They've come... for your condo!

Colson Whitehead’s new book, Zone One comes out tomorrow. The world has been overtaken by that cultural virus of the moment, zombies , and the zone in question is Lower Manhattan. It is the job of the protagonist to clear the area of the dead and undead, and many metaphors are obviously implicit: 9/11, the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street.

But it turns out that Mr. Whitehead’s biggest concern appears to be gentrification, as the native New Yorker revealed in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition today.

New York is always destroyed. Giuliani, Bloomberg—they got rid of the old New York. I think each time you destroy a tenement and put up a luxury tower, you're ruining New York and making some sort of a new version of the city.

I'm walking around with my idea of what New York was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. So is everybody else. And we superimpose that ruined city over what's here now. So it's cleaned up, but we're still seeing that old shoe store, dry cleaners, that old apartment where we used to live. So, any street you walk down in New York is a heap of rubble because that's sort of how we see it if we've been here a while.

So artistically, it was about time for me to take a stab at my hometown.

Who knew the answer to our affordable housing dilemma was a simple zombie plague?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

ESPN and Grantland have contracted McSweeney's to handle the production and distribution (which, in retrospect, explains why Dave Eggers is a Grantland contributing editor).

As such, the basketball leather-bound books will harbor twee custom moving parts, like posters, a pull-out section, "old-school baseball cards" and mini-booklets. The first volume is available through the McSweeney's store; individual issues cost $19.95 and a year-long subscription (four issues) is $48.

In addition to some of the more memorable Grantland features (Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout and Colson Whitehead on the World Series of Poker, for example), the first volume includes an original column by Mr. Simmons and new fiction from Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets.

Grantland Quarterly has always been a part of the ESPN-sponsored website's business plan, according to Mr. Fierman.

"If our site has a problem it's that we move so fast that readers miss stuff," he said. The print journal serves up the site's greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism. Plus, nostalgia runs rampant among Grantland's roster of magazine writers.

"I miss the feel of print," the former GQ editor told The Observer. "It’s good to be back in it."

Logo, by Jacob Weinstein, coming to a chip clip near you. If you live in Brooklyn.

Yesterday a Kickstarter announced the arrival of The Classical, yet another daily web publication dedicated to the burgeoning world of alternative sportswriting. This one is the brainchild of a cerebral fraternity of sports and culture bros, including Bloomsbury editor (and rumored pub-trivia powerhouse) Pete Beatty, Pitchfork and Village Voice vet Tom Breihan, Yahoo! blogger Eric Freeman, Wall Street Journal columnist David Roth, and University of Michigan fellow (and former New York Sun editor) Tim Marchman.

Judging from the pitch, The Classical will out-Grantland Grantland. In addition to regular columns and quickie blog posts, the editors have threatened a 25,000-word piece on 1938 Hall of Famer Pete Alexander, as well as contributions from prizewinning novelists and “guys and girls we went to school with who are unappreciated geniuses.”

“We will strive to someday publish something as amazing as Colson Whitehead's Grantland dispatches from the World Series of Poker,” Mr. Beatty wrote Off The Record.

Like Grantland, The Classical’s name is an obscure reference. The name refers to the first track off The Fall’s 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

“It is probably fair to describe The Classical as post-punk sports journalism,” Mr. Beatty said.

Unlike Grantland, which is published by ESPN, The Classical lacks big corporate funding (hence the Kickstarter idea).

“We're way smaller, way more seat-of-pants, with no giant corporate funding (yet),” Mr. Beatty said. “The more natural comparison for us is The Awl (but about sports).” Most of the contributors have at one point been in the orbit of Bethlehem Shoals, who wrote the sports blog FreeDarko and now contributes to the Awl.

In order to make a safe space for smart sportswriting (and commenting), they’ll have to raise a steep $50,000 in Kickstarter pledges. According to Mr. Beatty, the founders have constructed a first-year budget based on web infrastructure costs, paying a publisher—a shadowy figure still working out an arrangement with his full-time employer—to rustle up advertising, providing a “nominal” staff salary, and manufacture of “at least several hundred chip clips," a gift for donors.

As of this writing, they’ve raised $9,234, including support from those who have been there: Longform.org founder Max Linsky, Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, and Awl founding editor Alex Balk.

"I'm delighted by how richly American these books are," said judge Rilla Askew in a statement. "Elegant, funny, the pain often embedded in the laugh lines, these works range widely in terms of geography, era, and culture."

But what makes a book "richly American," anyway? Armed with our degree in American Studies, we scour the PEN press release for clues.

War Dances:

- Consists of "23 tragicomic short stories": Forgiving of its readers' attention span, maybe?

- Is "structurally inventive": Americans love feeling new and special. Totally.

- One piece "tells the vivid, off-kilter story of a Native American man's inadvertent murder of a black teenage burglar who breaks into his home": ALL OVER that shit.

The Lacuna:

- Kicks off with "World War II and post-war McCarthyism": Greatest Generation 4EVER.

