The dry-cleaner is Le Kang, an Asian name, and the woman who broke the news is the Korean lady who runs the place. She is assisted by an older Asian woman, and another Asian woman her age, as well as one or two or sometimes three Latinos, and on busy Saturdays in the tiny plastic-baggy space behind the counter, the bunch of them crawl and glide around each other like walruses hoisting themselves with fatty grace over sleeping mates to slide from rock to sea.

I walked to the subway in a daze: air-traffic control, I thought. Someone fucked up or went crazy and brought those planes in like that-I was preparing myself for the version of the story that we would all prefer, that there is a Madman, and the Madman does something Mad, because he's touched, irrational or, worst of all, religious, and always alone, oh yes, that's the important one, he's all alone. It's not a movement, it's not a trend, it's not an idea: It's a Madman.

But there are politics in the world-not the politics of bad talk-show appearancesandexpensive orchestrations of the inane, but actual politics, in which what we do, what the state does, what we as a nation do, matters. In which what we do matters even to the degree that others might feel themselves compelled to do something back.

Madison Square Park, along Fifth Avenue at 25th Street, is one of those spots in New York that I long loved (Sixth Avenue around 10th or 11th was another), where you would turn, arrive, look up, and there they were, previously invisible, suddenly lined up with the avenue and looming, enormous silver matchsticks down at harbor's edge. They changed in the light, from blue to pink to iron gray.

And every time I look at that sky now (I work two blocks from there), I see the drama of an empty sky: That empty sky is a narrative for those of us who live here. Often, as it was that day, it is an intensely beautiful-looking sky: beautiful yet filled with pain. When I got to this spot near 10 a.m. last Sept. 11, after a long, much-interrupted and finally abbreviated subway ride, there was only one tower still standing. It was engulfed in smoke. All along the park we stunned humans stood, alone or in twos and threes, staring and trying to use our cell phones. After a few moments, the smoke kind of lifted in a wind. I will never forget how beautiful a day it was, how blue and cool and filled with a promise of restoration. The smoke lifted and there it was, one tower with a hole of astonishing matte-blackness, jagged and infernal, and my stomach fell away and I thought I would throw up, the bad stomach of a roller-coaster ride taken too late in life. Tears came, and for once I let them: slow tears for all that death. Prayers came-small ones, hardly verbal-and I let them, too. Then I put my head down and walked. I got to my building, and five minutes later the second tower fell.

That evening, back at home, my best friend, a reporter, called with his ghoulish humor to say what he'd been thinking all day and knew he could say only to me, because no one else would understanding jokes at such a moment.

The voice goes Brooklyn-Jewish: "So everybody has to be an architecture critic?" Then he told me that among cops, fire and emergency workers, between 400 and 500 were thought dead. For a good many years and several papers, he had covered cops, fire and emergency; he'd covered corrections; now he covered City Hall. He was at the triage center on Greenwich Street-where, notably, there were no survivors to work on. He sounded different, changed. The other unforgettable and moving thing I learned on television Tuesday night was that, of the many people who jumped, preferring flight to immolation, two were lovers-perhaps they'd only been lovers for a few minutes, in circumstances of emotional and spiritual compression that most of us will never understand, but they were lovers nonetheless-and they elected to depart a high floor together, sailing through blue sky and dust holding each other's hands.

I had been reading Dante on the subway-it was my new pretentious fend-off-midlife project at the time, reading Dante on the subway, working slowly on my abysmal Italian-and before getting out to see the towers, I'd been working on this passage:

And how it is, when one glories in wealth and acquiring, And then the times make for enormous loss So that he weeps with every thought and fills with despair; So it was with me, when it met me face to face, That beast without peace, and little by little Drove me back to the silence of the sun.

The Italian for my awkward "beast without peace" is la bestia senza pace , which would really read more easily in English as "restless beast"-but all day, and ever since, when I heard the words in my head, la bestia senza pace , I thought not about the killers but the killed; I thought, as another friend reminded me, of Malcolm X's chilling remark, when Kennedy was shot, that "the chickens have come home to roost"; I thought about the United States in the world and how our ease and comfort and ignorance come at a price which, like all colonialists, we prefer others to pay. I kept thinking of being "without peace."

We watched though the evening, my three sons and wife and I, and then I put the boys to bed. Paul, the 9-year-old, said he would have nightmares. "You very well might," I said.

"I'll dream that the building next to ours gets hit by a plane, and it falls into our building, and I will be killed but you won't," he said.

"I don't like that arrangement," I said. "You're much better-looking than I am, so you should live."

"You'd be happy to inherit my Mickey Mantle card, though," he said.

"That's true," I said.

In the morning, he told me that it turned out he'd had some other important dreams and so didn't "have time for the nightmare."

