Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth married in 1836, when he was 24 and she was 21. From then until the time of their divorce 20 years later, Catherine got pregnant at least a dozen times, had at least two miscarriages and gave birth to 10 children. Nine survived infancy, eight reached adulthood, and all of them disappointed their father, who lamented “having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.”

A new group biography, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (FSG, 256 pp., $25) by Robert Gottlieb, documents the lives of the mediocre progeny of a great man. Making use of existing scholarship, Mr. Gottlieb has digested the stories of the Dickens children into easily consumed biographical sketches, illustrated with photographs and portraits. But this neatly condensed book offers more than mere trajectories of not-so-great lives. Instead, Mr. Gottlieb, the dance critic for this paper, has produced a comparative study of child-raising, one that would seem to attest to the value of contemporary ideas: cuddling, affirmation, diagnosis of pathologies, psychopharmacology, college. The Victorians were more resigned. A child’s path through life was not so much guided as observed and judged, perhaps with the occasional input of a phrenologist. A failed child was a failure. A dead child was dead. “There are things about the Victorians that we will never understand,” Mr. Gottlieb writes. And yet, after brief contemplation of today’s pampered scions (George W. Bush, Paris Hilton, Chet Hanks), the Victorians might have had a point.

Dickens was 25 when his eldest son Charley was born. The author already enjoyed massive popular success, with The Pickwick Papers in serialization and Oliver Twist in the works. While it’s certain that having so many toddlers underfoot likely affected, say, Dickens’s description of the Jellyby household in Bleak House (“We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark ...”), it would be hard to identify any parallels between the extraordinary juveniles in Dickens’s books and his own brood. As Mr. Gottlieb notes, “There was, in fact, almost no overlap between the real children and the imagined ones.” By the time his own children reached adolescence, most of Dickens’s novels had been written—which is not to say that Dickens did not turn his own children into Dickensian sketches.

Three more children arrived by the time Dickens turned 30, and a pattern soon emerged: initial enthusiasm followed by utter disillusionment. An excitable father, Dickens seemed happiest during his children’s infancy. “He bombarded friends with news of their arrivals, their christenings, their charms, their accomplishments,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. Charley is referred to in letters as “the infant phenomenon” and “the infant wonder.” Frank, the fifth, is “decidedly a success—a perpetual grin is on his face: and the spoon exercise is amazing.” And of the youngest, known as Plorn, Dickens fondly wrote, “we have in this house the only baby worth mentioning; and there cannot possibly be another baby anywhere, to come into competition with him. I happen to know this, and would like it to be generally understood.”

The Dickens children were raised by Charles, Catherine and Catherine’s sister Georgina. Since Catherine spent much of the time between births recovering physically and suffering from postpartum depression, Georgina had primary maternal child-rearing duties. “Catherine represented all the messy business of life—sex, childbirth, ill health,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. “Georgina was the devoted mother/sister.” In the paternal role, Dickens took responsibility for polishing the children for public life. He monitored their education, discipline and careers. He demanded neatness and punctuality. He also presented them to the world at birth and at their comings of age, named them ambitiously (the eponyms included literary figures like Walter Savage Landor, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding and Edward Bulwer-Lytton), and provided them with lots of amusement and entertainment.

“What a wonderful father he was!” writes Mr. Gottlieb. At first, anyway. Life in the family’s house in London included elaborate holiday productions starring the children, written and produced by their father. The Thackerays and the Tennysons were family friends. Each child also earned his or her own nickname, including Mild Glo’ster (Mamie), Lucifer Box (Katey), Young Skull (Walter), The Ocean Spectre (Sydney) and Skittles (Alfred).

“The Plornish Maroon is in a brilliant state, beating all former babies into what they call in America (I don’t know why) sky-blue fits,” Dickens wrote of his youngest son, Edward, whose original nickname, “Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter,” Dickens soon abbreviated to “The Noble Plorn” and eventually just Plorn, the name by which Edward was known for the rest of his plain and forlorn life.

As the children grew, one by one, Dickens’s enthusiasm turned to ashes. Having earned his success and overcome childhood poverty while still a teenager through his own impressive energy and drive, his children’s complacency and lack of ambition disconcerted him. “I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son,” writes Dickens of Charley. (This “lassitude of character” is attributed to Charley’s mother.) Of Frank: “A good steady fellow ... but not at all brilliant.” And Plorn: “he seems to have been born without a groove. It cannot be helped. He is not aspiring or imaginative in his own behalf.”

Mr. Gottlieb writes with avuncular concern and sympathy for the Dickens children, who had to cope not only with a famous, exigent and publicly critical father but also a broken home. In 1857, Dickens fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress. “By 1858,” writes Mr. Gottlieb, “he had made up his mind to change his life and ruthlessly expelled Catherine from it, packing her off to her own establishment (with a generous settlement) and removing her children from her—except for Charley, now twenty-one and his own man.” The children floundered through this estrangement from their mother and a Victorian culture generally lacking notions of self-esteem, self-improvement or much self-examination.

The two girls were groomed for marriage, but the boys were expected to launch careers in the armed forces, business or abroad. In the 19th century, Mr. Gottlieb explains, “university was the exception, far from the rule—and since the boys had no particular academic aptitudes, university was not an option for them except for the eighth-born Henry, and he had to plead to go to Cambridge to study law rather than being sent abroad like five of the others.”

Mr. Gottlieb defends the boys in their plight, particularly those dispatched to the far corners of the empire (one ended up as an unsuccessful Canadian Mountie; another died in debt after traveling to India; two went to raise sheep in Australia). “Yes,” Mr. Gottlieb admits, “half a dozen of them appear somewhat unfocused, even feckless.” But Mr. Gottlieb’s keenness to overturn history’s verdict of their ineptitude wins over the reader. “The saddest story is that of Plorn, a sensitive and nervous boy who couldn’t even handle a normal school situation and was then sent off alone, at sixteen, to the raw world of the Australian outback,” he writes.

