarious because they wiped my memory banks clean. I think it’s worth noting here that one of our choices, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, was an unqualified hit this year, winning its author the Orange Prize. And a second, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, was on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. How dare all those people have the gall to like books that don’t rate with Laura Miller.

It's like some postmodern myth cycle, Zeus and Hera in a 21st century of zoom-lens pap photos and manic dirty texts that live forever courtesy of AT&T. We can't, or won't, stop consuming the details. (Mr. Gore said what to the masseuse about "releasing" his second chakra?) The narratives hurtle from the first mistress revelation in The Enquirer or a trashy blog to-a million or so Huffington Post comments later-the wife's book deal and public "healing"; at the moment, we have forever-shocked Elizabeth Edwards in a second media push as her book, Resilience, comes out in paperback.

As the recession grinds on, there must be something primally reassuring in these stories of male infidelity and wronged female virtue among the elite. The über-cheaters give us evidence that entitled males still exist, are still in charge, while sober, de-eroticized women-even nubile, beautiful, ultra-blonde Elin Nordegren seems willingly desexualized-safeguard The Family. "The saddest part for me," Ms. Edwards told Larry King last week, "is that I know I'll never again be held in that way ... with passion." Meanwhile, Tiger has a new girlfriend already; Sanford is working on "rekindling things" with his Argentine lover.

These tales of hookers and half-hookers and gold diggers and fame diggers and "soul mates"-it all presents itself as censure, but the sheer volume of media, the obsessive attention to it, represents a kind of cheering on. "We really want to believe that powerful men have harems or the equivalent," as a prominent female West Village writer of 50 put it to me, "because it's reassuring us that boys will be boys. The alternative is unthinkable."

She went on to speculate that famous male serial cheaters want to be exposed. "I think being held up as the bad (yet randy!) boy in front of a nation is kind of a turn-on for some of them. A lot of men want to think of themselves as naughty, and of course they know that other men will envy them, which is one reason, no doubt, that they are so ambitious in the first place."

WHEN ELITE WOMEN'S cheating goes public, meanwhile, the outrage can be shrill: Just a year before Hanna Rosin's recent, well-received Atlantic cover story, "The End of Men," readers of that magazine excoriated Sandra Tsing Loh for her confessional piece about leaving her husband after an affair. And yet somehow, compared to what the male cheaters inspire, female adulterers' hold on our attention is short-lived, even, in the end, a bit ambivalent. Nikki Haley's reported extramarital liaisons were good for maybe a week of headlines, and did little to slow her political rise-she is now the G.O.P. candidate to succeed, yes, Mr. Sanford as governor of South Carolina. Over in Hollywood, when Laurie David left Larry David-gossip had her hooking up with the handyman of her Martha's Vineyard estate-the story was a blip on celebrity blogs for a few days, then disappeared. Where was Larry David's anguish, his healing, the journey that, say, Sandra Bullock has been on since revelations that Jesse James was cheating? Made into a mockery by "Larry David" on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Whatever the real Larry David was going through, we looked politely away; maybe it's just too much to contemplate, the idea that a rich, successful man isn't a winner in romance, too. Laurie David, meanwhile, has gotten more fulsome tabloid attention in a week for her rumored role in the story of Al and Tipper's divorce than in the adulterous provocation of her own. (Her publicist quickly sputtered a disgusted denial that she was cheating with the ex-VP, whose movie she produced.)

Even non-celebrity men want to be part of the story line of the cheating, sexually voracious husband and the wife who is muted or uninterested in bed. It's a staple of men's magazines and male confessional journalism: the half-cri de coeur, half-boast about how hard it is to be monogamous when you have such a monster sex drive, or how some anonymous author has decided to indulge in guilt-free adultery since his otherwise exemplary wife simply cannot fill his needs. (Exhibit A: Philip Weiss' exhaustive 2008 examination in New York magazine of his own wandering eye and his wife's lack of interest in sex.)

But let's put aside media mythologizing and look at real life for a moment among the married, educated, affluent class, who share the background and lifestyle of the über-cheaters. Is it a hotbed of unbridled male lust desperate for an outlet, coming home to a female libido that the high-achieving wife has shushed as adroitly as she puts her baby down to sleep? That scenario seems more and more passé-not to mention blind to certain realities of female erotic nature. The statistics say that marital cheating is at about 25 percent for men, 15 percent for women. But one wonders about those numbers. Self-reporting about any sexual matter is notoriously unreliable, and with adultery, any over-reporting is likely to be by men while under-reporting is likely to be by women, due to cultural pressures on men to be studly and women to be chaste.