Vince Passaro's novel, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (Simon & Schuster), will be out in paperback next year.

Catherine Millet's astonishing memoir of physical desire, frequent orgiastic sex and rich psychic debasement, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. , was first published in France last year as La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M . It was greeted with praise, shock, anger, droll and incomprehensible commentary by Baud-rillard (always a sign of "making it" in France, akin to being a joke on David Letterman here), and huge sales: more than 300,000 copies. If French critics-that's French and critics ; one cannot decide which most deserves the italics-thought Ms. Millet's adamantly frank look at her sexuality was an outrage against morality, against decency, and against some putatively more noble tradition of French porn, well, what are Americans going to think? We don't even have a putatively more noble tradition of porn. We don't have any "tradition" of porn at all; what we have is an endless stream of dull product and, somewhere in Joseph Biden's safe, Clarence Thomas' video-rental records.

Which is to say that to be an American reading the book, slightly in awe of it as well as entertained, is to spend part of one's literary energy rotating around it, looking for, pardon, the proper position.

Ms. Millet is a respected figure in the Paris art scene, a curator, founding editor of Art Press , and author of eight books of art criticism, including one that is reputed to be the "standard" French guide to contemporary art. She begins her memoir with a snapshot or two of what one senses was a difficult Catholic girlhood. As a teenager, she read Hemingway (presumably The Sun Also Rises ) and was shocked to find a female character that had many lovers-so shocked that she put the book aside. Clearly, however, the notion stuck with her, for shortly after losing her virginity at age 18 she began a life of frequent group sexual activity, in arrangements both spontaneous and organized. She did it in sex clubs, at what the French call, roughly translated, "dirty" parties, in parking lots, alongside roadways, at the Bois de Boulogne, even in the back of a municipal van with a line of men waiting outside-and to judge by the narrative of detailed encounters, she might at any one of these encounters accommodate from 10 to 20 to 40 men, and sometimes a woman or two as well. Thus it is natural to estimate that she has had some form of sexual congress certainly with hundreds and perhaps even more than a thousand people. But in her memory, she says, she can put a name or some signifier of identity to only 49 of them. The rest are faceless.

From the early 1970's until today, she has lived with the French writer and photographer Jacques Henric, who has published over the years many nude photographs of Ms. Millet.

What is truly extraordinary about her story, however, is how she tells it, the profoundly rattling self-confidence and psychological depth with which she examines her desires, her inclinations, her sensations and her satisfactions. What makes the self-confidence and depth even more striking is that she deploys them in the face of an incomprehensible need, and a vast sense of sadness. She describes minutely, carefully, coldly: What we can tell of her language, through a truly awkward and bloated translation, evokes the painful dispassion, the distance, and the melancholy and grim wit of Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet and the films of Godard. There is not a little of the pretentiousness of those figures as well, but one is not certain how much to blame her for that-she is an art critic, after all-and how much to blame the translator, Adriana Hunter, whose tumescent Latinates and grammatical clumsiness must be all her own.

Ms. Millet spends a great deal of time describing the sheer physicality of sex, but through the lens of an erotically tense and desperate imagination: Her body is like a sexual filament, a carrier of electric pleasures, and in sex she sees a vast landscape of personal disintegration, an explosive escape from self that she greatly longs for. She does not apologize for this near-suicidal eroticism, and she is adamantly unashamed. The ultimate liquid animalism of sex, the sense of melting and heat, the stains and drips (which she describes with a particularly loving attention), are for her an integral part of the pleasure of the act: As a result, her descriptions either will strike you as being among the most effective erotic writing you have seen, or you will find them fabulously disgusting. Quite often she walks the line between the two, a zone between pleasure and horror where she has, for many years, and with some unexplored sadness, lived:

"The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to brace the shocks to my rear end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face that-quite unlike my lower half, which is totally mobilized-is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for the eyes, which are intolerably listless .... Sometimes I bring myself to this peak of pleasure all by myself, as an interval in my bathroom routine. With one hand on the edge of the basin and the other one masturbating, I watch myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye.

"A particular porn film made quite an impression on me. The man was taking the woman from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forward and distorted, as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man's orders: 'Look! Look at the camera!' and the girl's eyes looked directly into yours, the viewer's. I thought he might well be pulling her hair to force to raise her head. This scene has given me a lot of inspiration for the little scenarios that nourish my masturbating. In real life, a man I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of the encounter, and this was because with every thrust, he would order me to 'Look me in the eye.' I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the disintegration of my face."

The French publisher and writer Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published The Story of O and Emmanuelle , called Ms. Millet's memoir "the end of eroticism." It is, in fact, the end of a certain kind of eroticism: the kind in which the woman is an instrument of male sexual desire and sexual fantasy; the kind in which the woman's own pleasure is derived in part from her exposure and shame, and in part from the desire a man has revealed to her. Ms. Millet brings into the equation of literary eroticism a modern pathology of narcissism and self-debasement that simply hasn't existed before.

