Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who ascended to their exalted position precisely because, as Denis Donoghue points out in The American Classics, their books "have survived … neglect, contempt, indifference, willful readings, excess of praise, hyperbole." You can't bruise Walden with lit-crit-not even dismemberment can damage it (it's now read in bite-sized excerpts, glazed with righteous Green sentiment); Moby-Dick is as astonishing as ever, unscathed by the harpoons of generations of grad students; The Scarlet Letter remains proudly enigmatic, despite Demi Moore's best efforts; Whitman woos new worshippers with mere cuttings, a handful of poems culled from the multitudes contained in Leaves of Grass; and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still beloved, its grossly unlovable episodes patriotically ignored. Insulted or even unread, the classics perdure.

Mr. Donoghue's book is a much milder, less brilliant and more reliable version of the passionate scolding administered 82 years ago by D.H. Lawrence in his unforgettable Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence assailed the reader with the unwavering conviction of his outrageous, hilarious, world-dominating opinions, all emphatically his own (witness his habit of calling Hawthorne "that blue-eyed darling Nathaniel"). Mr. Donoghue takes a meandering, open-ended approach and accommodates many voices, including a contingent of unfairly forgotten 20th-century critics (William Empson, Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke and others). Lawrence hectors, Mr. Donoghue converses.

More importantly, Mr. Donoghue begins with Emerson, whom Lawrence mentions only in passing and lumps with other "tiresome" New Englanders "of the ethical mystical-transcendentalist sort." Though Mr. Donoghue admits that no single book of Emerson's is a classic, he announces that "The canon of American Literature is Emersonian," and calls the sage of Concord "a great enabler … remarkable mainly as incentive and provocation … the cause of writers greater than he is." Specifically, Mr. Donoghue believes that a version of Emersonian individualism and self-reliance "drives" each of the five books he's singled out as classics. "Emerson did not invent the ideology of individualism," Mr. Donoghue writes, "though he bears the responsibility of making it charming to Americans."

A too rigid and literal reading of Emerson's radical ideas about the self can be a dangerous thing: "[I] t became a short step for Americans to regard themselves as categorically destined to be exceptional, the chosen vehicle of redemption, justified in imposing their will upon others." (Would you be surprised to hear that George W. Bush's name pops up in the pages that follow?) Mr. Donoghue argues that Emerson needs to be read in an equivocal spirit, to match "the spirit in which he revised himself and disowned his certitude." In this chapter-and in the book as a whole-Mr. Donoghue proves that he himself can be quite limber, almost double-jointed, willing at once to admire Emerson's strenuous self-creation and to deplore his pretension.

So who is this flexible, conversationally adept critic? The Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at N.Y.U., Denis Donoghue was born in Northern Ireland in 1928 and "grew up into the reading of literature under the sway of the New Criticism." He's published more than two dozen books, skipping back and forth across the Atlantic to pursue various interests: Jonathan Swift, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Walter Pater and so on. He's also written several books about literary theory-without picking up the slightest trace of theory's ugly and obfuscating jargon.

He's given his new book a somewhat misleading subtitle: "A Personal Essay." Except for a very brief passage about his religious education in Catholic schools in Northern Ireland, almost no autobiographical data clogs these pages. I'd guess he tacked on the subtitle for two reasons: because of the company he keeps, and because he's not attempting a comprehensive reading. When he first encountered the American classics in the middle of the last century, the critics he "read most warmly" (F.R. Leavis, for example) were all the rage; now they're antiques. But he's still interested in their ideas, and he's carrying on old arguments, reconsidering old positions. His book is "personal" because it addresses only issues that have engaged his mind for decades-a refreshingly untrendy, untendentious approach.

So he ponders Moby-Dick, the quality of Melville's imagination, and the Cold War rhetoric that turned Ahab into a totalitarian dictator; The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne's sense of sin; Thoreau's misanthropy and the advantages of reading Walden as autobiography; Whitman and his detractors and the possibility of "deflecting" their criticism by reading Leaves of Grass "notionally and provisionally"; and Twain, the Cold War rhetoric that turned Huckleberry Finn into an American idyll, and William Empson's understanding of the pastoral. The chapters jostle comfortably without ever linking up in the service of a tidy logical sequence. (As Melville put it, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.")