When you talk to married women about their attitudes toward infidelity, their own, their husband's, or their friends', you get a more subtle, complicated picture. For one thing, raging male libido is not the starting point of the discussion. This email from a married mother of two, an author married to another author, is typical: "Were infidelity to occur, there's no reason to assume it would be on his part. I don't worry that 'my husband is going to cheat on me.' That's not really a scenario I roll over in my head. ... But you get the sense from movies-like Judd Apatow's supposedly relatable Knocked Up-that a women's job is just to HOLD those virile, roaming husbands down! Crazy. Not something I experience or see in ANY of my peers."

Neither is there some male need for sexual variety that's paramount over the female's enjoyment, or potential enjoyment, of same. It's female desire, above all, that is notoriously difficult to sustain in a long-term relationship (hence the "lesbian bed death" syndrome). As an observant friend of mine once noted, heterosexual men may be the only ones ideally suited to monogamy, anyway, since only they can reliably be turned on by anyone, even a long-term partner. When a woman's desire for her husband wanes, it's all too convenient to assume her sexuality itself has been put aside.

"I know a few women who are cheating/have cheated," said Anna Holmes, until recently the editor of Gawker's women-oriented site, Jezebel, over IM. "When I first heard about them, I was shocked-because even I somewhat bought into the narrative that 'men cheat; women, not so much.'" She was also surprised to feel some "admiration" for these women. "I also think that women who cheat upend the narrative that the end goal is marriage. Because here they were, seemingly happily married-some of them, I believe were honestly HAPPILY MARRIED but restless-but it wasn't enough. We're always told that it's enough."

"My 20s in New York went like this: Most of the women around me continually beat themselves up in the pursuit of male attention-myself included!-we felt like passive players in our own romantic and sexual lives," Ms. Holmes tippety-tapped. "'Cheating,' for better or worse, is not really passive. So when I say I felt a strange sense of admiration, what I mean is that I saw women who had previously played second-bit roles in their own romantic and sexual stories take charge. This isn't to say that you have to cheat to 'take charge'-simply that by the time we hit our 30s, most of us were married, and so for one of us to unashamedly look elsewhere for sexual or emotional companionship-on our own terms-felt revolutionary."

THERE IS THIS perhaps uncomfortable fact: Sex means just as much to women as to men, but secrecy is a more fundamental component of sexuality for women (Ms. Holmes said the female cheaters she knew had all successfully kept it from their husbands.) "My sexual life is pivotal to me, as I believe it is for everyone else," Edna O'Brien, no stranger to self-revelation, once said while being interviewed by Philip Roth. "For me, primarily, it is secretive and contains elements of mystery and plunder. My daily life and my sexual life are not of a whole-they are separated." A cheating woman will tend to be very, very good at hiding it.

Female sexual secrecy is not the same thing as repression. There's much more to it than that. Set loose in the world, female sexuality can invite danger. Every category of violence against women, from stalking to murder, is heavily weighted toward ex-relationships, according to government statistics. Strangers are no day at the beach, either. It's not that an available woman in a sexy outfit chatting up guys in a bar is asking to be preyed upon-but can you blame a woman who, out of inchoate fear as much as anything, chooses to express her sexuality in more private ways? For mothers, there's even more at stake in sussing out and avoiding potentially violent men. Children really do need to be protected from abusive men, and how do you know which ones are? A Los Angeles woman who has just started dating after a divorce told me that meeting men now makes her worry about protecting her 4-year-old daughter, "about the fact that we are presented to the world as a package."

Not only are women better at keeping secrets, the forms their extramarital relationships take tend to be much more varied, often easy to not even classify as cheating: The IM relationship, the "emotional affair," the "work husband"; there is perhaps less boning in a hotel, more pouring out of her heart and dropping erotically charged lines to someone who is not her husband, someone she may not even have met in person; she may be trying to decide if she is in fact having an affair with the guy. (Women can keep sexual secrets even from themselves.) The experts agree: It's all infidelity. If she doesn't even tell her friends about it, that may be because in the end she finds the whole thing not a badge of pride but actually embarrassing-the not the sexual but the emotional exposure. When Karen Karbo tried to get women to talk about their experiences with "online cheating" for an article in Canadian Elle, she found her subjects slinking away after initially agreeing to talk. They were ashamed not so much of the cheating part, but of the neediness it seemed to advertise. "They all said they had great stories but that they were too embarrassed because it made them look pathetic," she emailed.