- Protagonist is "son of Solomé, a beautiful and rash Mexican woman, and an American father (whom Solomé abandons in Washington, DC)": Reminds us that 'melting pot' is a facile metaphor for our often uneasy history of intercultural relations!

- Protagonist's journals "dredge up not only the perceptions they conceal but also a history larger than his own": Citizen of a vehemently individualistic society is forced to confront own insignificance. Is hard.

Homicide Survivor's Picnic:

- "The stories are set in various southern locations": The South, last bastion of American regional identity.

- Title story involves "a single mother," "a pregnant teenage daughter," and "murdered loved ones": America is violent, our homes are broken, and our teenagers are continually impregnating one another.

A Gate at the Stairs:

- "Takes place just after 9/11, a historical moment which generates subtle anxiety and dislocation well into the narrative": Check.

Sag Harbor:

- Protagonist "sheds the uniform of his Manhattan prep school": We yearn to mythologize but also humanize an elite class, and prep school is an ideal setting for this kind of thing.

- At prep school he "is one of the few African American students." Spends summers in "a predominantly African-American community": RACE.

- Describes protagonist's "BB gun fights, and his first summer job in an ice cream parlor": Totez.

Which is the MOST American? Which most "freshly express[es] the complex ways Americans believe and behave"?

Our gut says Sag Harbor (prep school/RACE/BB guns) or A Gate at the Stairs (9/11), but that is just our gut.

Decisions will be announced March 23. The PEN/Faulkner winner receives $15,000; the four non-winning nominees get $5,000 apiece.

On this past January’s third Tuesday, Barack H. Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. On its fourth Tuesday, John H. Updike died at the age of 76.

I have no doubt the old man savored the gravity and relief of life in that first and final septimana mirabilis in our transformed republic—which is why it’s with no minor trepidation that I point to a review he wrote for the May 7, 2001, issue of The New Yorker.

Updike began, “The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead.” The piece proceeded, in this opening paragraph (and the next), to steam-shovel praise on The Intuitionist, Mr. Whitehead’s “strikingly original and polished début.”

Regular readers (and writers) of upper-middlebrow Anglophone criticism can guess what happens next: With his admiration duly noted, Updike pivots from The Intuitionist to John Henry Days, the actual topic at hand and a follow-up novel that we learn disappoints in the manner congenital to ambitious sophomores—it’s “longer and more various, and also slacker and more diffuse” than its predecessor, with Mr. Whitehead’s “hip wit sit[ing] on the narrative less as delicious icing than as a nervous burden.”

Updike would seem to bend the narrative arc of his essay to a familiar, lesson-learned take-away: To wit, Colson Whitehead will remain a writer to watch (and presumably just as African-American, if less young), so long as John Henry Days chastens him into a tighter discipline over his as-yet-uneven talent. And Updike indeed says more or less all that in his conclusion, but also something else that snapped back this reader’s neck, or at least his pupils, in double take. After noting the odd inconsequence of J. Sutter, the young, black, journalist-for-hire protagonist of John Henry Days—inconsequence, that is, compared to the folk hero of the title, and “the prophetic thunders and righteous wrath of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright and James Baldwin”—Rabbit Angstrom’s creator musingly questions the literary import of ordinary lives: “As assimilation and integration achieve their dilutions and ironies, what remains worth fighting for? How does a black man save his soul? Fortunate black citizens are now privileged to share the moral inconsequence of the entire society; this is progress of a sort, but not necessarily aesthetic progress.”

Three months after Updike’s, another review of John Henry Days appeared, written by James Wood. In the pages of The New Republic, Mr. Wood introduced Mr. Whitehead’s novel as the “African American version” of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. After the perfunctory (and, of course, dexterously lovely) avowals of the author’s “talent,” the review moved to a discussion of language, whereupon Mr. Wood’s close reading calibrated its microscope focus, remarkably, on Mr. Whitehead’s (lack of) command of standard English. “Whitehead writes what might best be called interesting prose—extraordinarily uneven, and sometimes barely comprehensible, not to mention smutted with inexplicable solecisms. … Errors are corrigible, and certainly forgivable; but error is sewn deep into the prose here, and is not easily unpicked.”

Here, Mr. Wood—who, contra Updike, hardly acknowledges the extra-textual problems, or existence, of race—occasioned a physiological response that only begins in the neck. It’s not the issue he takes with John Henry Days’ colloquialisms that elicits cringing; it’s the recurring assumption that Mr. Whitehead is not a stylist making choices when he alofts on flights of the ungrammatical (“that little song that always works isn’t today”), but rather simply doesn’t know better.

The young Presbyterian-American writer to watch, imagining there can only be one, would not exactly be watched like this.

AS IT HAPPENS, John Henry Days, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist, does tack, as both critics say, toward the overwritten, and –wrought, and –long. But in framing these critiques, their reviews ratified the novel’s core social and psychological insight: namely, that the persistence of racial identity in 21st-century America is most directly experienced in, and against, its absence.