In an afterword, Mr. Donoghue does make an uncharacteristically sweeping observation: He complains that the authors he's writing about were mostly indifferent to "the average man in his average circumstances" and "excited only by the vision of an individual's charisma"-a defect he traces back to Emerson. Because of this disdain for the common man, Mr. Donoghue claims, "the classic books do not offer any resistance to the determination of American culture to go for power, conquest, the empire of globalization …. " Would the course of American culture have been altered had Hawthorne or Thoreau examined in minute detail the daily doings of some 19th-century Rabbit Angstrom? Maybe, maybe not. But Mr. Donoghue's book is not a polemic and shouldn't be read in the expectation of discovering a grand, one-size-fits-all argument of the sort proposed by Lawrence, say, or by F.O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance (1941).

Mr. Donoghue's book offers the pleasure of following the brainwork of an intelligent man thinking hard and lucidly about books that are central to our literary culture. He's thinking, and he's also quoting, which offers another kind of pleasure. Here, for example, is John Jay Chapman: "[I]f a soul be taken and crushed by democracy till it utter a cry, that cry will be Emerson." Here's William Empson: "Hawthorne is an aesthetic writer, I don't deny, a premature decadent, in fact; but I think the result is shockingly nasty." Here's Thoreau, admiring "naked Nature" on Cape Cod, "inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray." Here's Ezra Pound lamenting "that horrible air of rectitude with which Whitman rejoices in being Whitman." Here's Twain describing Huckleberry Finn as "a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat." Every few pages comes a jolt, a bracing idea or a refreshingly lovely turn of phrase-that's one advantage of trading in high art.

This is not an easy book, but it's certainly accessible to anyone who's read (and perhaps reread) the five books under discussion. Think of it as a litmus test: If you have to struggle to follow Denis Donoghue's elegant, entertaining ramble, perhaps it's time to brush up on your classics-start rereading them now.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

"The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car!" That's D.H. Lawrence launching his wonderfully acid essay on Benjamin Franklin. Fervent belief in the perfectibility of man–these days we call it "self-help"–is one of our more embarrassing national traits. But Ben Franklin (Lawrence calls him "the first downright American") wasn't just out to perfect himself; he wanted to improve everybody else, too. With his lists of virtues and those perky maxims in Poor Richard's Almanac , Franklin set up a "dummy of a perfect citizen." He fed us lines like "Honesty is the best policy." Lawrence refuses to swallow the lesson: "I dislike policy altogether," he says. "I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me."

In his baffling first novel, the brilliant and irascible James Wolcott shows us a man who allows himself to be improved–and yes, it's a dreary theme. The Catsitters is meant to be a comic novel about the tribulations of single men (check out the jacket copy: "Suppose Bridget Jones had a twin brother … "), but it's actually a plodding first-person narrative that reads like a muted character study. Why should we care about Mr. Wolcott's narrator, Johnny Downs, the bumbling bachelor who lets himself be repackaged as "marriage material"? Johnny is an actor and a bartender, a regular guy living in a standard-issue downtown apartment, a plausible and boring fellow, a virtuous automaton ready to hoof it through any 12 steps that promise a payoff. He's nicer than average, but still average, and certainly not someone you want to spend 314 pages with. (Suppose Bridget Jones' twin brother shared none of her spark or charm ….)

The story begins when Johnny discovers the hard way that he's been dumped by his girlfriend: He catches her with another man. So Johnny calls his confidante, Darlene Ryder (she lives down in Georgia, which keeps her conveniently offstage), and she declares that he needs her help. Over the phone, in her wise-ass monotone, she spouts her version of The Rules for unmarried guys: "If you men had any idea how many lonely women there are out there you might spend less time feeling sorry for yourselves and more time finding Miss Right." She keeps hurling advice at Johnny until the reader is begging for mercy. But our dull and dutiful hero doesn't notice that there's something unnatural (and unfunny) about Darlene's obsessive manipulation of his behavior (she's Ben Franklin on steroids, spinning policy out of thin air)–he's too busy following directions ("After I jotted down the rest of Darlene's to-do list …"). He redecorates his apartment to suit feminine sensibilities, modifies his sloppy behavior, hones his sexual technique and eventually lands a new girlfriend, rich, curvaceous Amanda. But Darlene isn't done fiddling, and as a direct result of her machinations Amanda decamps–though not until she's slapped Johnny hard, twice.

