GERALD HOWARD (Random House):

Gerald Howard, an editor, recalls a "piece of publishing lore" passed down by J. Randall Williams III—Howard's father-in-law, and general manager at Little, Brown's trade division when they published Franny and Zooey.

Salinger had requested "house paint white" for the cover of his book, and after seeing around 20 proofs, he still wasn't satisfied. The art director was getting desperate. In final bid for authenticity, he sent over a paint swatch from Benjamin Moore.

"That did the trick," Howard says. "Cover approved!"

WELLS TOWER (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned):

As a "broodingish" teen, Wells Tower made the mistake of trying to lay claim to Holden Caulfield. He walked into his 10th grade English class the Monday after Catcher was assigned and announced that he'd finished the book.

"It's kind of a book about me," he explained to a friend, who he assumed hadn't bothered with the reading. This friend was in fact a good deal more brooding than Tower—and he too had done the reading.

"I remember him looking at me like I told him I'd just made out with his girlfriend."

The class ultimately saw "a five-way war" for the title of most Holdenesque. "There was real hostility," Tower says.

RIVKA GALCHEN (Atmospheric Disturbances):

"My mom learned English from this book called 50 Great American Short Stories," Rivka Galchen explains. It included "For Esmé, With Love and Squalor"—prime material for an eighth grade oral presentation.

Galchen didn't know who Salinger was, but she remembers being amazed by two things: the ping pong table described as "an ax-length away," and the moment when the narrator watches Esmé's nostrils flair.

Galchen did not make enough eye contact during her oral presentation, and received a 7 out of 10.

SAM MUNSON (November Criminals, out in April):

Sam Munson wrote his first novel from the "slightly frenzied" adolescent perspective of an aspiring Latin scholar/pot dealer. Holden Caulfield, as the patron saint of boy-angst lit, loomed large.

Munson had mixed feelings about this: While he later came to appreciate Salinger, he hated Holden when assigned Catcher in the eighth grade.

"I couldn't stand him," Munson says. "I found him so annoying. Little fuck."

Munson named a character "Phoebe," but didn't recognize the name as Salingerian until his editor pointed it out. So he inserted an appropriately ambivalent backstory: She's named after Holden's sister, but goes by "Digger" because she dislikes the book.

Joanna Smith Rakoff worked for Salinger's agent, Harold Ober & Associates. She answered his fan mail.

"I was given a form letter to copy, it was written around the time he became a complete recluse. Something like: ‘Dear _____, As you know Mr. Salinger does not wish to receive fan mail. Goodbye.'"

She was ordered to throw away all fan letters, but eventually began responding to them personally. Salinger called regularly, and Ms. Rakoff always knew when her boss was speaking to the author.

"My boss would say, ‘Oh Jerry, HA HA HA!’ She would only laugh when she talked to him. A divine nervous laughter."

Just kidding. Those guys have been running the show for centuries. But it does seem like every other literary novel that comes out these days has at its center some variation on the classic antihero—a character whose flaws are worn plainly if not proudly, and who inspires in readers scorn and affection in equal amounts.

One strain in particular—characterized by a self-loathing impulse to confession, a kinetic demeanor and a claim to authenticity expressed through vitriolic social critique—has emerged as a dominant model. The patron saints of this mini-genre: Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and pretty much every character Chuck Palahniuk has ever written. Readers can’t get enough of them, and writers—particularly young men—can’t seem to resist the temptation to put them in their books.

Gerry Howard, the editor at Knopf Doubleday, acquired the mega-best-selling 1996 novel Fight Club—a move that has put him in line to receive more Palahniukian writing for consideration than just about any other editor. Writers often miss the mark with their work for one of two reasons, though, according to Mr. Howard: either it is informed by too broad a view of what it means for prose to be “edgy,” or it is based on the mistaken belief that the essence of Mr. Palahniuk’s work is contained in the easily imitable aspects of his use of the grotesque.

So when agent Stephen Barbara came to Mr. Howard earlier this month with a manuscript written by 26-year-old Sam Munson, a friend Mr. Barbara had met during his days at the University of Chicago, the editor had reason to be skeptical; according to Mr. Barbara’s pitch letter, Mr. Munson could be “positioned” in the manner of Ned Vizzini (whose last book is about a suicidal adolescent’s experience in a mental hospital), Gary Shteyngart (whose most recent novel was narrated by an unpleasant, obese depressive) and, yes, Chuck Palahniuk, whose newest novel, Pygmy, due out in May, tells the story of a clandestine terrorist who despises the United States and is sent there in the guise of an exchange student to plot a massive attack.