Mr. Whitehead’s fiction is thus paradigmatically “racial” only insofar as it suspends, dispends and upends static racial markers. Updike came close to seeing the game in 2001, noting that “the disgusted junketeer J. Sutter, need not be black at all. His discontent might just as well be that of a young white or Asian-American of literary bent.” (True enough.) But the recognition quickly becomes lament: For reasons noble and otherwise, it seems the lion simply could not bring himself to accept a gifted black writer uninterested in claiming the righteous mantel, the thunderous birthright, of Douglas, Du Bois, Wright and Baldwin.

Would that it were possible for him to read Sag Harbor! Deceptively modest and extraordinarily assured, Mr. Whitehead’s new novel, set in 1985, recounts three months in the life of 15-year-old Benji Cooper. A wry and circumspect narrator, Benji is surrounded by a phalanx of other black boys—and a small advance squadron of girls—variably initiated into the worlds of cars, sex, politics and beer. With little visible strain, he re-creates the gaseous specificity that fills whatever space teenage boredom allows it: Benji and his friends close-read rap lyrics, practice streetwise handshakes (“Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap?”) and improvise hilariously baroque takedowns (“You fuckin’ Kunta Kinte-lookin’ motherfucker … with your monkey ass.”). The first hairlines of adult fissures appear: Once inseparable, Benji separates from his brother Reggie; less centrally, a boy named Bobby becomes the group’s first militant, developing “a fondness for using the phrases ‘white-identified’ and ‘false consciousness’ while watching The Cosby Show.”

But let’s be clear: Sag Harbor is a book about summering in the Hamptons.

Sag Harbor is also the first novel Mr. Whitehead has written explicitly based on his own life. Like Benji, he was 15 in the summer of 1985, and spent the season with his brother at their family’s house in Azurest, a black enclave in Sag Harbor developed in the 1940s for the Negro elite. The parents in Sag Harbor are judges, lawyers, doctors and schoolteachers—they generally come out on summer weekends, leaving their teenagers blissfully unsupervised with televisions, BB guns, and part-time jobs from Monday to Thursday.

Benji is, like untold American protagonists of the last decade, a supremely gawky example of comic-book boyhood. He wears braces, has never kissed—much less dated—a girl and, in a particularly winsome chapter, categorizes the world based on Dungeons and Dragons attributes. That he’s also black merely compounds the embarrassment: His friends lambast him for preferring Kraftwerk to Afrika Bambaataa; his physician father thinks he “look like one of those corner niggers” after a new haircut. Yet for all this high-resolution imagery, one suspects Mr. Whitehead is significantly less comfortable with the marketplace dictates of autobiography than the average sad young literary novelist. Indeed, if full-bore memoirist fiction is about excavating, and finally pathologizing, one’s life, the hyphenated writer ever risks pathologizing his group in the process.

As if expressly avoiding such ethnography, Sag Harbor treads lightly, perhaps too lightly. Conflict that would elsewhere mature into crisis—in particular, the apparent abusiveness, alcoholism and racial self-righteousness of Benji’s father—here emerge and just as quickly recede with the tide. But if Mr. Whitehead’s taciturnity sometimes obscures, it also exposes, through second-order demonstration rather than explicit description, the defining prudence and self-possession of the community at Azurest. As narrator and character—and child of this black foothold on a white mountain—Benji’s guardedness makes sense. The result is a pleasing respite from the literary mainstream, high and low—Sag Harbor is the beach read for those of us who are dubious, whether by shade of skin or content of character, about the powers of confessional. 

IN A PERFECT WORLD, a formalist like Mr. Wood might begin to recognize the aesthetic rigor in Mr. Whitehead’s little book, the tightly controlled ebb and flow between Benji’s voice at 15 and that of his adult counterpart, even if it’s best noticed in the narration’s shifting orientation toward particular Bands (the Smiths), Brands (Kangol) and Products (New Coke). The recourse to popular culture is not always, as it seems, an appeal to lowest-common-denominator totems. This reader, for one, grinned knowingly at the underage boys’ attempt to crash a U.T.F.O.–Lisa Lisa concert, the big show of the season. The period details feel like quick-and-dirty emotional shorthand, an evocation of shared kitsch history. But a half-step back revealed the immediate identification to be a matter of good writing, not the opportune citing of familiar names.

Which is to say, the reign of Lisa Lisa was not personally familiar at all. (I was born in 1985.)

More irrevocably alien is the Azurest milieu itself. As the adult-voiced Benji points out more than once, 1985 was a prelapsarian time, when Barack Obama was unthinkable, but middle-class professionals, white, black or otherwise, could imagine making good and earning a season a year on the East End, out of the city (which then meant Manhattan). An unlikely literary hub, the village of Sag Harbor appears in Moby-Dick and has counted Steinbeck, Capote, James Fenimore Cooper and Langston Hughes among its residents. But as the town has prospered in the past 20 years, Colson Whitehead’s generation might just be the end of the line: the last writers who can afford to summer there, or anywhere, or to think of seasons and vacations and houses at all. 

Jonathan Liu is a frequent contributor to The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com

"In my literary criticism," Mr. Whitehead’s oafish orator says in the opening of his address, "I have become known as a champion of the eternal verities and a scold of the trendy and the fashionable. I have essayed to instruct your writers in how to write correctly. Now I will teach you to read correctly."