The two girls had their own troubles. Katey entered into a white marriage with the brother of Wilkie Collins, whom Mr. Gottlieb describes as probably homosexual, “perhaps not in practice but in inclination.” Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mamie, chose not to marry, and Mr. Gottlieb says she might have had “lesbian tendencies.” Regardless of Mamie’s sexual orientation, she ended up in a situation more out of a Henry James novel than a Dickens one: she did not leave home until after her father’s death, whereupon she entered into a possibly sexual relationship with a clergyman and his wife, a “shadowy couple” that she had met through her involvement in a charity movement called Muscular Christianity. The rest of the family thought they might have exploited her for her money.

Several of the children “were undermined by drink” or had gambling addictions. At least one of them probably would have been medicated today. “When he is in full school employment, there is a strange kind of fading comes over him sometimes; the likes of which I don’t think I ever saw,” writes Dickens of his eldest son, Charley. Katey, the acknowledged favorite of her father, had a habit of obsessively touching the furniture and checking under the bed the same number of times on a daily basis. Frank stuttered and sleepwalked. Sydney, another early favorite of Dickens, went to sea, where he racked up so much debt as an adult that he earned his father’s disgust. Dickens confessed to another of his children: “I fear Sydney is much too far gone for recovery and I begin to wish that he were honestly dead.” (“This to Sydney’s brother!” marvels Mr. Gottlieb.)

The family’s attitude toward death is remarkable. When the profligate and worrisome Sydney did die of illness at 25, the family openly expressed its relief. “I fear we must feel that his being taken away early is the most merciful thing that could have happened to him, but it is very, very sad to have to feel this,” wrote his Aunt Georgina. So too with the baby who died before her first birthday, Dora: “If we could bring her back to life, now, with a wish, we would not do it,” Dickens reportedly said. We can picture Mr. Gottlieb shaking his head in dismay.

One unexpected conclusion of reading Mr. Gottlieb’s book is the realization that modern institutions intent on improving people—the therapies and education that offer progress and standardization to those who each begin life from a uniquely disadvantaged place—also serve as more effective propagators of dynasties. It seems not totally by accident that the most successful Dickens child, Henry, never had any peculiar mental tics, studied at Cambridge and became a lawyer. “Out of our large family of nine children there was only one who seemed to me to be really quite sane,” Katey later wrote of him.

Today, the path of the children of successful men and women would be to turn the other eight children into Henry: groomed into a functional sanity, coddled into college and an extended young adulthood that allows for some indiscretions, then passing into a career through carefully nurtured (if not inherited) industry. From this path Bushes, Kerrys, Kennedys, Gores, Romneys and one Clinton seem to have emerged with self-esteem and sense of entitlement fully intact. Our institutions of meritocracy might launder provenance, but they also secure privilege.

editorial@observer.com

Trident chairman Robert Gottlieb.

Trident Media Group, a powerful New York literary agency whose clients include Deepak Chopra, “Millionaire Matchmaker” Patti Stanger and The Vatican, has announced it will launch an e-book division to "create, manage and implement innovative e-book strategies for its authors, including the distribution of a variety of e-books directly to a large number of e-tailers in North America and internationally."

Other agencies have ventured here in the past. In 2010, Andrew Wiley started Odyssey Editions, a program to sell digital editions of certain clients' books directly to Amazon, and incurred the wrath of Random House, which said it would no longer do business with Mr. Wylie if he included authors first published under the company's imprints. Other publishers also lashed out against the deal.

Trident appears to be doing something different: "Trident will not become a publisher, but will instead continue in its new e-book operations to have itself aligned with its clients whose interests we serve as an agent and manager," said the chairman of Trident, Robert Gottlieb (not to be confused with Observer dance critic and former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb), in a press release. In fact, the agency's plans seem to include potentially competing with the likes of Byliner and Atavist. It described the program as including "out-of-print, backlist, new frontlist and original titles, special short-form nonfiction and fiction works by its prize-winning authors, enhanced e-books and new formats as the market develops, print-on-demand options, and new business relationships with traditional and non-traditional publishers."

Heller.

Our favorite parts of Tracy Daugherty's history of the publication of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in the August Vanity Fair, which describes how Catch-22 was a project ushered to life by young people.

This description of Candida Donadio, Heller's 24-year-old agent:

She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on people she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. 'She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across,' says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to 'polish silver.' She claimed she would have loved to have been a Carmelite nun.

Victor Weybright's description of Arabel Porter, editor of New World Writing, where the first pages of Catch-22 were published (as "Catch-18"):

According to her boss, Victor Weybright, co-founder and editor in chief of New American Library, Arabel J. Porter was 'a Bohemian Quakeress, with inspired eyes and ears which seem to see and hear all the significant manifestations of the literary, dramatic and graphic arts.'

How Robert Gottlieb, legendary editor (and Observer dance critic) came to wield power at a very young age:

According to Jonathan R. Eller, who has traced Catch-22’s publishing trail, six S&S executives died or moved to other firms in the mid-1950s, leaving the 26-year-old Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, a young advertising manager with whom he worked, with remarkable editorial pull.

And Evelyn Waugh's response to Bourne's publicity campaign:

Dear Miss Bourne:

Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny. You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”

"A meeting-up of the old Knopf family," was how Jane Friedman said she'd described the service to Random House CEO Markus Dohle. But the crowd that assembled Wednesday also included the family Ms. Bourne had acquired in her Simon & Schuster days, the families (like editor Robert Gottlieb's) she had adopted as her own, and, although she never married or had children, the occasional blood relative. The 13 speakers who eulogized Ms. Bourne spanned the duration of her career--from Kay Cattarulla, who in 1957 was hired to be Ms. Bourne's secretary for $50 a week, to Stephanie Kloss, who worked with Ms. Bourne in her last decade. Longtime colleague Mr. Gottlieb spoke; so did his son, daughter, and wife.

Certain motifs emerged. Everyone remembered the scrambled "Nina eggs" ("lots of butter, never dry," explained her nephew) that she made as a weekend ritual. Everyone remembered the huge manhattans that she had exchanged for dark-and-stormies by the time that she hit 70 or so. Everyone remembered being called "Lovey" for the first time (42 years ago, said Jane Friedman, and back then she thought she was the only one).