Ms. Millet is uniquely feminist. It will be interesting to see how the more desiccated schools of American academic feminism react to her work. Her entire sexual stance, her story, as it were, is an impudent and fundamentally inarguable challenge to the assumptions about female sexuality on which most of the world's social arrangements are built. Back at least to the story of The Bacchae , social convention has feared, detested and suppressed the truly explosive possibilities of female sexuality, with its vastly greater capacity for orgasm and for sustained activity-and, we ultimately fear, with its vastly greater depths of desire. Once these are unleashed, a single man is not capable of fulfilling them. Much that men and women are taught (and come to believe) about sex and courtship, about love and marriage, has been constructed to evade these simple facts.

For this reason, Catherine Millet's book strikes me not only as provocative, but dangerous. In this country, we succeed best in neutralizing dangerous ideas either by ignoring them or by a process of bland absorption: mild approval, a spot on the Today show, and bye-bye idea. So what will it be?

Vince Passaro is the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel (Simon and Schuster) .

They're 50! And they love it! They love it, they love it, they love it! (Pardon us-sharp pang of missing Molly Shannon , who was the best thing about NBC's Saturday Night Live and then just kind of disappeared, as funny women from that show have a rather ominous way of doing.) Anyway, More magazine, the thinking woman's Modern Maturity , is co-hosting a launch party for 50 Celebrate 50 , a book featuring glam boomers like slippery TV anchor Diane Sawyer , actresses Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep , singer Donna Summer and the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon , who will also pass out some awards on behalf of a charitable organization called Help a Parent, Save a Child , as is her wont …. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other fiftysomethings -already steamed about the recent Winter Antiques Show being moved from an armory to the plebeian Hilton-were in a panic about this year's Art Show being staged at the wall-to-wall-carpeted Jacob Javits Center. But luckily, at press time, the Art Show (which has loot like a nice 1932 Frida Kahlo watercolor of Belvedere Castle) had been moved back to an armory …. Phew . Tonight, a gala benefit preview benefits the Henry Street Settlement-and Tom Brokaw , who doesn't look a shade over 50, is coming!

[ More party, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 6:30 p.m. cocktails, awards and "entertainment" to follow, 455-1030; Art Show, Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue and 67th Street, 5:30 p.m., 766-9200.]

Thursday 21st

It's just another lunch in the Condé Nast cafeteria : tuna salad, coupla Rice Krispies treats , and suddenly it's 3:45 p.m. and you're flinging butter pats at James Truman -except today you can take the elevator up ( swooooosh , those ears are poppin' ! ) to the 20th floor of the building for the opening reception of The Meaning of Time: The New Yorker in the City , an art exhibit curated by New Yorker legend and long-limbed bon vivant C.S. Ledbetter , who can still tell ribald stories from the William Shawn era …. Meanwhile, the Armory Show , a fair of "modern" art, opens today-except, confusingly, not in an actual armory (that spot was swiped by the Art Show, yesterday), but in good old smelly Hell's Kitchen . Tonight's gala preview benefits the Museum of Modern Art . Bring a cookie.

[Meaning of Time, New Yorker Gallery, 4 Times Square, 20th floor, 4 p.m., supposedly by invitation only, 286-5593; Armory Show, 12th Avenue at 48th and 50th streets, 4:30 p.m., 708-9680.]

"Where do I start?!" said Laurie Benoit, 25, who is training to be a Pilates instructor , but is also a member of a new "choreographic collective" called the Varoom Group that stages its dubiously titled debut, Sometimes It Goes Whoosh , tonight. " It's definitely a 'downtown' dance aesthetic : There's a lot of lifting, a little bit like ice skating," she said, gamely attempting the Olympics tie-in. No nudity-the girls wear sundresses and overalls. " There are five of us-we're all about 25 , four of us went to Connecticut College . We've been here for like three years and taking dance classes and just decided it was time to get out there ." As part of the show, Ms. Benoit choreographed her own piece, Half a Mile Back , to bluegrass music. "I started out with the idea of a game of leapfrog-the idea that you step on other people, and you jump over them and push to the front of the line, but you always find yourself at the back of the line." Welcome to New York , honey …. Meanwhile, in the continuing and disturbing trend of teen magazines being the only publications in this city to really whoop it up, YM 's editor in chief, Christina Kelly (another alum of Sassy ), fêtes the April MTV issue with one-named song temptresses Pink and Shakira at the Whiskey. Burp !

[Varoom, University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, 8 p.m., 718-282-7283; YM , the Whiskey, 1567 Broadway, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 646-758-0810.]