From there, Mr. Whitehead makes fun of Mr. Wood’s enthusiasm ("I remember when the first dispatches of Dirty Realism made their way across the Atlantic. I pored over each latest issue of Granta as if it contained the Holy Word. And perhaps it did."), his preferred method of close reading ("We know Gus is thirsty; for pages Carver has created a matrix of connotation, employing such language as 'parched,' 'dried-up,' and 'really frickin' thirsty' to describe him. In short, Gus needs a drink."), and his disposition towards contemporary literature ("The bookstores are too full today of writers who have nothing to say.").

There are specific references to some of Mr. Wood's most identifiable traits as a critic (his distaste for what he calls "hysterical realism," his affection for Saul Bellow) and to the fact that he has written a novel of his own.

All in all, basically: "Here are some things about James Wood, a guy who exists and about whom you might know a few basic facts. He is an overeducated British jerk and a lamewad." Thin gruel, as far as parody goes, and though the editors of Harper’s—a magazine that has to date been very nice to Mr. Wood—will say it is not intended as a takedown, early reaction confirms that many will receive it as such.

Considering the judgments Mr. Wood has passed on Mr. Whitehead's novels in his criticism—in a New Republic review of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude in 2003, Mr. Wood said Messrs. Whitehead and Lethem are "fond of rampantly dangling phrases," and in a review of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion from 2004, Mr. Wood said in an aside that "Colson Whitehead's prose frequently seems unaware of its own illiteracy"—perhaps those people are not to blame for that impression.

“The wolves running in the night were magnificent. At one time those taxidermied mannequins were powerful, bloodthirsty, and pure, living on the outskirts of mankind and his petty concerns. Gazing at those creatures, I felt a hollowness in my chest, a feeling akin to infatuation. Their freedom exhilarated me.”

Can porn and philosophizing mix happily? The Marquis de Sade thought so, as did Henry Miller—but Walter Mosley must be the first writer ever to foist a “sexistential novel” on his unsuspecting public. A fixture of the New York literary establishment, Mr. Mosley is best known as the author of a series of detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins—Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first in the series, was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. Though Mr. Mosley has experimented with various genres over the last 17 years—sci-fi, political tracts, “literary fiction,” young adult (and in April he plans to publish a how-to book called This Year You Write Your Novel)—nothing in his motley oeuvre remotely resembles the triple-X symposium of Killing Johnny Fry.

Don’t let the subtitle fool you: This is a stroke book only lightly embellished with “deep” thinking about the meaning of life, or anyway about the life of Cordell Carmel, our wolf-infatuated narrator. A mild-mannered 45-year-old translator, Cordell is unhinged—and then transformed into a priapic world-beater—by the erotic insertion witnessed on page six: He accidentally walked in, unnoticed, on his girlfriend Joelle, who was being comprehensively sodomized by the eponymous Johnny Fry. Cordell’s transformation takes some time—a week or so—and the added stimulus of repeated insertions of the several kinds our inadequate anatomy admits. He learns, after some 280 pages of sex, to experience the knowledge that human beings are “sexual creatures.”

For those who require a plot in addition to character development, there’s Cordell’s homicidal intent, announced in the title and again in the novel’s first sentence: “I decided to kill Johnny Fry on a Wednesday …. ” But the proposed murder, though it sets him “apart from all those other common lovers,” is only a footnote to the catalog of Cordell’s erotic encounters (and those he watches on a pornographic DVD called The Myth of Sisypha).

As far as I know (and I herewith virtuously deny any expertise in the matter), all porn is episodic, and the episodes always drag on too long. This novel is no exception: The sex scenes pop up, so to speak, with numbing regularity and require an endurance that would be impressive in a 17-year-old, probably chemically induced in a 30-year-old and just plain unseemly in someone Cordell’s age.

Even more embarrassing than our hero’s heroic potency are his flashes of insight: “I realized that I had gone through my whole life starving and I never even knew it. I was angry at Jo[elle] and Johnny, but the real source of pain for me was that I had never known how empty and unfulfilled my life was. The sum total of my forty-five years was little more than the atmosphere within a hollow husk of a shucked snakeskin.” If that last metaphor seems out of place in a Manhattan setting, try this: “She groaned, bellowed actually, like some large woodlands creature in ecstasy over the wild.”

It’s an urban jumble: Central Park is the scene of one of Cordell’s fervid couplings; he picks up a new lover in the subway; on Sixth Avenue, he shares his umbrella with a young man who offers him a blow job; in Grand Central Terminal, he kills time in a bookstore: “I thumbed through John Updike, Colson Whitehead, Philip Roth, and a sex book penned by a popular TV sex star. All of them had their merits, but I realized that I wasn’t in a reading mood.”

Just as well, because that very night he’s invited to attend the Sex Games, an annual event held in secrecy “in special warehouses in Brooklyn and the Bronx.” I’ll spare you the details.