These twin blows are important, if only because the woman's percussive anger ("Amanda's face was raw now, fury and injury joined at the jaws") reminds us of what's missing from Johnny's makeup: He has zero temper. He's never more than mildly irritated, even when he should by all rights be ripshit. This deficiency is all the more odd because, towards the end of the novel, Mr. Wolcott has Johnny writing a play about a self-help group "for guys who have problems managing their anger." It turns out there's a back story to Johnny's anger deficit: A trip home to Baltimore to visit his dying grandmother establishes that when he was a kid, Johnny's parents would get drunk and quarrel loudly and violently. "To this day," he notes, "I'm hypersensitive to noise, particularly of the yelling variety." Once when he was in college, his mom decided to pound on his brother's car with a ball-peen hammer: "We both had to carry her twisting and writhing from the front lawn."

Because the novel is so flat, any hint of hostility stands out in sharp relief. Darlene torpedoes Johnny's love life; his mother goes berserk; his girlfriend Amanda expresses her "fury" with an open fist; and his cat, Slinky, draws blood with her claws. (Slinky resists with a tremendous show of feline choler the vet's attempts to administer an oral antibiotic: "I had never seen an animal in such a fury," marvels mild-mannered Johnny.) The women and the (female) cat get to act out their rage. As for the men, if they ever even feel any rage, they hide it.

And why is Mr. Wolcott himself so even-tempered? Why is his prose so unremarkably readable and bland? Anyone who has seen his Vanity Fair column knows that he's dangerously funny and mean, a critic who can pack enough dynamite into a sentence to explode even the most heavily armored authorial ego. Why has he muffled himself here? I had hoped at first that he was sneaking up behind the soft-edged ideal of contemporary masculinity–the earnest, huggable variety–and was planning to kick it hard. No such luck. Malleable and patient, kind and forbearing, Johnny gets a nice girl at the end of The Catsitters : another case of virtue rewarded.

Does Mr. Wolcott think that firecracker prose would scare away the novel-reading public? Or is he hoping that a quiet, flavorless novel won't attract the kind of drubbing he himself is used to handing out? Or is there an element of autobiography here–has he been soaking up the Zen lessons of anger-management therapy? Even a hardened critic can use a little self-help now and then.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Ignore the headline. The true title of this review is "How to Read Harold Bloom and Why," and I will proceed exactly so: first the how, then the why.

Open your Bloom anywhere (there are now two dozen titles to choose from) and read slowly, out loud, until you've caught the tone. There are several Bloom voices and each calls for a different style of reading. Sometimes a variety of voices will sound in a single volume, but if you read for a quarter of an hour, you'll find the dominant note. (If you're utterly unable to get past the first page, you've probably stumbled on The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy , the sole work of fiction in the Bloom oeuvre , executed in 1979 and quickly forgotten.)

The tone of early Bloom is vast authority born of encyclopedic reading and superb taste. Consider the sweeping first sentence of The Visionary Company (1961), his survey of English Romantic poetry: "Blake died in the evening of Sunday, Aug. 12, 1827, and the firm belief in the autonomy of the poet's imagination died with him." Or this grand declaration from the second page of the same book: "Milton, after the failure of his Revolution, turned inward like Oedipus, making of his blindness a judgment upon the light." Pick up any of Mr. Bloom's books from the 1960's and you meet a contentious critic with magnificent confidence in himself, who is also a brilliant teacher brimming with pertinent information and daring, if sometimes thorny, commentary. Read early Bloom with the eager attention of a curious student.

Self-confident is different from self-loving, which is Mr. Bloom's tone in the 70's. At the dawn of that decade, early Bloom evidently caught a glimpse of Bloom in bloom, fell in love and called upon his readers to join him in self-worship. The critic became a prophet, the teacher a proselytizer. This is the decade of The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the Bloomian scripture in which he discovers the origin of poetry and traces its progress (he would say decline) from poet to poet in an ongoing psychic wrestling match the rest of us call poetic tradition. You recognize a new mode when the author refers to his own theory as "dark and daemonic." But Bloom in love is still a formidable critic, and when he cuts through the fog of self-regard to focus on a specific poet or poem, the result is almost always luminous. Read the books from this period with caution and amazement (if you can read them at all, as they're willfully difficult). Watch for flights of fancy prose decorated with intimidating Greek terms. And note with a twinge of nostalgia that this was perhaps the last moment a sentient American academic could admire himself so brazenly.

After Bloom in love comes Bloom abroad, a literary critic grazing in neighboring pastures. His disastrous flirtation with fiction was just the beginning: In the 80's he also fiddled with Gnosticism and the cabala, then spilled over into biblical scholarship with The Book of J (1990), his first best seller, in which he argues that his favorite parts of the Pentateuch were written by a woman. Practice a pose of amused detachment before reading any Bloom that promises new discoveries about sacred texts and heretic cults. Keep an eye out for studied outrageousness, as, for example, when he refers to the God of the Hebrew scriptures as "an imp who behaves sometimes as though he is rebelling against his Jewish mother."