Fashion Week aftershock! French designer Pierre Cardin -who has been in the biz for, like, 50 years and is just experiencing a resurgence after totally overlicensing his name in the cheapo 70's -flies in from Paris with a couple of D.J.'s named Albert and Felix and hosts a big, sweaty dance party at Maxim's de Paris, which has gone the way of Starbucks, Pottery Barn, Putumayo et al. and pressed a music-compilation CD. Crash strategy: wear a silly little newsboy cap and "les sneakers."

[680 Madison Avenue, 9 p.m., by invitation only, 228-5555.]

Friday 22nd

Green or Greenwich? The Eight-Day Week has what is known as a "black thumb," and every time our Precious goes away on a business trip, his homegrown basil dies a slow death. But we hear that "in the wake of Sept. 11," a lot of people have embraced Real Simple magazine, chenille and gardening …. Today, at the Gramercy Garden Antiques Show in yet another armory, there will be plants, planters, flowers, pots, fountains, ironwork gazebos and topiary aplenty . Meanwhile, at the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair : out-of-print books, maps, prints, paper ephemera. Is it just us, or has the tchotchke density of this town reached total critical mass this week? Later, young Upper East Side women with ample leisure time-Marina Rust Connor, Nathalie Gerschel Kaplan, Lauren duPont and Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer -chair a Fête des Quatre Saisons at the friendly Frick . It's black tie, with "seasonal accents," which means the girls will be weaving flowers into their hair and stuff. Real simple, as they say.

[Gramercy Garden Antiques Show, 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, 11 a.m., 255-0020; Antiquarian Book Fair, 490 Hudson Street, 6 p.m., 675-815; Fête des Quatre Saisons , Frick, 1 East 70th Street, 8:30 p.m., 547-0707.]

Saturday 23rd

Are Saturdays back? Who knows? Tonight the Manhattan Society is having a casino basheroo benefit, " A Masquerade for Multiple Sclerosis ." What it'll cost ya: $150. Celebrity wattage : Andrea Plummer, Miss New York State 2001. Meanwhile, the Kristen Ann Carr Fund has a semi-formal to help cure sarcoma. What it'll cost ya: $120. Celebrity wattage : "Well, Bruce Springsteen has been known to go; I don't know about this year," said a publicist. We'll hold out for Clarence Clemons!

[Manhattan Society Masquerade for M.S., Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, 8:30 p.m., 463-7787, ext. 3030; Kristen Ann Carr Fund Winter Semi-Formal, 200 Fifth Club, 200 Fifth Avenue, 9 p.m., 675-2080.]

Sunday 24th

Helen Mirren chills out …. Exactly one month till the most dismayingly mediocre Oscars we can remember- Moulin Rouge nominated for Best Picture ? Ethan Hawke for Best Supporting Actor? … One lone bright spot is Helen Mirren's nomination for the pretty if sort of tedious Gosford Park . Ms. Mirren was in town to promote her new film, Last Orders . What does she do to escape? we asked. " Daytime television . Love Judge Judy . Love Judge Hackett. I love all the judges , very into the judges. I even watch repeats of ones I've already seen. That's pathetic, isn't it? " Does she ever pray? "I do pray, although I don't believe in God, so it's kind of pathetic, really." What does she drink? " I drink vodka usually. Sometimes a shot, sometimes a Sea Breeze, sometimes a Cosmopolitan. Tonight I'll probably chill a bit, but I want to chill big time ."

[777-FILM.]

Monday 25th

More matrons! It's the big Drama League dinner honoring gossip columnist Liz Smith -think Friars Club Roast, but with lots of beaded jackets and Christine Baranski . We're under strict orders to keep the rest of the participants top-secret so that Ms. Smith will be "surprised," but we can tell you that upon hearing Elaine Stritch will M.C., our big-cheese editor picked up the phone and ordered a corsage.

[Pierre Hotel, 2 East 61st Street, 7:30 p.m., cocktails, dinner and show to follow, 861-8690.]

Tuesday 26th

Ted Zagat alert! The babelicious, albeit slightly "manorexic" son of Tim and Nina-a 27-year-old Harvard grad who as of this writing is still up for grabs, ladies -is on the junior committee of tonight's Careers Through Culinary Arts Program benefit honoring Jacques Pépin. We hear from one who's seen young Ted on the town that, like Helen Mirren, his preferred libation is vodka. Straight. Got that, ladies?

[Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, 6 p.m., 718-279-0331.]

Book-party bingo: It's not the first time cranky Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and pink-cheeked Paris Review editor George Plimpton have gone head-to-head, but it may well be the ugliest. Uptown , Mr. Plimpton opens his home so his young editorial-assistant minxes can clomp around in clogs and lay out the Gouda for a passel of Dutch authors: Oscar van den Boogaard, Hugo Claus, Margriet de Moor, Arnon Grunberg, Marcel Moring, Cees Nooteboom, Maya Rasker, Hans Maarten van den Brink and Henk van Woerden , who have all been specially flown in (flap, flap, flap) from Holland to boost U.S. awareness of the Dutch literati …. Downtown , Harper's contributing editor Vince Passaro celebrates his first novel, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content .