There is one giant exception to the rule of female sexual secrecy: women who sleep with the married alpha males. These women seem to relish the chance to tell the world about their epic forbidden romance with, or their shoddy treatment at the hands of, someone famous. Their blabbing is in fact another big reason that the public face of cheating is so overwhelmingly male. "Hollywood women probably cheat just as much as the men," speculated Amy Sohn, author of the novel Prospect Park West, which depicts cheating among the Park Slope stroller set. "But there are all sorts of reasons that the men they have affairs with wouldn't go to the tabloids, where the Tiger Woods-type women do. For one thing, the women they go for-the low-hanging fruit, as they say, not their economic or social equals-have an economic incentive to expose it, while the men don't, necessarily."

In the end, the female propensity to wrap sex in romance may explain why they, more than men, can find that cheating does not brand them with notoriety-if they handle it right. "With the cheating women, they often end up in a relationship with the person, so there's nothing tawdry about it, and the stories just fade away," Ms. Sohn said. "It means you fell out of love with your first husband and fell in love with your second husband! Wow!"

editorial@observer.com

At Salon, Laura Miller paints this picture of the ebook future:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés -- for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue....

In other words, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, and if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job will soon be yours. Also, no one will pay you for it. Granted, the entry-level editors who used to do this job in old-school publishing didn't get paid very much, but it was better than nothing, and there was always the chance that a career could be made by plucking a hit from the slush pile (as happened with Judith Guest's "Ordinary People" in 1975). You, on the other hand, will be offered no such incentives.

Reading the things nobody else wants to, with no hope of career advancement? Essentially, we will all be interns.

We live in an age of relentless fascination, even obsession, with what we might as well call Middle-youth, that achy, anxious period of early adolescence marked by overpuffed independence, sexual confusion and passion for sweet soda pop and brightly colored bags of chips. At its worst, it yields armfuls of novels and films by 30-somethings longing for a last razz of the substitute teacher, a last sniff of the new girl’s locker. At its best, though, our collective fascination with Middle-youth ignores the public drama of sex and social dynamics and focuses instead on the private self. Middle-youth is when we begin to find our feet, discover a calling, become ourselves. How does this happen? How do we know our ship has come in, that this gangway leads to our own deck, that the shore is best left behind and we may safely turn to sea?

The critic Laura Miller’s new book, an account of her long on-again, off-again affair with C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, has these good questions at its core. Like Ms. Miller, I was changed by reading the Chronicles, made to feel more myself in those hazy, lazy years before car keys and contraceptives. But that was nearly 30 years ago, and unlike Ms. Miller, I have never reread the books and remember almost nothing about them besides their iconic covers and the presence of a very kindly lion. The Magician’s Book is both too detailed and too sketchy to make much sense of the individual novels to a reader at this remove, but for me it brought back something better: the memory not of the magnificent, strange and sylvan Narnia saga but of the experience of reading it—and of the person those books made me.

MS. MILLER DECIDED TO write her book when she realized, upon rereading the Chronicles as an adult, that she was enchanted once again despite the many flaws she could now see in them. “I’d always assumed,” Ms. Miller writes, “that I could never recapture the old enchantment I once found in books, especially the complete and total belief that I’d felt while reading theChronicles. I know too much now: about Lewis’ personality and intentions, about literary sources he raided, about his careless reflections of the world’s injustices. But what if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read?”

Much of the book recounts Ms. Miller’s dogged search for leads and clues in search of this knowledge. She travels to Lewis’ childhood home in Ireland; visits his rooms at Oxford; scours his letters and autobiographical writings; talks with Narnia fans and critics such as Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke; and meets the second-grade teacher who turned her on to the Chronicles in the first place. These rambles of mind and foot are often interesting—especially what she gleans from Mr. Franzen (a Narnia enthusiast) and Mr. Pullman (a Narnia scoffer), who are their usual thorny, perceptive selves. But her travels feel a bit dutiful, and her accounts lack depth and so feel a bit unsatisfying.

More convincing and in greater detail, Ms. Miller explores her adult disappointment with Lewis himself as reflected in the Chronicles. She traces the roots of his racism, his misogyny and his elitism, and she explores how and why the Chronicles are so deeply imbued with Christian symbolism and may be read as an allegory for the Passion of Christ. Despite having grown up in what she calls a “mild form of Catholicism,” Ms. Miller was upset to discover the books’ “dose of theology” several years after she first read them; she felt she’d been tricked into swallowing it. But she “never believed in Christianity as fully as [she] believed in Narnia,” and perhaps the same could be said of Lewis himself, whose proselytizing Ms. Miller excuses largely on the grounds that the nature of Narnia proves he was no fundamentalist. “The fact that Lewis thought he could retell the story of Jesus with a lion god, talking animals, and semihuman creatures from classical myths set in an imaginary country where the Bible doesn’t exist—all this militates against strict interpretation.”

THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK only really takes off when Ms. Miller turns to the origins of the Chronicles, and especially to Lewis’ intense, turvy friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien. Does everyone know that they were best pals at Oxford starting in the late 1920s? I certainly didn’t. According to Ms. Miller, they were as much a Romantic duo as Coleridge and Wordsworth: They read passages from their work in progress to each other; joined with other Oxford writers in a club called the Inklings to egg each other on; and together led the effort to keep books written after 1830 off the university’s syllabus. Fascinating stuff—I wouldn’t have minded if Ms. Miller had devoted her entire book to their friendship.

She reveals how strongly the writing of the late Victorian polymath William Morris influenced both of them. We still know Morris as socialist, publisher, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, textile and wallpaper designer and much else. But mostly forgotten are the “prose romances” he wrote late in his life, in which armored knights and pre-Roman Goths set forth in search of adventure, blood and treasure. Tolkien and Lewis devoured Morris’ romances, which ratified their childhood love of medieval tales and inspired them to write The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles. “In a way,” Ms. Miller writes, “the socialist Morris was the grandfather of a vast and highly lucrative genre of popular fiction, even though what he’d set out to do was revive a beloved, forsaken form.”

Still, for two Christian academics obsessed by the Middle Ages and Norse myths, who wrote epic fictions set in imaginary worlds, Lewis and Tolkien had remarkably different convictions about fantasy and fiction. As Ms. Miller teases it out, The Lord of the Rings is thickly described, rule-bound, unfunny; Middle-earth feels wholly imagined in every detail, as Tolkien was a very fussy fantasist. By contrast, there’s something de Chirico about the Chronicles—they’re thinly described, loose-jointed and out of tune, witty. Narnia feels like a half-remembered, hodgepodge dream rather than a world, and all the more disturbing because of it. Lewis was a magpie fantasist, taking from a wide range of sources.

Despite Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis, the Chronicles’ mixture of Christian mysticism, classical cosmology, Celtic legend (“fauns and dragons and dwarves and Arabian Nights exoticism all jumbled together”) so offended Tolkien’s sense of mythic order that he judged them, according to Ms. Miller, a “disgracefully slapdash creation.” Lewis, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for Tolkien’s masterpiece. Indeed, Laura Miller points out that given Tolkien’s procrastination and self-doubt, “it’s only due to Lewis’ nagging” that The Lord of the Rings was written at all.

Matt Weiland is co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Soon after Sept. 11, editors began phoning novelists to commission essays, in the hope that literary writers could offer a better, deeper response to the attacks than mere journalists could. Don DeLillo's name turned up at the top of everyone's wish list. That's how we think of him, as the novelist with a direct line on the weird, powerful yet slippery spectacles and paradoxes of contemporary life. Surely he could nail down for us the meaning of the images of those sleek, bland towers with their fiery wounds against the lurid perfection of the morning sky, and parse the queasy intersection of raw communal horror and great TV. But when Mr. DeLillo finally did publish his 9/11 piece, months later, in Harper's Magazine , it was just like everyone else's: a rote description of what happened and a half-hearted gesture in the direction of the unfathomable.

We badly want there to be a novelist who can pronounce on the Big Themes of our mediated world, and Mr. DeLillo has always been up for the job. For all his weaknesses (plot, character, dialogue), he writes terrific set pieces-critics and fellow novelists will forgive you anything if you deck it out in a glittering style-and he can work himself up into quite a state about the significance of it all. He's not afraid to be grandiose; that, and his eloquence combines potently with our desire for an oracular voice to obscure the fact that for years almost everything Big he has had to say has been either 1) banal or 2) wrong.

Mr. DeLillo is a great writer going grievously off the rails as a result of not attending to his strengths. His last novel, The Body Artist , began with 20 pages of perfection, a description of a married couple having breakfast. It was followed by many more unexceptional pages of solemn, gnomic maunderings about grief and loss. Reading those first 20 pages, it's possible to believe in miracles, or at least in the power of genius to transform something utterly ordinary into an intimation of the divine, to fill us with wonder at the texture of our lives. With the rest of the book, it's what happened?

His newest novel, Cosmopolis , alas, is all what happened? Is the book supposed to be serious? Funny? A parody of Mr. DeLillo's own writing, with its pompous pronouncements ("Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did …. Money is talking to itself"), the apocalyptic posturing, surreal crowd scenes and brainy, numbed-out yet studly protagonist? It's distressingly hard to tell. Nevertheless, this is a deeply silly book, and it's hard to imagine that that could be intentional.