"You know, Nina is not a little girl!" the five-year-old Lizzie Gottlieb once explained to a childhood friend who had just met the tiny and playful Ms. Bourne. But N.B.: "Nina was not totally adorable--let's get that straight," Mr.  Gottlieb added later. "We had a joke: I was going to de-bunny her."

Her work was testament enough to Ms. Bourne's non-bunny side. She could generally be found curled in her desk chair, where she would light two or three cigarettes at a time and then forget about them, going into a trance at her typewriter as she chose the perfect words to "uncork a book's essence," as former assistant Alice Quinn put it.

"It was bliss!" said Mr. Gottlieb of the old days. "You can't imagine what fun it was, to be dealing with English this way."

"What is publishing? It's making public your enthusiasm for a book," he said. "No one knows how to do it today."

Enthusiasm was Ms. Bourne's business. She defined the aesthetic of modern book advertising (clean layouts, black borders, bold copy), she propelled Catch-22 to success ("I'm like the demented governess who thinks the baby is her own," Mr. Gottlieb recalled her saying), and she came to the office until a few months before she died.

"There was no separation between work and home," Mr. Gottlieb said, remembering how books and friendship had intertwined for Ms. Bourne and her colleagues.

Once, he said, he had given Ms. Bourne the manuscript for Chaim Potok's The Chosen. He thought the book was amazing; he wanted her to read it that night and help him figure out what to do with it. The next day she came into the office frustrated. She had read the book and loved it. But she had finished it well after midnight: There had been no one awake to call and tell.

So what could she do?

Well, she said, she made a cup of tea and told herself.

"Now that's publishing," said Mr. Gottlieb.

On that last score, at least, they can rest easy: The company has announced that next season will feature seven premieres, four retirement galas (Yvonne Borree, Philip Neal, Albert Evans and Darci Kistler), and not a single full-evening ballet! The big question is, which will prove the better deal, feast or famine?

Amid all this season’s Swans and Beauties and Juliets there have been two premieres—Peter Martins’ endless and tedious Naïve and Sentimental Music (already reported on here, and not on the schedule for next season), and a true peculiarity, The Lady with the Little Dog, by a young Russian choreographer named Alexey Miroshnichenko, who we hear has done some good work for the company’s Choreographic Institute. Here is a ballet about which absolutely nothing is right, except the highly exposed, beautiful bodies of its two principals, Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette.

To begin with, the idea of making a ballet based on Chekhov’s deeply subtle and moving story is demented, even though the astounding Maya Plisetskaya already did it during the Soviet era. (She’s never been accused of good taste.) Did no one at City Ballet actually read this masterpiece before commissioning a ballet based on it? The score, by Plisetskaya’s husband, Rodion Shchedrin, is dull to the max. The dance vocabulary is 100 percent unoriginal—you can always spot a choreographer in trouble when he pours on the sexy lifts.

And then there’s the story. After some adorabilità involving eight guys in gray unitards, who are listed as “Angels” but cavort around like puppies, “Anna Sergeevna” and “Dmitri Dmitrievitch,” married though not to each other, appear in late 19th-century beach resort garb, along with her little dog. (It’s an inside job: The doggy belongs to Hyltin.) The couple meet, connect, and the next thing you know, the Angel-pups reappear and strip them down to their flesh-colored undies so that they can adulterate. (Yes, I know that’s incorrect usage, but you get the point.) Which is where the sexy lifts come in. And then—in what has to be a ballet first—poor Dmitri has to put his shirt back on, button it, climb into his pants, buckle his belt and zip up. And then he gets to zip up the back of Anna’s dress. And then the Angel-pups strip the lovers a second time, before they exit upstage hand in hand into a blazing light. For this Petipa and Balanchine (and Chekhov) lived and died?

The season—like all City Ballet seasons—has been a roller-coaster ride.

The lows, apart from the two new ballets, included Martins’ Romeo and Juliet, which is light on passion and pallid in atmosphere. I was eager to see the lovely young Kathryn Morgan’s Juliet, and her exquisite lyricism was the high point of the evening. Her Romeo, the usually satisfying Robert Fairchild, seemed clumsy beside her, but then Martins’ conception of Romeo is clumsy. The two of them seemed more like affectionate kids than burning, tragic lovers.

As for the rest of the cast, the nurse just can’t be played by a cute youngster doing shtick—Georgina Pazcoguin is simply miscast. But then City Ballet, unlike companies like the Royal Danes and Britain’s Royal Ballet, doesn’t have a tradition of using its mature dancers in character roles. (That’s why we get 20-year-olds as the grandparents in The Nutcracker.) In this Romeo, though, we do get the definitely mature Darci Kistler and Jock Soto as the Capulets, and their coeval, Albert Evans, as the Prince. In fact, we get a lot too much of them. Joaquin De Luz was a virile and properly threatening Tybalt.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Balanchine’s great story ballet, was uninspired. Who Cares? was humdrum except for a ravishing Tiler Peck in the sublime Patricia McBride solo, “The Man I Love.” Peck is the company’s most musical dancer; her wit, intelligence and charm add up to glorious phrasing. Whereas Ana Sophia Scheller, for all her polished technique, shows no expressivity. She gives you the steps accurately and smoothly, but she doesn’t give you the dance; her “My One and Only” is efficient, but hardly Gershwinian. Sterling Hyltin’s praiseworthy “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” would be more effective if she reined in her long, blond ponytail—it distracts from her dancing.

And then there was a misbegotten revival of one of Balanchine’s less-than-major works, Cortège Hongrois, which he manufactured in 1973 as a farewell gift to Melissa Hayden. It has two contrasting groups of dancers—classical and folk—and it employs the wonderful music Glazounov wrote for Raymonda. (Balanchine had used this music twice before.) This season the Czardas couple—Rebecca Krohn and Sean Suozzi—were terrific, tearing up the stage and giving their all, as they both always do. Unfortunately, the classical couple was subpar: Maria Kowroski is gorgeous, and in the right roles (Titania, “Diamonds,” Slaughter on Tenth Avenue) she can be stunning, but she doesn’t have the strength, the command, the dance authority for this kind of role, and she clearly knows it. As a result, she appears tentative—a fatal quality here. Far worse, however, was the classical corps, obviously under-rehearsed if rehearsed at all. These girls are the responsibility of the principal ballet mistress, Rosemary Dunleavy. Where was she?