Bestsellerdom is addictive. With the success of The Book of J , it was inevitable that we'd get Bloom the power-hitter swinging for the fences. And sure enough, in 1994, he wheeled out The Western Canon . Oddly, though, the tone is not triumphant; no–in the 90's we hear the querulous voice of Bloom besieged, a lone champion of aesthetic value lashing out against "our current squalors." If you come across a reference to "the rabblement of lemmings" (a category that includes Marxists and feminists and anyone else who reads ideologically), get ready to skim over many patches of screechy diatribe. Slow down and be grateful whenever he returns to the business of commenting on and evaluating literature.

These days, Mr. Bloom has nearly forgotten his ideological opponents. A new and more formidable enemy threatens: time itself. In How to Read and Why , we meet belated Bloom, who is now "going on 70" and keenly aware of reading "against the clock." Weary sighs punctuate the whole of the Bloom oeuvre (his pal John Hollander once called The Anxiety of Influence "an anatomy of critical melancholy"), but now the note of noble suffering is a constant refrain. He writes: "I ponder the letters that I receive from strangers these last seven or eight years, and generally I am too moved to reply." He recommends Proust–"We read novels (the greater ones) to treat ourselves for dark inertia, the sickness-unto-death. Our despair requires consolation, and the medicine of a profound narration." Laughter is essential when you read belated Bloom–without it, you would drown in bathos.

How to Read and Why is not just belated Bloom, much of it is recycled Bloom–bits clipped from earlier books and essays, simplified and sugarcoated with encouragement. The new book is divided into sections on short stories, poems, novels and plays, and reads like an eclectic syllabus annotated with brief commentary. Mr. Bloom explains that he is not offering "a list of what to read" (he already did that in The Western Canon ), "but rather … a sampling of works that best illustrate why to read." So, for example, he presents in 34 pages the three plays he has plucked from the world's library: Hamlet , Hedda Gabler and The Importance of Being Earnest . He scrolls through some 20 short stories in 36 pages. Proust in six pages? Remember, we're reading against the clock: "One measures old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust."

In the prologue of the new book he distills five principles to help put us on the right track (he assumes that we're already on the wrong one, misdirected by an ideologically charged university education). "Clear your mind of cant" is his first principle, and the rest follow suit, urging self-reliance, creativity and (bless him) "recovery of the ironic." (This last principle brings Mr. Bloom "close to despair," for he knows that one cannot "teach someone to be ironic.")

"Ultimately we read," Mr. Bloom insists, "to strengthen the self." He writes, "I myself believe that poetry is the only "self-help" that works, because reciting [D.H. Lawrence's] 'Shadows' aloud strengthens my own spirit." The practical advice he offers on how to access this "self-help" is comically lame: not just "read aloud" and "read slowly," but also "read closely" and "memorize" and "read deeply." How could it be otherwise? Mr. Bloom may be a great teacher, but he can't teach anyone to read deeply any more than he can teach anyone to be ironic.

Belated Bloom is a heavy-hearted cheerleader. Read How to Read and Why with a sigh of relief: It's not as long-winded as its wacky sibling The Western Canon or its wackier, even more long-winded cousin, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998).

Why read Bloom? Because Bloom at his best, when you watch over his shoulder as he makes meaning out of the lines of a poem, is a wizard. Because even bad Bloom trails sparks of brilliance. Because he does insist, in a world where judging by taste is shunned as invidious, on the importance of aesthetic choice. And because his trademark mantra about how to read, "There is no method except yourself"–a mantra he was repeating to his students decades before the word "best seller" ever flashed through his outsize brain–is a bold liberation from the airless squeeze of the classroom and a thrilling challenge to any reader who yearns to make the self stronger.

"I tell my customers: Take a bite, then a sip of cold white wine and breathe out through your teeth," said Attilio Fragna, one of Maratti's owners. "You will really smell the sea."

My husband had ordered the dish and he took the first mouthful. He looked a bit dubious at first. "It's very salty," he said. Then he had a few more mouthfuls. "But it's wonderful! I feel I should be eating this on a beach."