Cosmopolis relates a day in the life of Eric Packer, a monumentally rich assets manager who, at 28, has "made and lost sums that could colonize a planet." He spends most of the day riding around the streets of Manhattan in a fantastically outfitted white stretch limo in search of a haircut and, along the way, encountering both the expected (a host of hirelings, including his currency analyst and his chiefs of security, technology, finance and theory), and not (his wife of 22 days, a riot in Times Square, a homeless assassin). The novel seems intended to be a dissection of digital man, his overreaching hubris and his yearning to become, as Eric puts it, "quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void."

It helps, when writing about such people and their world, to know more about the subject than you can pick up leafing through a 1995 issue of Wired magazine at a garage sale. Perhaps it's not possible for an American man to write about an ostentatiously wealthy guy like Eric-who has a 48-room triplex at the top of the world's tallest residential tower, complete with rotating bedroom, lap pool, screening room, borzoi pen, two elevators (one timed to Erik Satie and the other to Sufi rap) a shark tank and, if Eric gets around to it, shooting range-without sounding like he's creating the alter ego of a comic-book superhero. Mr. DeLillo certainly hasn't proven it's possible here, that's for sure. Eric is also a polymath ("he mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon") who studies Einstein's special theory in both German and English, reads poetry, contemplates the Middle English roots of the word "hangnail" and works out faithfully (a universal trait of the protagonists of cheap thrillers). People, especially women, are forever feeding him observations about himself, like slave girls dispensing peeled grapes; these are flattery disguised as reproaches. "I think you're dedicated to knowing," his wife says. "I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful." He has sex with most of these women-and the less said about the sex scenes, the better.

Eric's great problem is that right now he can't figure out the valuation of the yen using his trademark method of comparing currency fluctuations with organic patterns. He's bet all his money on the yen collapsing and yet it keeps going up, and eventually he comes to embrace the growing peril to his fortune. He's being both self-destructive and vain, since he gets to take the whole world's economy with him on the way down. "He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now," he thinks while watching a broadcast of panicky economists addressed by the president of the World Bank. "You want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others," says his derelict nemesis.

Cosmopolis shows only the most superficial and cartoonish grasp of how people who work with technology think and live (as opposed to, say, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon , a vastly smarter novel). Mr. DeLillo's dialogue flickers between sub-Mamet choppiness ("You do this what." "What. Every day." "No matter." "Wherever I am. That's right. No matter") and preposterous philosophizing. The moral of the story, should you choose to accept it, is that trying to transcend our fleshly existence is perverse and misguided because, as Eric finally realizes, our bodies are integral to ourselves: "The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data." In other words, dehumanization is dehumanizing: Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

Mr. DeLillo ought to take his own advice here. He doesn't really have much that's insightful or even persuasive to say about the acolytes of data or the lives of the very, very rich. Nothing, certainly, to match his acute observations about suburban life in White Noise or the domestic minuet from The Body Artist . Enough of the food for thought, thanks very much. We'd rather have breakfast.

Laura Miller is a senior writer at Salon .

In what's becoming a signature of Don DeLillo's fiction, The Body Artist begins with a tour de force that the remainder of the book can't quite live up to. ( Underworld , an entirely different sort of book, has the same structural quirk.) The first 18 pages describe a few hours in the life of a couple, Rey and Lauren, as they breakfast in a rented seaside house–a scene that seems utterly ordinary, despite its ominous introduction as "this final morning."

The couple's breakfast is as mundane as the 1951 baseball game that kicks off Underworld is legendary, but Mr. DeLillo handles it with the same reverence. This morning scene is a lovely, perfect rendering of domestic intimacy, the absent-minded dance of two people rummaging through drawers, pouring juice and turning the radio off and on; she pressing down the toaster lever a second time to make sure his bread gets properly browned, he borrowing her spoon to scoop out the flesh of a fig to spread on the toast, and she wordlessly leaning forward to take a bite. They converse distractedly, each remark staggering out after the speaker has already begun to think of something else: "She crossed to the cabinet and took down the box and then caught the fridge door before it swung shut. She reached in for the milk, realizing what it was he'd said that she hadn't heard about eight seconds ago."

At the same time, Lauren takes pains to notice things: "how water from the tap turned opaque in seconds. It ran silvery and clear and then in seconds turned opaque." She muses at length on the odor of the soya granules she sprinkles on her cereal, "somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded. But that didn't describe it. She read a story in the paper about a child abandoned in some godforsaken. Nothing described it. It was pure smell. It was the thing that smell is, apart from all sources." She suffers regret when she forgets to taste a mouthful of her cereal and is transfixed by a blue jay perched on the feeder outside the window as she tries "to work past the details to the bird itself." This is Mr. DeLillo at his uncanny best. There's genius in the way he makes this morning so vivid: not by describing the world but by recording the way it registers on a human mind, specifically Lauren's, among drifting fragments of memory and imagined conversations with the people she reads about.