Did I mention that Cordell is a black man, that Johnny Fry is white, that Joelle has “copper-brown” skin, and that the color of every other character in the book (most of them sex-starved females in their 20’s) is painstakingly cataloged? I don’t mean to be facetious when I say that their racial characteristics are only skin-deep: Walter Mosley doesn’t care what color you are as long as you don’t stop fucking.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Mr. Yunqué prefaced the reading from his novel No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook Or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again by thanking the Y and the Poetry Center for "letting an old tomcat take the stage and read with two young literary lions like Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead …. "

From there, however, the acknowledgment turned into a bitch-slap as Mr. Yunqué said that his co-readers, "by dint of their enormous literary talent and quiet dignity, answer the suggestion made recently by Stephen King that there be no distinction between the literary novel and the formula novel, which he calls 'popular'-as if people of the talent of Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead were not popular.

"His speech was disingenuous, self-serving and cloying," Mr. Yunqué added of Mr. King. "He ought to examine his conscience."

An uncomfortable silence fell over the audience. Last November, after receiving the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Mr. King had said in his acceptance speech: "For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding …. You can't sit back, give a self-satisfied sigh and say, 'Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop-lit question. In another 20 years or perhaps 30, we'll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the best-seller lists.' It's not good enough. Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer."

Mr. Yunqué wasn't the only writer angered by Mr. King's comments. Shirley Hazzard, who won the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Great Fire, responded to Mr. King in her acceptance speech: "I do not regard literature as a competition," she said "[And] I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction."

But this sort of squabble has a gilded pedigree. "So-called literary writers" like Nathaniel Hawthorne have been drawing thick lines between their work and that of more popular writers for centuries. ("America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash," Hawthorne famously complained in 1855 concerning best-selling novelists like Elizabeth Wetherell and Maria Susanna Cummins.) On a slightly more elevated plane, Mark Twain administered a gleeful beating to the popular James Fenimore Cooper in his essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

Would Messrs. Lethem and Whitehead join their contemporary, Mr. Yunqué, in a gang sniping? "It's not a matter of a sound bite," said Mr. Lethem. "Every book exists as sort of a charged answer to popular culture these days, and that, for me, is a good thing. [But] I wasn't at the [National Book Awards], so I'm sort of hopeless for the context."

The dreadlocked Whitehead was even briefer: "I stay out of stuff like that," he said.

Mr. King declined to comment.

-Elon R. Green

Eyeful of Cyndi

There weren't a whole lot of people singing along to Cyndi Lauper's performance at the Panasonic New Year's Eve Performance and Sing-Along in Times Square, in large part because of a technical glitch-the song lyrics never appeared on the screen behind the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" singer. But that's not the only reason some in the audience were speechless. According to one concertgoer, Ms. Lauper's true colors were on display for the audience standing nearest to the raised stage because she hadn't worn any underwear beneath the black miniskirt and black jacket studded with white rhinestones that she donned for the spirited performance. "Everyone was talking about it," said the concertgoer. Asked for a response to the story, a representative for Ms. Lauper's label, Sony, said only: "That's not true."

-Alexandra Wolfe

50-Year-Old Johnson!

On Jan. 16, the New York Post's longtime Page Six editor Richard Johnson is doing the unthinkable: He's turning 50. But first he'll spend the evening of Jan. 15 bidding his youth adieu at Marquee, at a party hosted by Men's Health and Mr. Johnson's girlfriend, Sessa von Richthofen. The year might only be a few days old, but the invitation calls the event "the most highly anticipated birthday bash of 2004."

Originally the invitation was going to be a timeline of Mr. Johnson's life, and Men's Health asked him to submit half a dozen or so photos from his past. He obliged, even slipping in one of him riding an elephant through midtown with the Ringling Bros. Circus. "It was all going to be pretty elaborate," Mr. Johnson told The Transom a few days after returning from a trip to Grenada with his sons Jack, 12, and Damon, 25. "But then they decided there weren't enough dates in my life worth highlighting."

In the end, Mr. Johnson said, the magazine decided instead to select four special black-and-white photos and print them on a long folded card. A friend of Men's Health editor in chief David Zinczenko, Mr. Johnson was picked to be fêted by the magazine sometime after he filed a story on his sailing the Rolex Fastnet Race in England last summer.

But before Men's Health introduces us to Richard Johnson, Master and Commander (the sailing article will run in March), they'd like to show prospective party guests some other sides of the gossip columnist.

Photo 1: Richard Johnson, child chef: In this photo, Mr. Johnson appears to be about 1 year old and is proudly displaying a hand-held eggbeater of the variety that was popular in late 1919. Flaxen-haired and light-eyed, he wears a scalloped Peter Pan collar and overalls which show off his legs. "This photo belongs to my mother," Mr. Johnson said. "It's from when we lived on West Ninth Street." Was he generally thought to be a comely child? "Yeah," he said. "At least my relatives thought so."