And although Mr. Howard doesn’t see Mr. Munson’s book, titled The November Criminals, “as particularly Palahnukian,” it hooked him enough to enter a bid; Mr. Howard bought it last week at auction for a sum close to $100,000. The novel takes the form of an aggressively confessional letter written by a high-school senior in response to an essay question on the University of Chicago admissions application that asks him to discuss his best and worst qualities. Over the course of the book, Mr. Munson’s protagonist—named Addison—tries to illustrate at length the thesis that he actually has no “best” qualities—that he is irredeemable, pathetic and useless in every way, and excusable only as the product of a corrupt and shallow world. His misanthropy is expressed through various obsessions and enthusiasms, such as a penchant for Holocaust jokes, which Addison “collects” and deploys in order to offend people.

Mr. Howard said he does not get irritated when he sees young authors compared to Mr. Palahniuk, and thinks it’s natural that young writers would be attracted to drawing these kinds of characters. “There is so much pressure, I think, for young people to be adjusted and to get with the program these days that the fact that somebody like Chuck is out there saying ‘uh-uh’ is being taken as liberating,” he explained. “And obviously, if that sort of feeling is in the air, a lot of other talented young writers are going to channel it themselves.”

He went on: “There’s a huge amount of literature that suggests that the impulse to create art emerges from alienation, right? I don’t think people who have the impulse to engage in creative writing are doing so in order to, you know, affirm consensus reality. I think they’re looking to critique it. And there’s a model there in Chuck, ready to go.”

Joshua Ferris, the author of Then We Came to the End, a celebrated novel about office life that was chock-full of unpleasant and depressed individuals, said in an email that the modern antihero worked much the same as his ancestors, and that, formally speaking, the device is a natural thing to embrace if what you’re going for is social criticism.

“Dostoyevsky was interested in the new social and philosophical ideas of his time,” Mr. Ferris said. “The Catcher in the Rye, for all its enduring felicities and originality, grinds Salinger’s ax against phonies. And Chuck Palahniuk in, say, Fight Club, catches the zeitgest against IKEA conformity and the J Crewification of the nineties. This is best done with an anti-hero because an anti-hero is a hero in wolf’s clothing, saying and doing what no one else dares. They work a dark magic, dosing all the nitwits and dullards too stupid or afraid to say what must be said with a local, timely truth serum.”

Some of these characters are not far from monsters—not good underneath all their flaws but worth paying attention to because of them. Disfigured, pathetic, unapologetic and occasionally hopeless, they are, on the whole, contemptuous of the world around them because of what it’s turned them into and confident that the reason for their alienation is the inescapable, toxic nastiness of modern life. They are losers—spiritually dysfunctional, often ugly physically—with chips on their shoulders and resentment in their hearts that takes the form of a self-consciously unforgiving, bombastic mode of social criticism. 

Other contemporary writers who’ve embraced something like this approach in their work include Sam Lipsyte, whose most recent novel, the brilliant and finally life-affirming Home Land, features a sharp-tongued misanthrope named Teabag who submits sad, usually abusive letters to his high-school alumni newsletter; John Niven, whose recently published Kill Your Friends is narrated by an unscrupulous, misogynistic talent scout who sees rot in everyone and everything; Mark Sarvas, whose Harry, Revised is about a deadbeat in the throes of midlife crisis; and Alan Moore, whose massively popular graphic novel Watchmen has at its center a hard-right vigilante named Rorschach, who makes a life of hunting the cretins he believes to be responsible for the moral decrepitude he sees all around him.

Over the past decade or so, characters like these seem to have become the vehicle of choice for young male writers seeking to express a certain sort of disaffection. More than that, as Mr. Palanhiuk’s blockbuster success has demonstrated, they’ve become alarmingly lucrative cash cows—resonant with millions of readers and inspirational to scores of budding authors.

But why, exactly?

“Hard fought bitterness or acidity feels like it gives you a framework for a kind of angry comedy that is, if not necessarily cathartic, at least accommodating enough to encompass an entertaingly hostile, plausible inner life,” said literary agent Jim Rutman, who represents among others Beautiful Children author Charles Bock. “Everything that is potentially bothersome can be fit into that mold. It’s fun to write angry. And you can sort of take cover behind this deeply bothered persona you’ve invented and you can go anywhere with it. You grant yourself permission and access. I guess it’s a species of irreverence.”