A newspaper clipping follows, explaining that Rey, a Spanish-born film director, has shot himself in the New York apartment of his first wife, and that Lauren is his third wife and a "body artist." In the next chapter, Lauren returns to the house, wandering from room to room, performing minor chores. She's still observant, but with a kind of soreness, so that when "the wax paper separated from the roll in rat-a-tat sequence, advancing along the notched edge of the box … she heard it along her spine." She is sunk in grief, unable to see the sky as she once did, as "soul extension, dumb guttural wonder," staring instead for hours at a live streaming-video feed from a camera trained on a quiet road in Kotka, Finland, because it is "real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on the circumstance."

Then Lauren finds a man in an upstairs bedroom, a discovery that resolves the mystery of certain noises she's heard, noises that Rey also heard in the days before his death. The man is small, unthreatening and very strange, wearing only white boxers and a T-shirt and talking in a "halting," "self-taught" way. Instead of telephoning around to local mental hospitals or the police, she clothes and feeds him, studying him assiduously. The way he speaks, particularly his difficulty with tenses, fascinates her. She begins tape-recording their conversations. She hears "elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound."

Even more unsettling, the nameless man begins to talk just like Rey, repeating swatches of conversations from weeks before: "This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he'd had with her, in this room." This strange, small man (who she calls Mr. Tuttle, after a former teacher) "knew how to make her husband live in the air that rushed from his lungs." Part of Lauren believes that he has been hiding in the house, eavesdropping, but part of her begins to suspect that he exists outside of time: "His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible."

The Body Artist grows increasingly enigmatic. Who is Lauren's peculiar guest? The sheen of moisture across his forehead and cheeks when she first finds him, his spindly body and large head, and Lauren's own inclination to bathe and feed him by hand, make him seem infantile, even fetal. That he carries Rey and Lauren's voices within him suggests that he's a revenant of their extinguished love, or a manifestation of Lauren's grief. Mr. DeLillo is not the sort of writer to provide obvious answers, but Lauren's encounters with Mr. Tuttle lead to much metaphysical and linguistic speculation: "There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings."

Like the dragon in a Chinese parade, The Body Artist is a spectacular head followed by a less impressive tail. After the riveting specificity of the breakfast scene, Lauren's philosophical ruminations and even the puzzle of the visiting homunculus feel unoriginal, the routine devices of modernist fiction. There are occasional flashes of DeLillo wizardry (an exquisite account of how it feels to register, from the fringe of perception, a paper clip falling off a desk, for example), but they make the rest of the novel feel vague and listless.

No one writes more exhilarating set-pieces than Mr. DeLillo, but he's not especially good with character and plot–something of a liability when it comes to writing novels. He doesn't really do dialogue; his people either chat aimlessly or launch into monologues, decanting data and theories. Solitude is their natural state. The most momentous conversation in The Body Artist , the one in which Lauren recognizes that Mr. Tuttle is parroting talks she's had with Rey–an opportunity for virtuoso writing if there ever was one–gets summarized rather than dramatized.

When Mr. DeLillo does conduct a foray into human interaction, he can be emotionally tone-deaf. In the middle of the novel, Rey's first wife, Isabel, telephones to tell Lauren that Rey's suicide was "a thing that was going to happen …. For years he was going to do this thing …. This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn't have time to find out …. And I know exactly how his mind was working. He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess." Mr. DeLillo handles the scene so perfunctorily that he seems oblivious to Isabel's terrible cruelty. For him, the conversation merely provides a way to dispense with prosaic questions about Rey's motives and Lauren's likely feelings of guilt so that he can move on to the abstractions that really interest him. How a young widow might feel to be told by her husband's first wife that she never really knew him, that she was merely a clueless latecomer–and what kind of vindictiveness would cause the first wife to say such a thing–seem to be matters of mere psychology beneath this author's notice. The trouble is, this time around Mr. DeLillo has chosen a theme–grief–that's stubbornly personal.

Precisely because it begins on so earthy a note, it's frustrating that The Body Artist dissipates into sterile philosophizing. No one but Mr. DeLillo could have written this novel's first 18 pages; the same can't be said for such sentences as this: "Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping." An inclination to pontificate has always been this author's Achilles' heel, and more's the pity, because no one can match Mr. DeLillo when he's got both feet on the ground.

Laura Miller is the New York editorial director of Salon.

Not anymore.