Photo 2: Richard Johnson, newspaperman: Here Mr. Johnson is about 23. He is dressed in a plaid shirt and preppy V-neck sweater, and his hair looks pleasantly tousled. His eyelids are heavy, his chin cleft, his lips very slightly pouted. "This was taken right before my son Damon was born. I'm sitting at my Underwood typewriter at the Chelsea Clinton News, where I was editor in chief," he explained. "I wrote a lot about Westway."

Photo 3: Richard Johnson, rogue: In this shot, Mr. Johnson is being handcuffed by a policeman with long sideburns. He wears a short rain jacket and a fedora-like hat. His full lips are slightly parted and he is staring left of center, as if plotting. "This was shot by Post photographer Mary McLaughlin. I was about 26," said Mr. Johnson. "I was a general-assignment reporter at the Post and was covering a demonstration at the Shoreham nuclear plant. [The cops] thought I was a fence-jumper. But they let me go a minute after this picture was taken."

Photo 4: Richard Johnson, bon vivant: Mr. Johnson, now slightly gray, stands with arms crossed in a pinstriped suit in Times Square. He looks pleased with himself and the world. This portrait initially appeared in New York Characters, a 2001 book that also featured George Plimpton and the guy who incessantly runs around the Central Park reservoir, among others.

"I was happy to be in the book," Mr. Johnson said. "It was an O.K. book."

Unfortunately, there are no photos in the typical Men's Health black-and-white cover-photo style-they usually feature a hunky, shirtless man with great pecs. If ever asked, Mr. Johnson would be a willing subject. "I'm a total specimen," he said.

-Anna Jane Grossman

Springtime for Sirio

For two years now, Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni has been promising friends that his memoir is coming out "next year," but it appears the book may finally be ready for consumption. The restaurateur's co-writer, Bloomberg Radio food critic Peter Elliot, told The Transom that John Wylie and Sons plan to publish Mr. Maccioni's book, entitled Circus Master, in late April-just in time for Le Cirque's 30th anniversary.

"These things take a long time," said Mr. Elliot. He explained that after contracting to co-write the book in May 2001, he sat down with Mr. Maccioni every Tuesday to tape his recollections, then "interviewed 90 percent of the universe."

Mr. Elliot admitted that he had trouble getting past Mr. Maccioni's exterior of being the "magnanimous, imperial Tuscan social arbiter who can spin a President around and have him seated in two and a half minutes flat" and who is very close with the king of Spain. "Everybody in this town thinks he appeared one day in Brioni suits and looks fabulous and knows the President and movie stars, but he's been here a long time, and it's difficult to be Italian in America," Mr. Elliot said of the restaurateur whose career in the States began at the social hot spot the Colony in 1956 and grew into a business that includes Osteria del Circo in midtown and Le Cirque offshoots in Las Vegas and Mexico City. "This isn't going to be about Paris Hilton so much as it is about a man who came from nowhere and made it big in America."

Adding to the difficulty of writing the book was capturing Mr. Maccioni's unusual voice. A native of Montecatini, Mr. Maccioni speaks in an Italian-inflected, free-associative manner that might lead the uninitiated to guess that truffles aren't the only mushrooms found in the kitchen at Le Cirque. Mr. Elliot didn't say that-we did-but he did tell The Transom that he was determined not to spackle over his subject's vocal idiosyncrasies for the sake of convenience. "I've been absolutely adamant that he not appear as an Englishman," Mr. Elliot said. "Everybody writes about Sirio speaking like an American, and he really speaks in a stream of consciousness. And what I've done is to take the best bits of Sirio and call them 'Sirio moments,' where he goes from rent control to the Renaissance in three minutes." Mr. Maccioni's co-author added, "You have to kind of follow where he's going, and it's a wonderful tactic, but it's not English."

Mr. Elliot said that another reason the book took so long to finish was that Mr. Maccioni "had to go over every word" of the manuscript, which his co-author delivered to him this past summer. Ultimately, he said, the restaurateur made few changes.

Mr. Maccioni was vacationing in Mexico and couldn't be reached for comment, but his assistant Michelle said that Wylie and Sons was "forecasting" an April publication date.

-A.W.

Seldes' Shoes

In Beckett/Albee, the Off Broadway play performed by Marian Seldes ("It's SEL-duhs, not sel-DEES") and Brian Murray at Union Square's Century Center for the Performing Arts from October until Jan. 4, Ms. Seldes, a theat-UH (not theat-ER) veteran, was walking in the shoes of fellow living stage legend Cherry Jones. Literally. When Ms. Jones was starring in Flesh and Blood at the New York Theatre Workshop last summer, her friend Ms. Seldes went backstage and raved about how much she loved her character's bland beige pumps (she liked her performance, too).

"Marian said, 'Oh, I adore those shoes. They're the most beautiful shoes I've ever seen!' And Cherry said, 'Oh, they're so uncomfortable. Take them,'" said Sam Rudy, the publicist for Beckett/Albee. Thrilled, Ms. Seldes included a special credit to Ms. Jones in the Playbill, even though after several performances she also found them too high and too uncomfortable to wear and had them replaced with similar-looking but lower heels.