Readers, in Mr. Rutman’s view, respond to such characters because “if you are self-loathing enough, then you have access to difficult truths that other people would be loath to put forth. If you are invested in the fact that you are not even a candidate for any meaningful connection with anyone, then you let loose with all the painful honesty at your disposal.”

Daniel Menaker, formerly the editor in chief of Random House and the fiction editor at The New Yorker before that, said the modern antihero—specifically as he appears in the work of young men—has his roots in women’s liberation and the ambiguity of gender roles. 

“I think maybe what’s developing here is there are two kinds of young, alienated heroes,” said Mr. Menaker, who has edited books by both Gary Shteyngart and Benjamin Kunkel. “One is the nerd: the somewhat indulged, un-grown-up guy who has sort of philosophical ideas or objections to society and doesn’t know what to do with himself. The other branch of people are ones who are not fully socially or politically integrated—they’re the tough guys.”

Both variations, Mr. Menaker said, can be seen as a “sociological outgrowth of some gender-role ambiguity introduced beginning in the ’60s or ’70s, when the way a young guy ought to be became less clear.”

Mr. Munson, for his part, who said he has read only one book by Mr. Palahniuk, chalks it up to the inevitable disillusionment of idealistic people.

“I just think it’s because of something enduring in the way our society is set up that makes it kind of eternally relevant,” Mr. Munson said. “I think, basically, we’re still living with the same kind of moral and political systems that saw the birth of the Underground Man and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. There are superficial differences, in the sense that now it’s much more permissible to be frank about violence and sex than it was even 50 years ago, but especially in America, where we kind of drink in these ideas about freedom and equality from a very young age, you have to be very, very unperceptive not to see the disjunction between what we aspire to and what we achieve, and I think for some people that’s a very tragic, embittering thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Mr. Munson, the online editor of neoconservative journal Commentary (and a onetime contributor to The Observer), and his agent, Stephen Barbara, graduated a year apart from the University of Chicago. During his junior year, Mr. Munson—who is, incidentally, the grandson of former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz—was the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine called Euphony that Mr. Barbara had founded as a sophomore.

Mr. Munson’s is the second book by a U. of C. classmate that Mr. Barbara has taken to market.

"I'm working that little niche," the young agent said, pointing to a children’s book by fellow U. of C. grad Lauren Oliver that he says he sold last May to HarperCollins for a quarter of a million dollars.

Mr. Barbara, who recently left his job as contracts manager at the Donald Maas Agency to join the growing team of 20-somethings at Foundry Literary + Media, said Mr. Munson’s novel is told from the perspective of a high school senior applying to the University of Chicago.

"The essay question he’s given is, 'What are your best and worst qualities?'" Mr. Barbara said. "The novel is addressed to the admission office."

Of the narrator, Mr. Barbara said, "He's like a Chuck Palahniuk character. He's very in your face and abrasive. He claims to have no good qualities, though the novel tells you otherwise."

Mr. Barbara said the book's conceit had drawn comparisons to Sam Lipsyte's stunning novel 2005 Home Land, which takes the form of a charming misanthrope's letters to the alumni newsletter of his old high school.

According to Mr. Barbara, the book will go to auction next week.

A succès de scandale brings with it a host of problems for an author, most notably the difficulty in obtaining a fair hearing from the reader. Arnon Grunberg's The Story of My Baldness arrived in America carrying an odor of showmanship and self-seeking: Mr. Grunberg won the Anton Wachter Prize for his first novel, Blue Mondays, and won it once more with The Story of My Baldness, submitted under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt. Because the Wachter Prize is awarded only to first novels, Mr. Grunberg was publicly reproved. This baggage is unfortunate, because The Story of My Baldness is a dark, funny and penetrating analysis of adolescent sexual fear, executed with a much lighter touch than you would expect from a book brushed by literary controversy.

Mr. Grunberg presents his book as a memoir, and van der Jagt as its supposed author. Marek is the youngest son of a wealthy Viennese couple, an eccentric, philandering heiress (dead nearly a year at the book's opening) and a rapacious businessman (recently remarried). The book opens with his attempted pickup, in a bar, of a dilapidated older woman. Marek begins to explain the unusual circumstance that compelled him to restrict his amorous pursuits to ignored or desperate women, a circumstance more or less the central fact of his existence: his laughably small, near-useless penis, revealed to him as such by a disgusted girl in the course of an evening tryst.