[Dutch author party, at George Plimpton's Upper East Side apartment, we can't tell you exactly where, 5:30 p.m., by invitation only, 246-1430, ext. 209; Vince Passaro, Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, by invitation only, 7 p.m., 420-5779.]

Wednesday 27th

New playwrights are poking their heads forth like the hopeful buds of spring …. Take The Allegory of Golf , by Wade Gasque - please ! The plot: middle-aged widow comes home to find neighbor's daughter hiding in her kitchen; the two hop in a car to California and discuss Ayn Rand . Or there's Room 314 , by Michael Knowles . The plot: Six couples spend time in one hotel room and wrestle with relationships, commitment and identity-alas, not all at the same time. Stay home and work on your garden.

[ The Allegory of Golf , Flatiron Playhouse, 119 West 23rd Street, 8 p.m., 340-1359; Room 314 , Paradise Theater Company, 64 East Fourth Street, 8 p.m., 726-1310.]

All I Could Get , by Scott Lasser. Alfred A. Knopf, 247 pages, $24.

Palladio , by Jonathan Dee. Doubleday, 386 pages, $24.95.

In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread . Adam's curse is the weary refrain of our recorded history, the modern, bumper-sticker version being "I owe, I owe, so off to work I go." And what about the future? In 1930, John Maynard Keynes declared it possible that within 100 years the "economic problem" would be solved and a new era of abundance would reveal a new human dilemma: "[F]or the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem–how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."

So by 2030, each of us could be issued a golden parachute. Or maybe not. In the meantime, here are three new novels about men working hard in quintessentially New York professions. Two of these are first novels, Vince Passaro's Violence, Nudity, Adult Content , which tracks a few months in the life of a young lawyer on the verge of making partner, and Scott Lasser's forthcoming All I Could Get , which does the same for a rising Wall Street trader. In Palladio , Jonathan Dee's fourth novel, a Madison Avenue career gets the treatment, though advertising in this story takes a highly unorthodox turn.

In each of these books, work–not poverty, not want–becomes the enemy, a destructive force that threatens grievous harm, even death (I counted two work-related heart attacks, an attempted kidnapping and an incineration). In each book, relationships flounder, and the proximate cause is work. Toil is famously tough on the home life, and it rots your moral fiber, too. From reading these novels, you could easily get the impression that idle hands are the only ones safe from the devil. Work is revealed as a sanction for aggression and greed, a sinister patriarchal conspiracy to let boys be boys and yet feel proud of it. The moral of these stories is that work corrupts. Virtue consists in learning how to resist ambition and embrace leisure so that one may live, as Keynes would put it, "wisely and agreeably and well."

Vince Passaro's smart young lawyer, Will Riordan, senses that there's something wrong with what he does: His professional cleverness is not serving truth or beauty. He's mainly working on two cases, defending a sinister rich man accused of killing his wife, and suing for negligence the management company of an East Side high-rise where a tenant, a young black woman, was viciously raped in the course of a robbery. In neither case can Will's impressive legal maneuvers produce a morally just result. (Women certainly won't be made safer from male predation.) Though our smart young lawyer wins , the benefit accrues to his Wall Street firm. The point of Will's labor is not justice but money and professional advancement. As his wife Ellie tells him: "Every time your income goes up, a little more of your conscience has to die."

That's one of Will's problems (he's burdened with a romantic soul), but there's worse: His work leaves him little time for his wife and two tiny tots, and the brutality of his cases (and of his lousy childhood) cuts him off from tender domestic joys. Ellie says he comes back from the office at night "with a dead face and dead eyes," and that his "silence and alienation and barely contained anger fill up the room and choke everything in it." Home, sweet home.

The problem for the reader is that the strongest parts of Mr. Passaro's book are about lawyering. When Will's on the job, the novel hums with extra energy. Ellie wants him home (and attentive), but the reader wants him back at the office, where his secretary, after she's typed up a document, says, "I'm shooting it to the laser," and where the promise of partnership eternally dangles: "bribes and extortions hang in the air flaccid as yesterday's balloons."

Violence, Nudity, Adult Content is clever, rich and ambitious, very New York, very indebted to Don DeLillo. O.K., it's a little artsy, what with the allusions–some attributed, some just floated, gifts for future grad students–to Whitman, to T.S. Eliot, to Stephen Crane. But it's also a satisfying way to spend your leisure time, this business of discovering a sophisticated and energetic new author.