Beckett/Albee consists of a collection of several inscrutable short plays by Samuel Beckett and an Edward Albee one-act about an old married couple. The Albee play has several unscripted minutes where the two actors are supposed to "introduce" themselves to the audience. While each actor's roughly three-minute-long improvised monologue changed from night to night, certain lines were repeated often. Ms. Seldes liked to ask the audience not to leave their Playbills on the sidewalk outside the theater ("It's so sad for us to see them lying there," she'd say), and then she'd then go over the correct pronunciation of her name. Mr. Murray liked saying a word about mad-cow disease and how thrilling it is that President Bush is still eating beef.

-A.J.G.

Monster Maker

"I have become the person to go to to look bad," said makeup artist Toni G.

A native of Stockton, Calif., Ms. G started doing makeup professionally on the set of Beverly Hills, 90210, where everyone seemed dewy and doe-eyed, but in the last few weeks she has been noticed for doing what she was trained not to do: making a memorably beautiful woman unforgettably ugly.

Ms. G is the makeup artist who transformed Charlize Theron into serial killer Aileen Wuornos for Patty Jenkins' Monster, a movie that may just get both Ms. Theron and the architect of her onscreen ugliness nominated for Oscars.

And it almost didn't happen. When the opportunity to work on Monster arose, Ms. G was slated to be the makeup supervisor on Haunted Mansion, a far more lucrative venture.

"Haunted Mansion was one of my favorite rides as a child, so it was a makeup geek's dream to do something like that," said Ms. G, who honed her craft working under such industry stalwarts as Rick Baker on How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Nutty Professor and Ve Neill on Pirates of the Caribbean. "I just felt like [Monster] was going to be a special project, as long as I was allowed to really do my job and make her unattractive and she wasn't going to become this glamorized version of Aileen."

Unattractive is an understatement. In the full-page ads for the film, Ms. Theron's skin appears sun-scarred and blotchy. To achieve this effect, Ms. G had to use six different layers of translucent paint and foam-latex eyelids to simulate aging; she also tweezed off 50 percent of Ms. Theron's eyebrows. The makeup took an hour to apply on each day of shooting.

"We needed those years of abuse to read on her face," Ms. G told The Transom by phone. "If she had too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, emotional scars from terrible things that happened to her in her life, all those things read in your face. That's really what we tried to capture."

On top of all that, Ms. G brought in Art Sakamoto, a dental-appliance specialist who worked on Men in Black II, to create a set of crooked-teeth dentures. In the movie, the effect is startling, and it moved a number of film reviewers-including The Times' Stephen Holden, Slate's David Edelstein and the New York Post's Megan Lehmann-to mention Ms. G by name.

"It's easier to make somebody look like a [real] monster," said Ms. Jenkins. "This was beyond that. She made a person look like another person who has lived a different life. That kind of eye for detail and character is not something I would trade for the world."

"I am just surprised how many people have even seen the film," said Ms. G, who recently finished a remake of George Romero's zombie film Dawn of the Dead. "But I knew that [Ms. Theron's] performance was amazing-it made my work look even better."

Ms. Theron, who appeared in Playboy in 1999 and has since been named one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People," has already won this year's National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress and has also been nominated for a Golden Globe. Ms. G noted that her work gives beautiful women who are often overlooked as serious actresses the chance to be seen in a different way.

"Beautiful people have their obstacles as well-and she did not want to be beautiful," Ms. G said.

In the end, it may not be only Ms. Theron who is recognized come Oscar time.

"Everybody keeps saying in fact, 'Oh, [Toni G] could never get nominated, because it's not that kind of movie,'" said Ms. Jenkins. "And I keep saying, 'I'm not so sure.' It's so stunning. I hope she gets noticed for it."

-Jake Brooks

John Henry Days , by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday, 389 pages, $24.95.

Here's a curious case of literary overlap: Walter Kirn's new novel, Up in the Air , is about a man obsessed with amassing one million frequent-flyer miles. Meanwhile, in Colson Whitehead's ambitious new novel, John Henry Days , a journalist is "going for the record"–he's on a junket jag, and so far he's chalked up three months' worth of all-expenses-paid publicity events, a solid streak of product placement, orchestrated hype and catered hors d'oeuvres.

It's not unusual for two novels in the same season to zero in on marketing schemes–how corporate America sells and why we buy are inescapable topics–but in this case the overlap is accompanied by unusual twists. John Henry Days begins with a brief, impressively vivid description of an airplane trip, a radically condensed version of Mr. Kirn's Up in the Air ; the title of Mr. Kirn's novel even makes an appearance: Mr. Whitehead's junketeer is "always up in the air." As if to underscore the coincidence, Walter Kirn's name appears on the back of John Henry Days ; his blurb–more marketing–offers a boost to Mr. Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist . Scary.