At Maratti, bottarga, which is made from the dried roe of mullet or tuna, is not only shredded onto pasta, it is also spread on crostini to go with a spicy tartare of tuna and salmon and marinated cucumber. These are just a few of the remarkable dishes on the menu at this restaurant, which opened exactly a year ago on the Upper East Side. Maratti did not blast onto the scene like Babbo in the Village or Colina on the Upper East Side (which fizzled and quickly closed). It's been a sleeper that has quietly built its own following of customers.

Perhaps it was the aroma of truffles I smelled when I first walked in, but there was something about Maratti that appealed to me right from the start. The restaurant is on East 62nd Street on two floors of a 100-year-old town house that, according to Mr. Fragna, was a private club at the turn of the century. (It even boasts a disused swimming pool underneath the kitchen.) The ground floor, where you can smoke, is saloonlike, with low ceilings, a handful of tables and a long, wide mahogany bar displaying generous platters of breadsticks and green and black olives from Sicily. Upstairs, two elegant rooms on the parlor floor have high ceilings and working fireplaces. One room is for private parties, and the other seats about 70 people, with three enormous windows giving onto the street. The walls are painted pale yellow with a cream trim and hung in a desultory fashion with small paintings of swirling landscapes in pastel colors, placed so they miss the light (which is perhaps just as well) that shines up from behind blue glass shades. Tables are set with white cloths, votive candles in blue glass holders and red tulips, and Italian beachside pop music plays at a discreet level in the background. You don't sense the hand of any hot new designer, and the effect is oddly charming.

Customers here are hard to pin down. "It's certainly not the Swifty's crowd," commented a friend as we looked around the room. Rather behind the times, he had gone there for lunch earlier in the day expecting Nell Campbell's Kiosk and instead found the sort of people who used to flock to Mortimer's, complete with black velvet headbands and pinstripe suits.

There were one or two pinstripe suits at Maratti, but the restaurant doesn't feel as though it's on the Upper East Side. It feels like a place in Rome, which is where Mr. Fragna, who is the manager, and his brother Alessandro, the executive chef, were born. Their parents owned restaurants and instead of hiring baby sitters, took the children with them to work. "We were raised in the restaurants, and when we were kids the chefs would amuse us by cutting vegetables into funny shapes."

Maratti's wine list was put together by Mr. Fragna and his sommelier Davide Pinzolo who spent two months last year looking for small and less-well-known producers, with the result that they have many unfamiliar but excellent wines at low prices. Our charming young waiter, a Hungarian who bore an unsettling resemblance to Andre Agassi, was extremely helpful in recommending cheaper wines to go with the food, which is mainly fish.

We began with a plate of fried calamari. When D.H. Lawrence visited Italy, he didn't reckon much to calamari-"fried ink pots," he called them, "tougher than india rubber, gristly through and through." Not so at Maratti, where the rings, accompanied by a heap of whitebait, were crisp yet tender, sprinkled with fresh thyme. Fresh sardines were also delicious, voluptuous and silvery on a bed of arugula and tomato. Maryland lump crab cakes the size of a half-dollar, nicely crunchy yet moist within, came with mâche salad, corn and a spicy aïoli. But the outstanding dish was the shrimp and potato napoleon, with a vinaigrette of onion and bacon confit, a fanciful version of the best potato latkes you've ever had.

Romans do great things with artichokes, and a first course of shaved baby artichokes sautéed with parmesan cheese into a lemony hash was an unusual and delicious way to begin dinner. But one of the most original dishes at Maratti-and one I'd never had before-was a salad made with roasted chestnuts that had been glazed with a little sugar, diced butternut squash, baby greens and shaved Parmesan, a lovely interplay of textures and tastes.

Pasta includes delicate pillows of ravioli filled with a creamy mix of asparagus, black truffles and ricotta cheese in a butter and sage sauce and an outstanding risotto with mixed seafood in a subtle tomato sauce that brought out the distinctive flavors of the shellfish.

Since Maratti is essentially a seafood restaurant, one of its signature dishes is a whole boned sea bass that is filled with slices of black truffle, lemon and parsley, and baked in bread dough. The fish steams inside the dough so the flesh is soft and moist, and when the dough is cracked open in front of you it releases a wonderful aroma. Alas, it was overcooked. Whole roasted sea bream would also have been phenomenal had it been less cooked, and both dishes were served with great crispy, roasted potatoes and delicious spinach. But a fillet of pan-roasted wild striped bass was perfect, served with a reduction of shallots in barolo wine, spinach and a mound of mashed potatoes garnished with little fried carrots. It was simple and gorgeous.

If you prefer meat, there is Florentine rib eye with Tuscan fries, pan-seared veal chop, or baby Australian lamb chops. The latter were tender and juicy, served with a Sicilian-inspired melange of artichokes, potatoes, black olives and tomato fricassee.