I can guess: working with them on the revival of Peter Martins’ The Sleeping Beauty. And it was worth it. The first performance, with a cast from heaven, was the most satisfying evening I’ve had at City Ballet in a decade. This is Martins’ finest work as a choreographer-stager. He’s loyal yet not slavish to the Petipa text; the story is clearly, sympathetically told; he’s trimmed it judiciously and added effectively to the divertissement. It’s a swift Beauty, but it doesn’t seem rushed—attention is paid. And this time around, someone has actually worked on the mime—maybe Martins himself; after all, coming from the Danish school, he must know it well.

Not a single one of the company’s seniors was on the stage, holding things back. Here were the best and the brightest, beginning with Ashley Bouder as Aurora. She has superb technique—it’s been evident since she first stepped on the stage 10 years ago—but she’s softened it, refined it, and found a lovely youthful approach to the part: lovingly attentive to her parents; excited by her birthday party and the four magnificent princes summoned for her inspection; and well up to the technical demands of the “Rose Adagio,” apart from an unsteady moment or two. Not only was she strong, but throughout—and particularly in her solos—she demonstrated subtle and delicious phrasing. And she rose to an appropriate maturity and regality in the climactic pas de deux. Her handsome Désiré, Andrew Veyette again, gave the most secure classical performance I’ve seen from him. And what a relief that in Sleeping Beauty, he didn’t have to strip.

Another of the company’s most talented young ballerinas, Sara Mearns, was a blooming Lilac Fairy—expressive as always, open, full; more feminine, perhaps less emphatic, than the usual Lilac. Tiler Peck again revealed her musical brilliance as the best Princess Florine I’ve seen in years—more than holding her own opposite Daniel Ulbricht’s flashing Bluebird. And then we had the treat of welcoming back Merrill Ashley, thrillingly malign as ever as her black rattlesnake of a Carabosse. She began with the company in 1967—yes, that’s 43 years ago.

There was no dead weight in this performance. The company looked revitalized. The theater’s new acoustics enhanced Fayçal Karoui’s vigorous conducting. Balanchine’s wonderful “Garland Dance,” wisely included by Martins, carried us right back to Petipa and 1890, and gave great joy. But then so did the entire performance.

rgottlieb@observer.com

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan have chosen to place Helen Mirren’s super-Oscar-worthy Queen Elizabeth II in the curiously sympathetic role of an upholder of tradition against the media-driven hysteria of celebrity worship. What makes Ms. Mirren’s lively and lucid incarnation of the real-life dowdy queen so remarkable is that she is pitted against the real-life glamorous media mythology of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who in death is even more in command of the country’s devotion than she was in life. And, in my opinion, at least, Elizabeth comes out on top.

Since Robert Gottlieb confessed his prejudice against the royals because of his being “an unreconstructed American republican” in his fascinating article on the Diana-Elizabeth duel in last week’s Observer, I must be equally candid in tracking my own monarchist predilections to my parents. They came to the United States from two small villages in Greece—one near Sparta (my mother) and one near Kalamata (my father)—on the Peloponnesian peninsula, a royalist stronghold of King Constantine against the anti-monarchist Venizelos government back in my mom and dad’s time. This royalist childhood orientation has put me at odds politically with all the Greek-Americans I have ever met.

In his brief comments on the movie The Queen, Mr. Gottlieb mentions a scene in which Elizabeth shoos away a majestic stag from the oncoming yelps of the royal hunting hounds, and he proceeds to dismiss it as “the Oscar moment.” A subsequent scene in which Elizabeth sees that the stag has been slain, and its head and antlers detached from the stag’s carcass for mounting, is interpreted by Mr. Gottlieb as the movie’s simplistic reminder to Elizabeth that Diana, too, is dead and deserving of some compassion. What impressed me about the second sequence is that Elizabeth does not seize the opportunity to gain sympathy with the audience by scolding the royal steward of the hunt for killing Bambi. She instead has too much respect for the feelings of her loyal servant to grandstand for the animal lovers. After all, it is supposed to be her film, not Diana’s.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan show a singularly fair-minded approach to the conflict that arises between Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street during the week in 1997 after Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel, and just about the same time that Tony Blair brought the Labor Party to power in a national election. Some reviewers have claimed that James Cromwell’s Prince Philip and Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles have been hilariously caricatured. But, for the most part, I didn’t recognize either the hilarity or the caricature. A tall man like Mr. Cromwell in kilts doesn’t strike me as automatically funny, and after all the jokes I’ve heard over the years at the expense of the royals, I thought that neither Philip nor Charles were unfairly presented—perhaps because I sympathized with their exasperation over all the fuss that Diana’s death was causing. Apropos, at the screening I attended at the Lincoln Plaza, a near-riot ensued when two ultra-sophisticated women kept giggling at everyone in the movie, even the newsreel appearances of a radiantly smiling Princess Diana. “Are you animals?” one patron hissed. “Have you no shame?” said another. Apparently, the mourning for Princess Diana continues for some people.

For the most part, however, the bulk of the audience did not react to the picture as if it were a satirical farce, partly because Michael Sheen bore such a striking resemblance to the real-life media-saturated Tony Blair that the whole film took on the authenticity of a documentary. Mr. Blair is shown here at his political sunrise, so to speak, bringing the Labor Party to power with promises of a progressive resurgence after the Thatcher years of Conservative regression. Even the monarchy was subject to reform if not outright abolition, as Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, saucily played by Helen McCrory, clearly preferred. The delicacy with which Mr. Frears directs Mr. Blair’s first audiences with the Queen—first alone, and then alongside his wife—establishes a bond of respect and affection between the prime minister and the Queen. These scenes could easily have been played for laughable displays of pomposity, but Ms. Mirren and Mr. Sheen never allow that to happen by keeping the Queen and the prime minister resolutely and realistically human despite the inescapable awkwardness of their first encounter. As it turns out, Mr. Blair is more a student of history than his wife—he appreciates, as she does not, the fearsome obstacles faced and overcome by Elizabeth from her accession to the throne at a youthful age to the present.