Scott Lasser is by comparison a literary naif. Unfortunately, though he's good at giving the feel of the trading floor ("it smells as if an electric oven has been turned on that hasn't been used in years"), the buying and selling of Treasury bills is even less intrinsically interesting than filing motions. The best scenes in All I Could Get record the tense jockeying of our overworked narrator, Barry Schwartz, and his fellow traders, all of whom are gro-tesques, misshapen by their allegiance to the hard-ass trader ethos. At home, again, there's the wife and the two tiny tots–but in this case the goody-good wife's a cipher (she tells Barry, "I know that deep inside you, somewhere, is that person I fell in love with"). It's not entirely clear what Barry is missing by staying at work, by allowing himself to drift into the inevitable affair.

The sentimental trickle in Mr. Passaro's novel is more like a torrent in Mr. Lasser's. The epiphany that eventually sends Barry back to the bosom of his family comes from watching a comet and "contemplating … our insignificance in the comings and goings of the universe." Now there's a good reason for knocking off early.

But what if your work is "creative"–a kind of remunerative play–which is how many people would describe the business of dreaming up advertising campaigns? John Wheelwright, the antihero and part-time (unreliable) narrator of Jonathan Dee's Palladio , has a good job ($75K) with an established ad agency. We learn early on that "John took his work seriously." It sounds like the perfect job: "[I]n his experience, he and [his work partner] were hired to do exactly as they pleased." Mr. Dee makes the business of advertising interesting and even exciting; the scenes of John at work are among the finest in the novel. John, however, is dissatisfied with his career: "He felt … like an instrument … of what seemed … like a vast and powerful blankness, an opacity." So he quits his job, abandons the lovely lawyer girlfriend he lives with and signs on with Malcolm Osbourne, a mysterious ad man who's setting up–in an ante-bellum mansion in Charlottesville, Va.–a venture called Palladio. Osbourne plans to create advertising "unlike anything the world has ever seen." In fact, soon enough, after the buzz has built up in a gratifying manner, he's calling the work done at Palladio art . John calls him a "facilitator" who "provides the link between great artists"–his employees–"and the means for disseminating great art"–that is, the medium of advertising.

Jonathan Dee is intelligent and talented and has lots to say about advertising, art and commerce. He also has lots to say about relationships between men and women: A second strand of the plot introduces Molly Howe, whom John once loved and lost (an enigmatic woman, Molly is without profession or fixed occupation; she's a woman with no attachment to work). Actually, Mr. Dee wants to say more than his story can bear–his novel is talky and didactic and not quite digested. But it's consistently interesting, especially about the kinds of work people do and why they do it.

Presented with the opportunity to make art at Palladio, John Wheelwright produces nothing ("he couldn't seem to dredge up anything on that level"). Instead he becomes Osbourne's "adjutant," his "fixer." He throws himself at this task, leaves himself no room for a life outside work: He lives at the mansion, slips into a low-key romance with a colleague. Palladio prospers and John becomes, as someone bluntly remarks, "the perfect toady"–or as someone equally blunt puts it, a "pathetic lackey." His dedication to his job begins to warp him (John narrates this portion of the novel, and his account is very cleverly skewed). Osbourne is revealed as something of a monster; ditto John. Their compound monstrosity, combined with the single-mindedness of a Palladio artist who "lived in his work, [whose] life did not seem quite real to him outside of it," adds up to a spectacular catastrophe.

Americans are notorious for working hard–and New York is the capital city of full-throttle ambition. But though many a hymn has been sung in praise of the work ethic (Walt Whitman, when he wasn't loafing, cataloged the beauty of every kind of labor), our national literature consistently ignores or denigrates the daily grind (a friend has suggested that Moby-Dick is really a novel about whale-work and that Ahab is just a workaholic with a weird job). There's something schizophrenic about anti-toil tirades, especially coming from professional authors who sweat over each and every word. Great writers know that fine things come only from determined, even heroic effort–though they do their best not to let the effort show.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Hemingway has been called a lot of things over the years–vain, anti-Semitic, sexist–and now this.

This ultimate insult comes as an aside in an article on the supposed resurgence of American short fiction in the 90's. Making a case for the work of Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Rick Moody and others, the critic Vince Passaro writes: "Today's short fiction tends to be smart, and wit is an aspect of the literary art form that Hemingway couldn't master and that his followers, consciously or unconsciously, put aside. (His anti-intellectualism, perfectly American and perfectly tuned to the needs of an ever-less-educated reading public, meshed well with his own marked lack of intelligence.)"

It goes on like that for a while. Now all Harper's readers, a half-million or so quietly angry men and women with college educations, have been supplied with some heavy artillery–" marked lack of intelligence "–to fire at the greatest and whitest of the great dead white male authors.