Apart from a napoleon of lemon and passion fruit, desserts were a bit of a letdown, tending to be overly sweet and on the heavy side. Cassata, Sicilian ice cream, was served with the traditional candied fruits sprinkled around it instead of inside, and was covered with chocolate sauce. I found it cloying. I liked the light crème brûlée with Limoncello liqueur, but the chocolate soufflé was leaden and the panna cotta very sweet.

At the end of dinner, one of my female friends rather self-consciously asked our waiter if she could have a cup of hot water with lemon (she's convinced this cleanses the blood after a big meal) and she apologized for the odd request.

"Not at all," he replied. "We serve a lot of that."

"You do?" she was incredulous. "Why?"

He remained unfazed. "Many of our customers are women."

MARATTI

* *

135 East 62nd Street

826-6686

Dress: Casual

Noise level: Fine

Wine list: Italian, from small vineyards, well-priced

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Main courses lunch $14 to $26, dinner $16.50 to $29.50

Lunch: Monday to Friday noon to 3 P.M.

Dinner: Daily 5:30 P.M. to 11 P.M.

* Good

* * Very good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No star: Poor

O.K. I have a theory (surprise!). I think it has to do with the true nature of our "inner child." Not the simpering little innocent homunculus within us all envisioned by the self-help, recovery movement books. Not the little Bambi-eyed fawn-in-the-forest tyke who supposedly represents the true childlike self we've all tragically lost access to due to the abuse we've suffered from dysfunctional families and a cruel and exploitive society that has cut us off from our kinder gentler essence. Not the prelapsarian Edenic Adam curled into the fetal position within us–that Redemptive Child who, if we could only get back in touch with, would bring us out of our shame spiral and make us all better people.

No. I don't think so. I think we all know what our inner child really looks like: a lot more like Mini-Me than Bambi. Not as malign as Chucky, say, the evil child-doll in Child's Play and Bride of Chuck y–a series that was accused of inspiring the notorious Bulger child murders in England. More like Poe's "Imp of the Perverse," say.

I suspect that the way we as a nation have welcomed Mini-Me into our hearts can be seen as a vast collective sigh of relief that we no longer have to pretend that we have Bambi inside us, a vast collective repudiation of all the bogus Inner Child sentimental psychologizing over human nature. And a more realistic willingness to come to terms with the imp of the perverse within, the real day-to-day shape human malignity shows up as: not Satan, not Hitler, not a serial killer, not Evil incarnate but a dwarf clone of evil, the kind one nonetheless has to keep an eye on, because if not restrained it will go around, like Mini-Me does at one point, biting people in the crotch. Mini-Me gives us a chance to get down–in a good way–with our Bad Self. And he may well have finally given us the name for the 90's we've been seeking but not finding for 10 years. Not the "Me Decade," but the Mini-Me Decade.

In homage to Mini-Me, the column this week will take the form of several more Mini items. Beginning with:

2: The Sable at Barney Greengrass. Yes, I know: After writing several combative columns celebrating the chopped liver at Barney Greengrass as one of the supreme achievements of Jewish-American civilization, after having my assertion triumphantly vindicated over the choice of carpers like Gael Greene and Daphne Merkin in a blind taste test conducted by that repository of the values of Jewish American civilization, The Forward (Isaac Bashevis Singer's newspaper!), you would think that I would be wedded to their chopped liver forever. Or, at least that I would order it every time I go there. But, in fact, I am compelled to report I have switched. No, not to another place's chopped liver. Barney G.'s is still the best. But to another delicacy at Barney Greengrass. To the sable. I've come late to the smoked fish thing, I know, perhaps because sturgeon leaves me cold and nova is kind of a taste cliché, however good it gets. And I didn't even know what sable really was until recently when I got a brief tutorial from Gary Greengrass. As it turns out, Sable is the name given to smoked black cod, a name that was considered more fancy-sounding (I guess because of the fur coat association) than the plebeian "cod"–although black cod is considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine.

I'm not going to make an effort to summon up the verbal equivalents to the taste of the sable at Barney Greengrass. It's less a taste than a pure, empyrean high, a transformative total body experience. It's that good. Order it very plain without all the pickles and olives and accessories they tend to clutter the plate with at Barney G.'s. Order it very plain and place the slices on a lightly toasted bagel and experience the way the essence of ocean is compressed and expressed in the pearly translucence of the black cod flesh. The pounding waves, the vast sunless depths of the sea, the creatures stirring on the ocean floor, the treasures spilling out of the shipwrecks, the pearls in the eyes of the drowned sailor in the "full fathom five" song in The Tempest . Sable is Mini- Sea .