Indeed, when she is finally forced by the sustained hysteria of the press and the populace over Diana’s demise to acknowledge the veritable ocean of flowers and laurel wreaths in front of a gate at Buckingham Palace, she provides another “Oscar moment”—this by accepting, at first unbelievingly and then gratefully, a bouquet of flowers from a little girl meant not for Diana, but for the Queen.

Ms. Mirren’s crowning moment as Elizabeth occurs in a perceptively written confrontation with the self-satisfied prime minister, in which she begs to differ with his assessment of her intervention on Diana’s behalf as a victory for the monarchy. She corrects Mr. Blair by deeming her acknowledgment of the people’s grief “a humiliation.” And then she tells him that he will someday understand her feeling when he tastes defeat.

Of course, we in the audience know, as do Mr. Frears and Mr. Morgan, that Prime Minister Tony Blair is now experiencing the sunset of his political career almost 10 years after Elizabeth’s “humiliation” on the screen.

Finally, I do not agree with one of my esteemed colleagues that The Queen doesn’t belong in the New York Film Festival because its selections should be confined to difficult foreign-language films in more need of public exposure. While I agree that The Queen is not difficult, it is sufficiently and, yes, marvelously artistic enough to qualify for inclusion.

Besides, Mr. Frears, now 65, has been in the movie business for close to 40 years, mostly making very highly regarded British television movies that have never been released here. Still, in the theatrical films we have been privileged to see, he has displayed an auteurist flair for cutting-edge subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his poetically pungent entertainments from Britain are Gumshoe (1971), Bloody Kids (1979), The Hit (1984), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (both 1987), The Snapper (1993) and Liam (2000). In the U.S., he has scored with The Grifters (1990), Hero (1992), Mary Reilly (1996) and High Fidelity (2000). Perhaps the time has come to say thank you for Mr. Frears, and opening night at the 44th Annual

Joyless

Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, from a screenplay by Jonathan Raymond and Ms. Reichardt, based on a short story by Mr. Raymond, plays out its minimalist plot and brief (76 minutes) running time in a skeletally articulated mood of universal alienation. There are basically only two characters, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham)—three, if you count Mark’s pregnant wife Tanya (Tanya Smith). Mark and Tanya are seen briefly in their home in Portland, Ore., when Mark receives a call from his old college friend Kurt, and agrees to go with him on a weekend camping trip to the Cascade Range in Oregon. Up to that point, Mark and Tanya had been busy non-communicating, but she suddenly conveys by her negative expression that she doesn’t think much of the idea. Indeed, she makes her first entrance by virtually flaunting her pregnancy with a defiantly thrust-out stomach. (I suppose that can be considered time-saving visual exposition.) Mark whines a bit about not wanting to make her unhappy, and the next thing we know, he is loading some supplies into his Volvo station wagon as well as his dog, who seems excited about going on the trip.

But once Mark picks up his old chum Kurt in front of the Portland apartment in which Kurt is crashing temporarily, Mark becomes all business behind the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road and letting Kurt do all the talking. He also seems impervious to all the scenic spectacles unfolding through the car windows. Meanwhile, Kurt is trying to re-establish their old hippie relationship with bits and pieces of crackerjack philosophizing, including a scene from one of his dreams in which a woman hugs him and provides him—and the audience—with an explanation of the film’s title: “Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”

Instead of responding to Kurt’s conversational gambits, Mark turns on the radio periodically to his favorite station, which carries the liberal radio network Air America and its favorite message, the decline and fall of America under George Bush—a subject with which I am in total agreement, but not when it’s used as a substitute for character-developing dialogue. I am informed that Ms. Reichardt’s two previous films consist, like Old Joy, of endless shots of landscapes glimpsed through the passenger-seat window of a moving car. I have not seen either River of Grass (1994) or Ode (1999), and so I cannot construct an auteurist context for Ms. Reichardt’s despairing directorial personality, as Dave Kehr has done so elegantly and so eloquently in the September/October 2006 Film Comment.

After many false starts, Mark and Kurt reach their destination, a seemingly well-hidden and seldom-frequented natural hot-springs facility. When both men undress and get into separate tubs, and Kurt begins massaging Mark’s back, I couldn’t help thinking that they had been heading for Brokeback Mountain all along. But that’s just me; I have never had the slightest desire to go camping with anyone else, male or female. Apparently nothing “happens,” and the two men return to Portland with no hope of ever reconciling. Mark will presumably resume his middle-class existence as a husband and father, and Kurt will continue on his bohemian path. Some reviewers have suggested that it is Mark who has failed some sort of test meant to broaden his narrow bourgeois outlook. But if our society is in decline-and-fall mode, as Ms. Reichardt seems to suggest, are middle-aged hippies likelier to be happy than their conventional middle-class former friends, now saddled with family responsibilities? For that matter, how can one measure degrees of joy, old or new? Mark is simply too undefined a character even to begin answering that question. Let us say simply that Ms. Reichardt’s brand of minimalism leaves me truly joyless.

It all seems so long ago. Dance has retreated to being just plain dance. The big companies, worldwide, are in the doldrums—what’s the last new piece that le tout New York had to go to? Who’s a star as exalted as the Margots and the Mishas? The ground has leveled: We’re reduced to the latest (exhausted) new wavelet at B.A.M., the smorgasbord at the Joyce, A.B.T.’s tired full-evening classics (except when they aren’t), and City Ballet’s 70th or 80th new piece by Peter Martins. And what about that scarily graying audience in those scarily unsold-out theaters?

None of the above seems relevant to the annual “Fall for Dance” season at the City Center—already in its third year a sacred tradition. The audience is young(ish)—at $10 a pop, it’s practically a free ride. (Nearly 14,000 tickets were sold the day they were put on sale, and all 10 performances were sold out: That’s 27,500 attendees.) What’s more, the audience was wildly enthusiastic: Just about everything—good, bad and indifferent—was greeted with whoops of approval. These were people happy to be in this place, watching this dance at this price.