The money men aren't happy that no one seems to have figured out a way to make money selling content online. And the TV cameras aren't paying much attention–unless, of course, it's some Schadenfreude report on the implosion of the most recent Web firm.

For the journalists, the stock-option riches they tallied up in their heads aren't likely to come to anything, and now that it's clear that content must make money or perish, they're going to have to return to those same ratings-sensitive, focus-group-approved, newsstand-driven values.

Recently, it seems, another content company has stumbled almost daily. Crime news site APBnews.com ran out of cash on June 5 and fired its entire staff. The next day, the CBS Internet Group announced it had laid off nearly a quarter of its staff. And the day after that, Salon.com and Oxygen Media laid off some of their employees. Most recently, on June 13, NBCi, the Internet arm of the network, announced that it would be killing off two of its better-known Internet brands, Snap.com and Xoom.com.

Some day, more Americans may get their news from ABCNews.com than ABC News. And when that day comes, the editors and reporters for ABCNews.com will find that the things that made them leave ABC News in the first place are still around. Because when big money is at stake, when writers and editors start getting bossed around by Nielsen meters tracking what each Internet user looks at, for how long, and in what order, then the new medium that was supposed to be the promised land of freedom has become something else.

Television.

Long ago, in 1995, Laura Miller was living in San Francisco and getting tired of struggling as a freelancer. Her options, as she saw them, were to take a job writing something she hated or move to New York and try to break into the world of Manhattan glossies. "There was no work in San Francisco," Ms. Miller said. "I could have gone to MacWorld and the newspapers there are terrible–it was a nightmare."

At the same time, David Talbot, then the arts editor of the San Francisco Examiner (an occasional employer of Ms. Miller), was organizing a Web site which would become Salon.com. Mr. Talbot eventually offered Ms. Miller a job.

Though attracted to the idea of full-time work, Ms. Miller was still worried. "I thought, 'If I do this I will probably vanish off the radar screen of journalism.'"

Ms. Miller was willing to take that risk in exchange for steady work and getting out of the editorial game.

"The thing that decided it was that he was going to let me do whatever I wanted," Ms. Miller, now Salon 's New York editorial director, said a few days after she had to fire one of her bureau's writers. As a founding editor of a Web site, Ms. Miller got the chance to write about what she wanted and edit the pieces that she wanted without pandering to the whims and constraints of the editors who gave her freelance assignments.

Jim Edwards, the laid-off celebrity news editor for APBnews, described a similar account of how he started working for the site. In 1999, he was a managing editor of Adweek and growing tired of running the trade. "I was willing to take a pay cut just to do something interesting," Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. Edwards knew some of the people at APBnews from when he worked at the North Jersey News and Record and started talking about taking a job with the company. Mr. Edwards said, "They asked, 'what do you think of the site?'" He gave his thoughts, "And they said, 'Why don't you come over here and do that. They actually allowed me to design my own job."

Mr. Edwards was put in charge of the "G-Files" section of APBnews.com, filed for access to F.B.I. files on various celebrities and posted them on the site in their entirety, highlighting the gossipy material. "The management here was good," Mr. Edwards said. "They left you alone to work on stories you liked, investigations you were interested in. They weren't standing over your shoulder waving a copy of the New York Post going, 'Why didn't we get this?'"

Those were the frontier days, though, when the people financing and starting Web publications had about as much a clue on what online journalism should be as the people they were hiring.

Making money wasn't just unimportant, it was unknown, something left to sort out later. And still, aside from tiny operations, like Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles.com and Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.org, no one has figured out a way to turn readership into revenues, in the lingo, "monetize traffic," on a large enough scale to support a full-fledged journalism operation.

That will change, however, or online journalism will go away. For it to become a big business, online journalism will become a lot more like a big business. The events of last week were like the first marital fight after the honeymoon in the new media. The viability of the marriage isn't at stake–but the issues of flexibility and change are. And nothing is written in granite in eParadise–complete editorial freedom for Web writers and editors will most likely be the first to go.

"Too many journalists have this complacency, they have these blinders on," said Sreenath Sreenivasan, a new media professor at Columbia's journalism school who has earned a reputation for being a guide for helping people from print and television make the move to the Web. Mr. Sreenivasan urges those entering the online world to understand the way the online content business works. "This is no longer a charity operation. I call it 'know your enemy,'" he said."

Already, it's becoming clear that hit-counts–the number of times a particular Web page is accessed–will loom larger in journalists' minds. Just as television had rude awakenings when Milton Berle beat Edward Murrow and The Beverly Hillbillies rose after Playhouse 90 subsided, the new medium is going through some shelf-testing, and it's not pretty.