In the face of the psychic devastation that this wreaks on him, Marek seeks help from a plastic surgeon and a psychotherapist, and consolation in the arms of Miss Oertel, a forgiving art teacher. His mother, the hitherto-dominant influence in his life, contracts a terminal illness soon after the fact of Marek's abnormality comes to light, and he accompanies her to a remote mountain resort, where she meets a grisly death at his hands.

The baldness referred to in the title? Induced by defective penis-enlargement pills, procured for Marek by the woman we see him attempting to seduce as the book opens.

It may strain one's credulity to hear that Mr. Grunberg derives comedy from such material-but he does. And it's a kind of comedy that stands out among dark sexual farces for its understatement. Marek is a careful and wistful narrator, with (unsurprisingly, perhaps) a novelist's eye for detail. He conveys his stepmother's stunning banality with a single phrase-"She was very unlike Mama; she despised needy people and had an aversion to handguns too." And it's this care, and Marek's unselfconscious self-awareness that allow the comedy to emerge. (Mr. Grunberg does not engage in any metatextual trickery; Marek's self-awareness stems from his suffering).

Mr. Grunberg's sharp, not untender treatment of the abortive sexual encounter in which Marek discovers his underendowment recalls vividly the fumbling in which we begin our sexual lives. In the grip of an unquenchable desire to experience an amour fou, as he calls it, he clumsily picks up two girls on the street, invites them to an overelaborate meal and a dismal bar, brings them flowers, calls in his more experienced older bother as wing man and, having inveigled them back to his parent's house, is rudely awakened to the fact that he has "the penis of a dwarf."

That crushing judgment provokes a near-total disintegration in Marek-bizarrely, but utterly believably, he begins to walk on his haunches, to make himself more dwarflike and thus more proportional. In a phrase that captures the high choler of adolescence perfectly, Marek, when pressed at the dinner table for an explanation, screams "You people gave me the penis of a dwarf, you're all a bunch of murderers!" The words are no less despairing for being spoken in high dudgeon, and they expose the real subject matter of The Story of My Baldness: the end of a weak, pampered, slightly mother-fixated and high-strung boy's innocence. Marek, reviewing his life from the perspective of a sexually wounded man, sees all of his adolescent passions-to write the greatest poetry of his age, to become a figure of Byronic proportions, and even the rage and hatred that fill him after he discovers his shortcomings-as just those: insubstantial, narcotic passions.

Mr. Grunberg's book is not without its flaws. Marek's murder of his dying mother-he pushes her from the top of the resort mountain-seems contrived; it lacks the force of his earlier, more imaginative gesture, walking on his haunches as a response to his disillusionment. But the book as a whole succeeds. Marek's meditative, nostalgic tone of voice sounds in sharp distinction to the hysterical, self-abusing patter of Alex Portnoy, the model for so much American literature about the sex life of adolescents. Perhaps Arnon Grunberg didn't feel Philip Roth's presence as strongly as an American coeval might. In any case, he has produced here a compelling and, at moments, troubling and saddening study of the darker corners of the adolescent mind.

Sam Munson is a research associate at Kudlow and Co.

It's difficult to imagine a writer who could have appreciated the adaptation of his works into a series of increasingly bad movies more than Philip K. Dick. The progression from Blade Runner through Total Recall to Paycheck has all the hallmarks of one of his stories-black irony, psychological degradation and the implication of a vast conspiracy organized to deceive and persecute one man. The young Dick would have written it as a dark comedy, the older as a bizarre Christian fable.

Dick's journey from neurotic bohemian to full-blown religious psychotic is as fascinating a tale as anything he ever wrote. And it has fallen into capable hands in Emmanuel Carrère's I Am Alive and You Are Dead. The title is drawn from one of Dick's most horrifying novels, Ubik (1969), in which it appears as a message scrawled on a bathroom wall. Mr. Carrère, a French novelist, demonstrated his gift for capturing stranger-than-fiction truth in The Adversary (2001), his book on Jean-Claude Romand, who murdered his family when he could no longer maintain the fiction-as he had assiduously done for most of his adult life-that he was a high-ranking doctor in the World Health Organization. I Am Alive and You Are Dead is similar in approach to The Adversary: an attempt to depict the life of a pathological personality "from the inside," as Mr. Carrère says in his introduction. Dick, whose everyday activities seem positively dull when compared to his chaotic inner life, is a figure peculiarly suited to this sort of biographical treatment.