Ten performances of six different programs, each featuring five acts—that’s 30 different dance companies on display, many of them exposed to a New York audience for the first time. Yes, a number of them were mediocre or worse, and how could it be otherwise? There probably aren’t 30 first-rate companies in the world. But “Fall for Dance” gave us a healthy taste of what’s out there.

In ballet, the pickings were lean—no major foreign companies, no San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Joffrey, etc.—and our own two major companies didn’t cover themselves with glory. A.B.T. dropped in with less-than-thrilling performances of the White and Black Swan pas de deux. (Veronika Part—White—is very beautiful but very studied; in any case, this sublime adagio should never be wrenched out of context. Paloma Herrera—Black—with all the ill will she can muster, is simply not an Odile.) I kept fantasizing about the two pas de deux running simultaneously, but the audience was clearly grateful to be seeing tutus and pointe shoes. City Ballet brought in Jerome Robbins’ In the Night (1970), which is at least a coherent work, even if it’s essentially leftovers from Dances at a Gathering (1969). Three couples swoon to Chopin, while stars twinkle in the firmament. Outstanding was Wendy Whelan in a highly romantic, dramatic performance—this woman can do anything; Sofiane Sylve can do many things, but being lyrical isn’t one of them.

The other two ballet troupes put their worst feet forward: Instead of bringing substantial repertory works, they decided to show off house choreographers. Pacific Northwest Ballet, in its first New York appearance since being taken over by Peter Boal, is an important company with superb dancers. Alas, it gave us Paul Gibson’s The Piano Dance, a well-meaning collection of neoclassical Balanchine-isms punctuated by cute Robbins-isms, set to five composers and dressed in faux-“Rubies” red. From time to time, I wondered whether it might be subtle parody rather than pure pastiche, but no. The Pennsylvania Ballet presented excerpts from Matthew Neenan’s 11:11, set to Rufus Wainwright. There was no excuse for this puerile exercise—it didn’t even show off the dancers very well.

No surprise that first-rate choreographers gave us first-rate work: Paul Taylor’s explosive Syzygy (1987) and Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), a beautiful, fluent piece with perfectly calculated Rauschenberg décor. (I wish there had been a more compelling example than Tensile Involvement of Alwin Nikolais’ achievement from the 50’s and 60’s.) Equally unsurprising is that second-rate choreographers produced second-rate stuff: David Parsons’ Swing Shift is as empty and thin as everything he does; Bill T. Jones’ Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin is as overblown and pretentious as everything of his. (We count our blessings at having been exposed to only half an hour or so of this bombardment of agitprop instead of the full “groundbreaking three-hour work exploring history, spirituality, slavery, and identity.”) Five of James Kudelka’s Fifteen Heterosexual Duets (1991), performed by Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie, proved that early Kudelka is a lot more interesting than late Kudelka, but the dance fights the music—Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata—and the dance loses.

The Stephen Petronio Company looked good in Lareigne: His dancers move spaciously and easily through this busy piece that opens inexplicably with a protracted male solo. I also enjoyed another busy group piece—Cause, by the San Francisco–based Robert Moses’ Kin—even though urban violence, complete with angry voices, isn’t usually my thing. And then there was Random Dance, yet another dynamic ensemble. They all tend to blur into one another, because they all lack a sharply defined personality. The sterilities of postmodernism are running out of gas, the vulgarities of Euro-conceptualism are sticking closer to home, and in their place we’re getting sheer unadorned energy.

There were the conventional ethnic-inflected efforts, such as Farruco, two young male flamencoists whose brilliant tapping was upstaged by their brilliant shoulder-length hair. Excerpts from Alonzo King’s The Moroccan Project left me out in the ethnic cold—all those plucked instruments and droning voices: Who knows what the droning is telling us? And who knows what the Yi-Jo Lim Sun company means with its Heaven and Earth, which opened the festival. It’s Korean, it’s colorful, it’s folkish, it’s ritualish. And its swirling girls revolve around artistic director/choreographer Yi-Jo Lim, he of the moon-round face and slightly nutty smile.

Worst were the solos—not the clever and joyous snatch of Martha Graham (Miki Orihara, in Satyric Festival Song of 1932), but all the rest. You know you’re in trouble when you read that a piece is by the Robert Gottlieb Dance Company, choreographed by Robert Gottlieb, costume by Robert Gottlieb and danced by Robert Gottlieb. These solos are inevitably exhibitionistic, even if the dancer is talented. Funniest (unintentionally) was the Maureen Fleming Company, Maureen Fleming artistic director, in Maureen Fleming’s The Stairs, in which Maureen Fleming is discovered, in the faux-nude, hanging upside down at the top of a staircase and very, very slowly unfolding herself down the steps. The high point was her curtain call, in which—arms reaching out to the audience—she accepted our homage to her art and to her self.

Now for the plums. First, a pair of young dancers from the Dutch National Ballet—Julie Gardette and François Rousseau—who performed a simple, touching duet (Before After) about parting. These kids were beautifully trained and deeply involved with their material, and I was happy to hear, later on, that far from parting, they’re getting married. Then there was the duo Bridgman/Packer Dance, who actually took that old cliché of projecting photographs of themselves onto their real selves and made it into something original and absorbing. They’re in social-dancing get-up, and as the two of them emerge from, and recede back into, black cloth panels, mingling and interacting with their projected images, you feel you’re at a surreal thé dansant.

Another original group: the French Compagnie Franck II Louise, whose extravaganza began with most of the dancers (all men) in cumbersome sci-fi armor and headpieces, lumbering around the stage. As they shed their armor, they picked up the pace, ending in the most dazzling display of hip-hoppery I’ve seen since Rennie Harris, with one guy spinning wildly on his head—as exciting as any ballerina’s 32 fouettés, and a lot more fun.