"What new media journalists learn is that you can tell specifically how many people read your story. You've got to understand your bosses know that and you have to be able to make a case for yourself," Mr. Sreenivasan said. "If they have the numbers, they will use them."

Virtually every Web journalist has access to daily traffic reports, derived from the Web site's server logs, which can tell exactly how many people accessed a particular page, and frequently can tell how long they stayed. In the content world, hits are cash, or the nearest approximation, because advertisers pay for the number of times their ads are displayed; 50,000 hits are 50,000 opportunities to display ads.

When Mr. Talbot announced layoffs at Salon.com, he said he used these traffic figures to determine who got pink slips.

Jake Tapper, who covers politics for Salon and enjoys high traffic, downplayed the daily numbers, even though they are e-mailed to him every day. "I try not to pay too much attention to the numbers," Mr. Tapper said. "Luckily, I've been able to write what I want and the numbers have worked out."

On June 6, some of his colleagues were less lucky. Don George, as editor of Salon 's travel section, turned out quite a bit of fine writing. Because travel was the least visited area of Salon.com, however, Mr. George was let go. Other editors and writers freely doing what they want to do will no doubt take notice.

As an editor the importance of traffic leads to a heavy emphasis on snappy headlines to convince people to click through and, thus, ring up another advertisement display. When Salon 's Ms. Miller gets her hit-count, she said she uses it to check up on her own headline writing skills. "A lot of it depends on how you present it on the cover," Ms. Miller said. "You ask yourself, What was it about that cover line that made people want to click on it?"

The never-never land for journalists has existed because online journalists have been homesteaders in a land grab by upstarts who want to be future media titans and media titans who want to stay that way.

Last January, The New York Times started what it calls the "continuous news operation," which has its own small staff of editors and rewrite men to churn out updated stories for the Nytimes.com site throughout the day. Jerry Gray, who oversees the "continuous news desk" said the Times started the operation primarily just to be in the game.

"[ Times publisher] Arthur Sulzberger's line on this is that one day it may be possible, maybe outside our lifetime, that news can be delivered to the cerebral cortex," said Mr. Gray. "He said that he doesn't care, but you know, when that day arrives, if that day arrives, I want The New York Times in position so that our readers, our listeners, or whatever you're going to call them then, will be able to turn to The New York Times ."

Yow! I've had a power surge and I'm writing like Doreen Carvajal!

Condé Nast Publications Inc. and Fairchild Publications Inc. have shared the same corporate parent–S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s Advance Publications–since August, and though the two publishing empires were meant to happily coexist and perhaps complement each other, editors at Jane , a Fairchild publication, are worried that Mademoiselle, a Condé Nast publication, is stealing their article ideas.

On June 7, Jane received an e-mail from a reader describing how, about a month earlier, she was lured out on a blind date with a writer. All was going well–the happy couple even went out two more times–until … he stopped calling. Three weeks later, he finally telephoned to let the desolate young woman know that the problem was him, not her.

"Turns out that he was writing a piece for the August issue of Mademoiselle called '24 Dates in 52 Hours,'" the Jane reader wrote, "and I was one of the repeat subjects of the story." She added, "No wonder he was taking me to expensive dinners: He was on an expense account."

The Jane staff was not happy. It wasn't just their concern for the Jane reader's romance. In the previous December issue of Jane , they had published "24 Dates in 24 Hours." With the August issue of Mademoiselle billed as the first to bear the mark of editor in chief Mandi Norwood, who took over the post in March after nearly five years editing British Cosmopolitan , there's some concern on West 34th Street that Ms. Norwood may be developing a Jane clone.

"I have to love how loyal Jane readers are that they would write in and say that Mademoiselle is doing a copy of a Jane story," editor in chief Jane Pratt said. "People keep telling me the way she's talking to writers and making assignments, it sounds like [Ms. Norwood] is going for the same reader."

According to a memo about the August issue sent to Mademoiselle 's writers, Ms. Norwood will focus on the "Me Years" of women's lives, between college and career and family responsibilities. Ms. Pratt described her magazine similarly, saying, "We're for single women who are between their parents' homes and their own families." Of Ms. Norwood's August issue, Ms. Pratt said, "I would think that she would want to particularly differentiate herself."

Uptown at 4 Times Square, Condé Nast spokeswoman Maurie Perl denied that Ms. Norwood had copied the "24 Dates" story idea, pointing out that the title in the Jane reader's e-mail is not accurate. Ms. Perl also said, "Mandi said she has looked at and read the odd issue of Jane . If there is any similarity to this still-unpublished article, it would be purely coincidental. Mandi hasn't traveled to America to not do her own thing."