The year 1999 could have been such a damned good time for Hemingway. In Oak Park, Ill., where he was born July 21, 1899, there was the Hemingway Fiesta, with flamenco dancing and tours of Hemingway family graves. In Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself July 2, 1961, the Idaho Humanities Council sponsored a Hemingway workshop for 25 high school teachers as Hemingway pilgrims visited his grave and scholars gave lectures.

But amid the centennial hoopla, Papa has taken a beating. The publication of True at First Light , probably the least of the posthumously published Hemingway books, has shot some more holes in his shaky literary reputation. And the introduction of an Ernest Hemingway collection of furniture from Thomasville furniture makers–now available at Huffman Koos and other outlets where fine furnishings are sold–hasn't helped much, either. Both True at First Light and the furniture line ("Kilimanjaro" bedside chest, anyone? or could we interest you in a "Catherine" slipcover love seat?) depend on Hemingway's rugged public image for whatever success they might have in the marketplace and have very little to do with the writer of the perfect first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and a number of indestructible short stories.

Asked to explain why he thinks Hemingway was stupid, Mr. Passaro said: "There's a very appealing quality to the Hemingway milieu–the places and people, a very dashing and appealing sense about them. He romanticizes at a perfect pitch, but I just began to sense that he was not a very intelligent or pleasant person. After reading a lot more and a lot better people, my opinion of him just ratcheted down, down, down, down. Technically, he worked very hard. He figured out how to put sentences on the page. But he's shockingly unintelligent for a writer treated as so canonically important."

While calling Hemingway stupid may be a cheap shot, it's hard to imagine a critic taking that same cheap shot at, say, James Joyce or Henry James. At its best, Hemingway's writing was lean and brisk. He buried profundities of thought and emotion under a smooth surface of dialogue and description. James and Joyce and other writers of that more obviously intellectual ilk gave readers more to grab onto. They enjoyed showing off their erudition and the meanderings of their minds, and so they were willing to err on the side of messiness and wordiness.

"My old college professor used to say that Henry James wrote his stories on the surface of the mind," said Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, on the phone at the Ketchum festival. "Hemingway writes his stories on the surface of the cafe table."

But with so much important stuff buried, Hemingway leaves some critics wondering if there is really anything beneath the polish. "What is it that you learn about the world from Hemingway?" said Mr. Passaro. "Pretty girls, he can't get them–and when he does get them, they bust his balls."

The charge made by Mr. Passaro is not quite new. In a 1934 essay, a Hemingway friend and rival, Wyndham Lewis, implied that his fictional heroes, dumb in both senses of the word, reflected their creator: "Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton, a lethargic and stuttering dummy … a village-idiot of few words and fewer ideas." Gertrude Stein, in her 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , made a similar charge, comparing her friend Hemingway to a student "who does it without understanding it, in other words who takes training." (Both criticisms made him furious.)

Hemingway himself distrusted big ideas, grandly stated. In the work of Leo Tolstoy, he loved the storytelling, hated the philosophy: "I have never believed in the great Count's thinking," he wrote in the introduction to Men at War , a 1942 anthology. "He could invent more with more insight and truth than anyone who ever lived. But his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write as truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible."

He often played the part of pugilist and sensualist to the hilt–he hit on other women even in front of his first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway; he beat up the poet Wallace Stevens in 1936–which must have helped bring about the idea that he was a brute. But there's no doubt he educated himself well, after joining the Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front instead of going to college following a high school career during which he had a 90 average.

"He was probably the best-read American writer of his generation," said Mr. Reynolds, who spent much of the last 25 years on his five-volume Hemingway biography. "His Cuban library had almost 8,000 volumes and he didn't start assembling that until 1940. He only had a high school education and he was making up for it, but he sort of overcompensated."

If Hemingway felt intellectual insecurity, or felt himself to be less talented than his literary rivals, he apparently took pride in having made up for what he lacked. In an October 1929 letter from Paris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before his falling out with Stein, he brought up the touchy topic of who had more talent: "Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise.… As for the comparison of our writings she was … only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent and I had a small one–implying I had to work a damn sight harder for results obtained.… Gertrude wanted to organize a hare and tortoise race and picked me to tortoise and you to hare and naturally, like a modest man and a classicist, you wanted to be the tortoise."

Years later, when Lillian Ross interviewed him for her 1950 New Yorker profile–just issued, as Portrait of Hemingway , in a Modern Library paperback edition–Hemingway described the virtues of not being too smart, in the form of a boxing parable: "One time, I asked Jack [Britton], speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard, 'How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?' 'Ernie,' he said, 'Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.'"

Ms. Ross duly scribbled down such talk, but never bought the idea that Hemingway was a dummy. "He was sharp," she said. "He knew people, he knew writing, he knew fakers." She said she wasn't surprised that a critic is making the Hemingway-was-stupid argument. "I learned about critics when I was a kid," said Ms. Ross. "What they did to Keats–I never forgot that!"