Best of all, maybe because least expected, was the Honvéd Dance Company, their roots in Carpathian gypsy folk dance. Who could have guessed how charming, how touching they would be—the women modest, gravely smiling, enjoying the elaborate attentions of the men; the guys strutting their macho yet unaggressive stuff, proud to be wooing their fair maidens. No gender-bending, apparently, in the Carpathians, and a feminist’s nightmare. The Web reveals that the Honvéds have a large repertory of extended works, from Hot Szeg (a Carpathian Romeo and Juliet) to The Hammer of the Town. They may be terrific, they may be ludicrous, but on the basis of Black Pearls, this company—which has performed in 19 countries in the past five years—should make a more extended stop in ours. The City Center audience was enchanted.

MEANWHILE, B.A.M. WAS CELEBRATING Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a doubleheader, starting off with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s early signature work Fase (Phase, 1982). Two women dance for about an hour in this implacably austere work. The idea seems to be to use relentless repetition, with barely perceptible adjustments, to create an atmosphere or make a point. It’s a little like early Tharp in its high-mindedness, and indeed De Keersmaeker in person has a distant resemblance to Tharp—you see it most clearly when she trots offstage after her curtain calls. But she doesn’t have Tharp’s range, and she certainly doesn’t have Tharp’s humor. Or, for that matter, any of her own.

Fase was followed by the young British choreographer Akram Khan, performing with two other dancers and the London Sinfonietta, beautifully deployed around the stage, the basses gleaming in the dark. His dance was set to Reich’s Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings, a more forgiving piece of music than that used for Fase, and the choreography was far from austere—thrusting, showoffy, energetic. Khan is a big deal these days in London, and you can see why: He grabs your attention. But if his work is about anything other than its own drive, I missed it.

UNEXPECTEDLY, THE MOST SATISFYING DANCE event of this insanely busy week didn’t take place at the City Center or at B.A.M. but at the Met, where Christopher Wheeldon provided a new 10-minute ballet for La Gioconda. It was delicate, elegant, exquisitely crafted—imagine a hybrid of Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations and La Source. Yes, it’s to that old chestnut “Dance of the Hours,” which Walt Disney featured in Fantasia, but Fantasia was never like this. Two principals and two groups of four girls each, the short ones in pale coral, the tall ones in slate blue; the corals supporting Letizia Giuliani (the sun), the blues supporting Angel Corella (the moon). Everything so simple, so classical, so right. I’ve never seen an opera ballet on this level, but then I wasn’t there in Monte Carlo in the mid-20’s when Diaghilev had Balanchine turning them out by the handful. Corella was his superb self, Giuliani the happiest kind of surprise—quick, pretty, confident, precise and unfakey. Why isn’t she filling the huge classical-ballerina gap at A.B.T. or City Ballet? And more important, why doesn’t Wheeldon show us this side of his talent more frequently? There’s not a step imitating Balanchine—no pastiche here—yet this is the best Balanchine ballet since Mr. B. stopped making them.

To the Editor:

Chris Lehmann wrote a great article on the coming Congressional races [“Bush Flickers Out, Republicans Face Mass Hibernation,” Feb. 13]. It was very interesting, but I have been the communications director for four Congressional campaigns in New York City and Westchester County, and I found his conclusions to be very premature.

First, nationalized Congressional races are a rare thing.

Second, Congressional race trends coalesce later than Presidential races (if they do so at all). Since the last two Presidential races did not fully come together until mid-October, one cannot expect to get a good feel for the Congressional trend until at least that point.

Third, we have seen huge swings in polling for Congress—35 percent approval at this stage is historically not bad, as that number generally increases as Congress buffs up its image over the summer. The approval could easily be 45 percent even before summer.

Fourth, people may say they disapprove of Congress, but they tend to like their own Representative, which of course aids incumbents, and in this case that means it aids Republicans.

Finally, the “right track/wrong track” number isn’t always what it seems. If a voter is opposed to gay marriage and the election of Hamas, they will tell a pollster “wrong track,” but being social conservatives who support the war on terror, they are probably Republican voters nonetheless.

Vincent Giandurco

Fairfield, Conn.

Forget Oprah, I like you anyway

To the Editor:

If I were Oprah, I would have picked Simon Doonan’s wonderful book Nasty for her club [“Why Oprah Spurned Me: I Am the Un-Frey,” Simon Says, Feb. 6]. America needs more stories about Betty, Mr. Doonan’s roommates and the homemade hooch. I read it last summer and laughed myself silly at some of the anecdotes. But his book also serves as a lesson about making one’s (supposed) liabilities into assets. I loved the sweetness that came through his words, and I was left feeling that he was someone I’d like to know.

I hope Mr. Doonan’s busy scribbling another volume. I’m looking forward to hearing more of his adventures. And I would have liked to hear the purse descriptions (he’s right about how ugly a lot of the new “It” purses are). People underestimates its readers!

Martina J. Flynn

Boston

Making Music, Making Moves

To the Editor:

Thanks to Mr. Gottlieb for a very interesting take on Christopher Wheeldon’s work [“Wheeldon Waxing Romantic; City Ballet Missing the Mark,” The Dance, Feb. 6].

In general, it seems to me that young musicians find their way more easily than young choreographers, because the musicians (unless they’re composers) deal with merging their own mental-physical interpretation onto a piece; the score is their guide. There may be comparisons to past artists to face (as with Mr. Gottlieb’s comment on Schnabel’s Hammerklavier vs. Pollini’s), and they may imitate their teachers a bit too much at first; but they still can stand alone.

Choreographers must graft movement on, in or against the score, which offers a whole set of problems—one of them, as he points out, being the mistake of seeing a movement as a stand-alone piece when, conceptually, it’s not. But then, I’ve met very few young choreographers (and not a few older ones) who have no real understanding of music; with them, feeling expresses understanding.

Craig Smith

Dance Critic,

Santa Fe New Mexican

Santa Fe, N.M.

Heart and Soul

To the Editor:

I have enjoyed Robert Gottlieb’s evaluations of the ballet world for quite some time. He has been “on the money” so much, I must commend him. Bravo! He sees what so many of us diehard ballet fans see. I couldn’t agree more about Sofiane, Darci and Nilas.