Dick's biography is spare. He was born in Chicago in 1928. After his parents' divorce, his mother Dorothy took him first to Washington, D.C., and then to Berkeley, Calif. Philip was a withdrawn and sensitive child, subjected to both Freudian and Jungian therapy by the time he was 15. His anxious, self-dramatizing mother lived, in Mr. Carrère's phrase, in a state of excited "bovarysme." It's not surprising, given these circumstances, that Dick turned toward literature, and particularly toward the fantastic and grotesque.

In his early 20's, after an adolescence colored by his mother's subtle domination and his fears of latent homosexuality, he published his first science-fiction story and decided he'd found his vocation. From his beginnings as an unknown and frustrated writer of science fiction, he became a theological guru and existential mascot to the burgeoning counterculture, a highly respected author in a small but explosively broadening field; he finished as a prematurely aged, functional-but-insane casualty of LSD and scores of other drugs, writing an interminable religious text called the Exegesis. He died in 1982, after achieving his first substantial material success with the sale of the movie rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that would become Blade Runner. His reputation survived his rather sad end, and his cult of fans (of which I am a member) rivals or exceeds in size and devotion that of any other major contemporary science-fiction author, from Asimov to Zelazny.

Given the absence of globe-spanning travels (he spent his entire adult life in Northern California), brilliant conversation or any of the other staples of the typical literary biography, the fascination Mr. Carrère's book exercises on the reader may seem puzzling. The biographer lavishes on his subject's internal life great care and detail, and that's the source of the book's power. Dick, after all, attracted an astonishingly broad readership, from philosophically inclined hippies to jaded French journalists. The Man in the High Castle (1962), Dick's 1963 Hugo-winning alternate history set in an America conquered by and divided between the Empire of Japan and Germany, has become a staple of high-school reading lists. The mind that produced his fiction, unsurprisingly, has a similarly unnerving and far-reaching appeal.

At least it does when elucidated by Mr. Carrère, who has seized on the fact that Dick's books resulted, almost uniformly, from progressively more serious derangements of his psyche. As Mr. Carrère puts it: "[This book] is a trip into the brain of a man who regarded even his craziest books not as works of imagination but as factual reports …. Dick's life was as much marked by the fictions he created as those fictions bear the mark of his lived experiences."

In a dreamily clinical prose, he proceeds to chronicle these derangements as carefully as if they were the factual bases of Dick's "reports." When, in 1955, a series of visits by the F.B.I. touched off in Dick a long and involved paranoiac fantasy (the speculative process that ultimately led to his 1957 novel Eye in the Sky), Mr. Carrère follows in detail the convoluted internal argument Dick had with himself, covering nearly as many pages as he devoted to the first 24 years of Dick's life. Dick's hallucination that the C.I.A. had attempted to steal the manuscript of his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is treated with similar seriousness. As Dick grew older, ingested various drugs in ever-larger quantities, and indulged his compulsive passion for catastrophic relationships with women, these fantasies grew ever more bizarre, and ever more insistent on the illusory and adversarial nature of reality. But Mr. Carrère never wavers: With his concise, fluent prose and eye for psychological detail, he succeeds in making Dick's psychoses not only understandable but even convincing. By the time Dick, in the last decade of his life, came to the conclusion that reality as we know it is an illusion used by the Roman Empire to numb the minds of Christians, the animating idea of his unfinished Exegesis, the reader feels as simultaneously trapped and enlightened as Dick must have at the moment of his epiphany. Mr. Carrère, through a remorseless and clear-eyed accretion of detail, makes this last madness seem both plausible and inevitable.

Mr. Carrère's book does not supplant Lawrence Sutin's authoritative biography, Divine Invasions (1991). It's not, one gets the sense, meant to. Rather, it serves as a complement to Mr. Sutin's dense and heavily annotated book. Divine Invasions may be more comprehensive, but I Am Alive and You Are Dead is more intimate-as one reads it, one feels uncomfortably at home in Dick's claustrophobic fantasies. In the end, it reads almost as if it had been written by its subject. And that is perhaps the highest possible testament to Emmanuel Carrère's gift for telling stories "from the inside."

Sam Munson is a research associate at Kudlow and Co.

/HTML