But scary coincidence is appropriate to two novels tinged with paranoia. Mr. Kirn's narrator is fascinated by a shadowy consulting firm called MythTech that is purportedly at work on a comprehensive map of the code that makes business work: "You've heard of that human genome project? The human gene map? That's what they're after at MythTech, except with commerce. All the angles. All the combinations." What's worrying is the idea that "The market knows"–the mysterious movements of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" appear more sinister if there's a brain attached. For his part, Mr. Whitehead imagines an all-powerful publicity firm with its fingers in every pie, "an interdisciplinary and gangster army of hype." This publicity firm controls "the List," a register of the junketeering journalists who can be relied on to present a product to the public. (I suppose it's worth noting, before the paranoia buzz fades, that these two novels share a publisher, Doubleday, which is an imprint of Random House, which is owned by the mighty media colossus, Bertelsmann.)

Both Mr. Kirn and Mr. Whitehead are tapping into an anxiety spawned in the 20th century and destined to grow exponentially in the 21st: the fear that the relentless pursuit of profit will lead some unscrupulous corporate entity to perfect the science of manipulating consumer desire. Smart marketing scares us; it jeopardizes our sense of autonomy, our sense of self.

In both novels, the protagonist reacts to this threat by embracing consumer culture fervently and cynically. The idea is to be smarter than the market, always aware of its mechanisms, and yet consume with gusto. It's the surrender of the defiantly savvy, a way of rebelling through obedience.

Ryan Bingham, the narrator of Up in the Air , has turned himself into an airline's ideal passenger: "I'm everything they dream of in a customer." He half-believes that the company is studying him, hoping to learn the secret of his loyalty. "If they could create, say, a thousand more of me, just think of the earnings. The market share." Invasive corporate scrutiny doesn't bother him–as long as he can think of himself as an insider, hip to hidden promotional strategies. He declares: "I know of no pleasure more reliable than consuming a great American brand against the backdrop featured in its advertising. Driving a Ford pickup down brown dirt roads. Swigging a Coke on the beach at Malibu. Flying Great West over central Colorado."

Ryan shares with J. Sutter, the protagonist of John Henry Days , a visceral fear of being the dupe, the sucker who swallows the sales pitch. J., the junketeering journalist, once dreamed of becoming a crusading reporter and got an internship at "the Downtown News , the oldest and largest alternative weekly in the U.S. of A." Young and idealistic when he started at the paper, J.–who is black, from a middle-class Manhattan family–saw journalism as an opportunity to express his outrage at racism. The internship doomed his illusions. He wanted to rail against inequality; his editors wanted headlines that would sell newspapers. Now, as a junketeer, J. has abandoned the idea of socially responsible journalism (the very phrase would make him smirk); he has reduced his "obligations" to this: "meeting the word count."

We travel with J. down to Talcott, W.Va. The town has claimed ownership of the folk hero John Henry, the legendary railroad worker who "challenged a steam drill to a race and swung his hammers so hard that he beat the machine." J.'s junket jag ("I'm going for the record") is the sad modern counterpart to John Henry's fabled heroism; the machine J. plans to beat is the vast commercial conspiracy that we buy into everyday–he calls it "pop." Like Ryan Bingham, who's eager to get a job with MythTech ("To be safe from them one must be one of them"), J. aims to beat the machine by joining it.

Neither Ryan Bingham nor J. Sutter is a bad man; they're merely twisted into ugly shapes by the force of the market, by the hideous ubiquity of "pop." Both Mr. Kirn and Mr. Whitehead offer their protagonists the opportunity for redemption, and in both cases the opportunity takes the shape of a woman (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist). It's a sentimental notion, but few of us can do without it: Love trumps irony and anomie. Or so we hope. Both authors string us along with the possibility of a "happy" ending, but they're too canny to follow through–equivocal is the best we get.

Walter Kirn is a first-rate critic and a funny, sharp-eyed novelist (though he lacks confidence in himself as a writer of fiction; he fidgets and strains, he pushes too hard). Up in the Air is too long by a third, but it's sophisticated and substantial entertainment. If he ever develops a storytelling talent to match his cleverness, Mr. Kirn could write dazzling novels.

Colson Whitehead has all of Mr. Kirn's cleverness and more: a large and vibrant talent. In John Henry Days , he's working on a huge canvas. The novel is uneven (whole sections fall flat), but its high points are dizzying. Here is J., marveling at what he calls "terminal city," the web of look-alike airports that makes travel in America such a weirdly static experience: "It is safe in here. He watches his fellow shufflers queue before the gate attendants, who carve up the airplane cabin into certified tracts. This seems to him an orderly system, one of many in this concrete aviary. The giant brackets lulling the prefab sections of the terminal into peaceful aggregation, the charged and soothing simulated air, automatic flush urinals. He likes the new sound of cash registers, no more chimes: Instead this novel theater of validating purchases, the electronic scrying of purple ink across paper, that tiny pulse that reaches out to the network checking the credibility of credit cards. True, each foray through the metal detector still feels like a prison break and there is no stopping the animal jostling when boarding is announced or when the plane sidles up to the destination gate and all those grubby moist-toileted damp hands grope for the overhead compartment latches, but these are expressions of human weakness, no fault of the design of airports."

This is the voice of a writer who is watching America carefully, gauging its triumphs with wary detachment, and choosing to root for human weakness.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.