I also saw the A.B.T. performances that he wrote about last season, of Vishneva and Corella in Giselle. It was most memorable.

So few brilliant performances stay with one’s soul. Fonteyn and Nureyev definitely had a few that I saw; Marguerite and Armand in Seattle, and Sibley and Dowell in A Midsummer Night’s Dream were others; Lynn Seymour (in a good period) in Romeo and Juliet and The Two Pigeons sticks in my memory, and does Ferri in Manon. But my all-time favorite would have to be Fonteyn in Giselle.

Mr. Gottlieb understands that if the soul and heart are not in the performance, technical brilliance is wasted.

Karin Schwalb

Bernardsville, N.J.

To the Editor:

Did I actually read an editorial in your newspaper called “Bad Marriage and Babies” [July 11]? This is truly painful. I read The Observer for its intelligence, style, irreverence and chutzpah. As a mother of five, I don’t need to be told that couples report a drop in marital happiness after their first baby is born. In fact, I can testify that marital happiness temporarily drops with the birth of each child, not just the first. This doesn’t make the marriage unhealthy, and in no way do these “temporary interpersonal struggles” provide long-term harm to the child’s emotional well-being. Parents—especially first-time parents—have enough to worry about without being unnecessarily scared. Although your editorial offers no good solution to this “problem,” I can suggest that besides trying to get some sleep and keeping a sense of humor, taking the time to read the decidedly un-P.C. Observer is an excellent antidote. That is, unless more such editorials appear.

Vicky Schippers

Brooklyn

Independent Voice

To the Editor:

The Independence Party’s mission, as I understand it, is to give voice to and thereby empower independent voters. If Jessica Bruder had written her article “Will Spitzer Shun the Independence Party?” [July 11] from a more objective perspective, she might have had an inkling (and might have shared it with Observer readers) that the Independence Party is non-ideological. Its litmus test for whom to support isn’t whether a candidate has the “politically correct” positions on the issues. Rather, it supports candidates who support and will work for political reform that advances independent voters’ fight for political recognition. That is why the candidates that the I.P. gives its endorsement to range from Governor George Pataki to independent Presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

Francine Miller

Executive Committee,

Kings County

Independence Party

Brooklyn

First-Time Writer, Longtime Fan

To the Editor:

I’ve been meaning to write for some time about Robert Gottlieb. Mr. Gottlieb’s ballet criticism is outstanding. It puts him in the ranks of Denby and Croce. I was so moved by his review of Balanchine’s Don Quixote [“Farrell’s Revival of Don Q, Balanchine’s Gift to His Muse,” The Dance, July 11]. This is what art is all about. And thank you for having the courage to speak the truth about what is happening at NYCB under Peter Martins.

Carol Reese

Manhattan

You'd think this would be good news for everybody: Publishers and agents and authors will have a more realistic basis on which to negotiate future projects, because they can know for sure how similar ideas or the author's previous books have fared. Also, because BookScan can "slice and dice" the numbers a lot of ways, including by price and by region, publishers using the service can get an edge on pricing and marketing. The advent of BookScan promises that news outlets and their readers will no longer have to try to decode best-seller lists, the most important of which-the New York Times best-seller list-compiles its data by a complex system of weighting and extrapolating that only a Kremlinologist could love. As for authors-well, the BookScan reports that your agent or publisher can show you are a whole lot easier to read than your average royalty statement. And besides, such reports can be made available weekly.

But this being the book business, reaction to BookScan has been far more complex. Why? Because for all the bottom-lining and conglomerating of recent years, publishing is still a business built on passion and perception. "We talk about the BookScan numbers in editorial meetings," said one prominent publisher who didn't want his name used-and who then admitted that the numbers are not always factored in when projects go to auction. "On the one hand, we want to buy books that sell, and BookScan can give us an indication of how well a project might sell," this person continued. "On the other hand, when you want a project, you usually have to pay more than somebody else. The competition can get very heated-and you end up paying more than you probably 'should,' based on the numbers, because you don't want somebody else to publish it." Besides, an editor hell-bent on acquiring a book can be perversely happy about being in the dark, numbers-wise. "O.K., sometimes I knew the agent had puffed up the author's track record," said one former editor. "But I was grateful to be able to talk back to a skeptical marketing department that had doubts about selling the book I really wanted. Nobody had inarguable numbers."

Agents, too, are wary of BookScan, probably precisely because hard data undercuts what they do best: the enthusiastic spinning of a project's viability. ("Spinning" in this context is a "generous word," one disgruntled publisher told me.) "These numbers are both a good thing and a bad thing," said the agent Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group and agent to such megasellers as Janet Evanovich and Dean Koontz. "They are an indicator, but an overreliance on them can be misleading." For one thing, he and others point out, they tell only part of the story; according to Jim King, vice president and general manager of Nielsen BookScan, the service receives reports from most, but not all, retailers-Wal-Mart is conspicuously absent on the roster, for example-and the company suggests that it reports around 70 to 75 percent of all sales. So a book that sells very well in non-reporting retailers-a book like The Purpose-Driven Life , for example, which has been sitting at or near the top of virtually all nonfiction best-seller lists for many weeks-as well as the kind of mass-market, Wal-Mart- and book-club-popular authors that Mr. Gottlieb represents, may not appear as huge sellers on BookScan.

So BookScan isn't foolproof-but it's the closest the book business has ever come to knowing itself, and you'd think that fact-seeking journalistic outlets would embrace it. For one thing, it efficiently collects data that, until now, the periodicals have had to collect from retailers themselves by phone, fax or survey. But ambivalence reigns in journalism, too, apparently. While The Washington Post recently contracted with BookScan to receive its services-under their agreement, the paper can publish its rankings but not the hard numbers, according to Mr. King-the venerable New York Times has made no such arrangement, and a spokesman for the paper declined to say whether its executives were even considering doing so. "We sample a portion of the known book-selling market, and we essentially extrapolate from that," Richard Meislin, The Times ' editor of news surveys, told me.

But it was his next comment that made me think, for one minute, that I was talking to a dyed-in-the-wool book publisher:

"We like doing things the way we do them," he said.