3: The Truth About Cats and Dogs . Even more satisfying than the vindication afforded by The Forward 's blind taste test was the recent scientific vindication of my position in one of my most controversial columns ever: "Stumpy Versus Lucille: The Great Pet Debate" [Aug. 10, 1998]. It was a column in which I tried gently and compassionately to disillusion the fine writer Caroline Knapp, who (in her book, Pack of Two ) showed herself to have been utterly conned by her canine companion Lucille into thinking that she, Ms. Knapp, had won the sincere love of her dog and that her dog's love somehow validated her self-esteem. Her dog had become her inner child when it was really her inner con artist.

What I tried to explain to her and to all dog lovers, as a onetime dog owner and dog lover myself, as someone who grew up with dogs, but who had never truly known anything about the profound nature of the bond with an animal until I adopted a stray cat I called Stumpy (my true Mini-Me)–was that the love of dogs is false and deceitful, that dogs are shameless flatterers who will lick and slaver and make goo-goo eyes and waggy tail at anyone who gives them food and security. But that this "love" has nothing to do with your deserving character and shouldn't be seized upon (as Caroline Knapp sadly does) as some index of her self-esteem. Rather, the love a dog displays is just the commodified currency of the canine con game, bestowed as eagerly and fervently on serial killers as it is on saints. But never bestowed "sincerely." The sincerity of dog love is a delusion of self-congratulatory owners with a need to believe they deserve unconditional love.

Shakespeare knew this. In her famous study of Shakespeare's Imagery , the British scholar Caroline Spurgeon called attention to the recurrent cluster of images that are linked to the word dog in Shakespeare's works: "images of licking and fawning … called up inevitably by the thought of false friends or flatterers." In her 400-page study of such image clusters, Ms. Spurgeon called this, the dog-licking-and-fawning-and-flattery cluster, "the clearest and most striking I have met with" in all Shakespeare's work.

Still, many were skeptical about my argument, many thought it was just a matter of taste, some personal preference for cats being expressed although those (particularly, discerning women) who had met Stumpy completely understood my point of view.

And now comes Science, in the form of a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly , titled "Why Your Dog Pretends to Like You." A story (by Stephen Budiansky) that demonstrates how the study of evolutionary genetics confirms just about everything I was saying about dogs as false flatterers. Dogs are Darwinian con artists trained by centuries of evolution to fake orgasms of affection: "Just as we are genetically programmed to seek signs of love and loyalty, dogs are genetically programmed to exploit this foible of ours." That's the difference between dogs and cats, if you ask me. We're programmed, dogs are programmed, but cats see through the whole game. At least Stumpy does.

4: The Overratedness of 2001: Isn't it about time someone said it? This photographer I know, let's call her "Nicole"–called me one night from the darkroom with a question. She'd been up developing some work and she'd had the television on in another part of her loft and there was this weird sci-fi movie on she'd caught a glimpse of. From what she could tell, she said it was "just a bunch of apes gibbering at each other with all this pretentious cinematography and no voice over." Did I have any idea what the film was?

I looked up the time slot in my TV guide and guess what was playing? 2001 , the alleged Kubrick masterpiece we're all supposed to be even more reverent about now with the passing of the Master. Don't get me wrong. I think some of Kubrick's work justified some of the adulation he enjoyed. Dr. Strangelove certainly, and maybe The Shining . But after watching 2001 again on tape, I have to believe that Nicole was not far off in describing it as "a bunch of apes gibbering with some pretentious cinematography." It is gibberish: 2001 may be the single most overrated work of art in the cinema if not in the culture.

Of course, it might be that I never saw it at the right time with the right substances. I never saw it when it first came out. In part because everyone who saw it then said it had to be seen tripping and I never found myself in possession of an elixir worthy of this peak visionary experience. So it was years before I saw it at all, saw it straight, and it was such an Emperor's New Cinema moment. The gibbering of the apes in the first part, the tedium of the astronauts in the second part, the incoherence of the antiquated light show at the end, the anticlimax of the "star child" payoff. (Was the star-child fetus Kubrick's Mini-Me?)

When I watched it once again after the call from Nicole, after Kubrick's death, it only seemed to get less impressive–although I do see now where the dancing-dwarf dream sequences in Twin Peaks (featuring David Lynch's own Mini-Me) came from now.