Ms. Ross' profile of the author–while written with affection and published only after he himself had read it over in full–did much to knock down the myth of Hemingway as literary superman in its day. Nonetheless, Ms. Ross and Hemingway stayed in touch over the years and he showed his intellectual mettle to Ms. Ross' satisfaction in roughly 80 letters he wrote her.

In this year of Hemingway weirdness, a new book, Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood , spills more of his secrets, particularly those having to do with his intense feelings about hair, androgyny and "his lifelong fascination with lesbian eroticism." Drawing from parts of A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls , To Have and Have Not , his ménage à trois (posthumous) novel The Garden of Eden and the short story "The Sea Change," the author Carl P. Eby deflates the notion of Hemingway as a pig who wanted to control women, replacing it with a Hemingway who feared women and, sometimes, wanted to be a woman. Mr. Eby has found, in an unpublished letter to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, that Hemingway wrote, in closing, "Your girl Katherine sends her love." Yes, Hemingway was referring to himself with this phrase. He also called Mary "Pete."

Hemingway buffs know about the time he "accidentally" dyed his hair red in Cuba. Well, guess what? In another letter to Mary, Hemingway wrote that he "remembered how you used to talk about Catherine in the night and how her hair was and so decided would make red– … So now I am just as red headed as you would like your girl Catherine to be and don't give a damn about it at all."

In an unpublished bit of the Garden of Eden manuscript unearthed by Mr. Eby, the protagonist David Bourne, in bed with his wife, Catherine, says: "You're Catherine." And she replies: "No. I'm Peter. You're my wonderful Catherine. You're my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change."

Far from playing the role of great white hunter on the 1953-1954 safari that gave rise to the 800-page manuscript that got whipped into shape as True at First Light , Hemingway wanted to go native–not as a Masai warrior, but as a Masai girl. On that trip he shaved his head–which is something Masai women do. Mr. Eby calls this "inherently transvestic." He also wanted to pierce his ears. Mary said No.

So Hemingway is more psychologically complex than the feminists imagined. But does psychological complexity equal intelligence? Isn't it possible that he was a simpleton who had a knack for writing distinctive prose? Mr. Passaro compared Hemingway's mind to those of nonliterary artists: "We don't ask painters to be intelligent, or photographers, or musicians," he said, "but I, for one, do ask writers to be intelligent."

It's a view that Harold Bloom, the Falstaffian professor at Yale and New York University and author of The Anxiety of Influence and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , disputes: "Don't underrate his intellect," Mr. Bloom warned. "His is a very sharp, discursive intelligence. There is a real limitation in his powers of imagination when he works on a large-scale book–in For Whom the Bell Tolls , he fails in his attempt to write a Tolstoyan novel–but he did not lack intellect. In the end, he wanted to be a greater writer than he was."

The Hemingway style was tough and tight–and hard to maintain over the long haul of years that ended with him shooting himself in the head with his 12-gauge Boss shotgun. The critic Leslie Fiedler paid a visit to him in Ketchum in those very last days and he was shocked, according to Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway , to see "his doubt and torment, his fear that he had done nothing of lasting worth."

Hemingway's best work shows the impossibility of always living by the code of grace under pressure, a mode of behavior he learned from the British soldier's cheerful stoicism in the works of his beloved Rudyard Kipling. Hemingway and his most honestly rendered characters wanted to live by that code, but couldn't. In the chasm between that romantic ideal and daily life he found his true subject. Hemingway himself wanted to be a fine, masculine sportsman and writer … but then again, he wanted to be a Masai girl.

What Hemingway may not have known was that he was at his best when he showed his familiarity with the territory of weakness and doubt. True at First Light and Green Hills of Africa are rotten books because they cast the author as a macho hunter as they extol the virtues of courage and honor in the hunt. The story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is great, on the other hand, partly because it deals with cowardice and hesitation; in it, Hemingway questions everything he held dear in his daylight hours.

Whatever the thing is behind a story that good–if you can't call it intelligence, call it imagination or talent or inspiration–Hemingway had it. He eroded it or even destroyed it, probably just by drinking huge amounts of alcohol, but he had it at some point.

He had roughly 20 good years of apprenticeship and early success, followed by a 20-year decline during which he won the Nobel Prize but couldn't pull off what he might have been able to do had he guarded that original quality of mind that allowed him to write "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "Ten Indians" and "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Killers." Those stories are so clear and so beautiful that, unlike the works of Tolstoy or James, they can indeed seem like pieces of writing produced by a simpleton. That's how good they are.

So hail, Hemingway, our literary idiot. Maybe it's true that he wasn't exactly a genius–and maybe that was his secret strength.