I know there are people who are still into it. Who still watch 2001 over and over again. I asked one of these people to explain the relationship between the David Lynch-style dream sequence part (which follows the light show) and the birth of the starchild. But he couldn't. He got all twisted up in talking about "wormholes" and parallel universes and who the Advanced Race that implanted the monolith to stimulate our cosmic evolution was in relation to the Starchild. But there is no answer, because it's an incoherent work of art. And not in a good way. And beyond that, 2001, even when it is coherent suggests a really juvenile view of cosmic causation and human evolution: that all human endeavor, all human progress, imagination, comedy, tragedy, art and love is really incidental–all subsumed to the eugenics project of some Big Daddy-type galactic paternalists who are programming us to develop in their image. The human race is their Mini-Me. It's a childish Master Race fantasy. Let's face it, this bad, pretentious, incoherent master-race-worshipping film is the stunted Mini-Me, the dwarf runt of Stanley Kubrick's otherwise impressive body of work.

5: Loiterature and Out of Sheer Rage. I felt sheer rage in trying to read Loiterature. It's a wonderful title for a wonderful project: examining the literature of digression, of loitering, of digressive and discursive paths through the world and the word. I love some of the literature Ross Chambers (the "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan"–even his title is a long and winding road) examines in Loiterature (University of Nebraska Press). I love Tristram Shandy , I love Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog (Bulgakov perfectly captured the slinking, conniving, petty criminal, canine character in his brillant comic fable), although Professor Chambers leaves out the great classic of eddying, loitering, idleness: Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov . Still, I liked–at first, anyway–the fact that Professor Chambers opens a section of Loiterature called "Learning From Dogs" with what seems at first like a hilarious parody of an academic deconstructing Barbara Bush's Millie's Book –the work she supposedly co-wrote with her spaniel. "One's doubts about Millie's 'authorship' grow more strongly when one looks more closely at the front matter," Professor Chambers (parodically? solemnly?) informs us before concluding (I believe in all seriousness) that Millie's Book is evidence of the imperialist thought-control project of the hegemony. Teaching people to read (the profits from Millie's Book go to the Foundation for Family Literacy) is a way of inculcating "a suitable sense of one's inadequacy with respect to the hegemonic model."

Here is where the sheer rage comes in. At the fact that this "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan" (no trace of the hegemony in the way he presents himself, huh?) seems to take this sentiment so seriously that he can actually proceed to somehow link the depiction of Millie the poodle to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei." "It's a bit hard," the Marvin Felheim Distinguished etc. tells us, hard "on Barbara Bush and the Foundation of Family Literacy, I know, to draw a parallel between Millie's Book and the gates of Auschwitz …"

No, it's not merely hard ; it's ridiculous if not meant as self-parody. If it's meant seriously, it makes the Distinguished etc., into just what he, in his habitual overkill, calls poor Millie "a complete, unmitigated, totally uncritical dope."

But I am grateful to Loiterature for the title, for the conception of a literature of loitering–and for the sheer rage its silly, jargon-clotted execution inspires. It gives me the excuse, and the method for making a loitering, digressive transition to what I believe is a new classic of true loiterature, a book called Out of Sheer Rage , by Geoff Dyer (North Point Press), the smartest, funniest memoir of a writer I can recall ever reading. A memoir of Mr. Dyer's agonizing and comic attempt to write–or to avoid writing–a study of D.H. Lawrence.

Please put aside your prejudices against Lawrence because I had to when two writers I'd met recently–Justin Kaplan and his wife, Anne Bernays– and my wise and knowing former editor at The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker , Robert Vare (who knows my sometimes dilatory writing tendencies all too well), spent almost an entire dinner insisting I read this book. Believe me, I never liked Lawrence, his leaden, overwrought, overblown prose, his German metaphysics–never liked anything he wrote except the dirty parts of Lady Chatterley's Lover , if you want to know the truth. But they, Mr. Kaplan, Ms. Bernays and Mr. Vare, were right! Out of Sheer Rage has little to do with Lawrence and everything to do with the dark comedy of the writing life.

I'm fairly sparing in my absolute uncritical recommendations to my readers. Even my enthusiasms are frequently tinged with edginess. But when I'm right, I'm right, as people who have recently been reading The Dog of the South , the Charles Portis novel that I've gotten back into print, have told me. You'll have to trust me on Out of Sheer Rage : Geoff Dyer is our Oblomov, the comic genius Portis of literary nonfiction.