A single person clapped and, realizing they were all alone, stopped.

Mr. Shanks continued, “It exudes the grandeur of Gotham and the dazzle of the iconic Mad Men design gone modern.” Mr. Shanks cleared his throat. “It’s really amazing.”

Last Monday, a group (of “top hotel and publishing executives as well as media industry influencers,” per a press release) was gathered at a private party to celebrate the grand reopening of the gut-renovated hotel and the launch of its new partnership with Penguin Books.

Scheduled to coincide with Book Expo America, a massive publishing trade show that forces attendees to trudge all the way to 11th Ave., three evening readings and panels were to take place in the lobby.

These readings, called the Penguin Preview Series at the Round Table, will continue on a quarterly basis. Another aspect of the new partnership is the Night-table Reading promotion, in which books and galleys from Penguin’s recent releases will be distributed to hotel guests each night.

It’s all a concerted effort to reclaim the “rich literary history” (a phrase repeated ad nauseum through the night) of the hotel, where, during the 1920s, the Algonquin Round Table met for lunch to exchange jokes and barbs, where The New Yorker was born in 1925, and where Dorothy Parker said that thing about leading a horticulture (you can’t make her think).

Penguin authors abounded: Elizabeth Gilbert, Ron Chernow and Simon Doonan milled around, Rachel Dratch chatted with John Hodgman in another corner, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who dropped by on the late side.

We asked Mr. Hodgman if a literary salon could be revived in this way. Can there be another Algonquin Round Table?

“Salon culture still exists, but it’s online now. Writers don’t need to get together in an actual place any more,” Mr. Hodgman mused. “Though writers would benefit from a meeting place, because there would be alcohol and table service. Writers love hotels because they are the living rooms they cannot afford themselves.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz responded to the same question with characteristic flourish, but no optimism. “An incubator for personalities supremely attuned to this socio-cultural moment—it would be a wonderful thing for human circuitry. But communities have diffused and moved into the thinnest splinters,” he said.

Marion Meade, biographer of Algonquin patron sinner Dorothy Parker, clutched a glass of white wine with both hands, and proudly gestured toward one of her books, displayed in a glass cabinet in the lobby.

When asked if the spirit of the place could be revived simply by hosting readings and stuffing a new novel next to the Bible in each bedside drawer, Ms. Meade replied with an acerbic pragmatism.

“They are probably the only hotel in New York that has this kind of literary history. If they don’t use it, they’re pretty stupid, and they’re not stupid. Whether they can keep it up with Penguin, who knows, but I give them credit for trying.”

What would Dorothy Parker think of this latest campaign to capitalize upon the hotel’s literary pedigree?

“She’d think it was bullshit,” came the answer.

• On her store, which she purchased and renovated with the movie money: "This should be called the Julia Roberts Memorial Building." 
• On the movie: "I do not have any trouble telling the difference between me and Julia Roberts." 
• On Javier Bardem: "I fell in love with my husband all over again." 
• On bracelets her store sells: “If I were a 9-year-old girl, I would have killed and field-dressed someone to have these gorgeous, sparkly bracelets on my arm.”
• On what the Times described as "small primitive-looking heads:" "These are boundary gods. They protect and watch over your boundaries. I give them to every woman I know. I keep one next to my computer to remind myself not to say 'yes' to everyone."

Except for Julia Roberts and Ryan Murphy, we presume.

Lovely to Murphy, maybe. Roger Ebert wasn't impressed:

In Italy, [Roberts's character] eats such Pavarottian plates of pasta that I hope one of the things she prayed for in India was deliverance from the sin of gluttony. At one trattoria she apparently orders the entire menu, and I am not making this up.

Ebert sounds like he was grossed out, not scandalized. He finishes his review with some subtle stings, calling the movie "shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue." Eat, Pray Love, says Ebert, "mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat."

The ultimate verdict on any controversy in the movie will, as always, be at the box office - and perhaps in upticks in business at your local Olive Garden.

Then Lyons backtracked for a second. "And that's not a bad thing-it's about rediscovering yourself."

The celluloid version of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir may be all about rediscovery, but last night was about promotion-as if any more were needed. The book, after all, has been selling at an astounding clip since its release, and the posters greet you at every street corner.

Maybe that's why the stars were slow to come. At first, Julia was nowhere in sight, Javier would be a while, and James Franco wouldn't even bother showing up.

The evening's real guest of honor, however, may have been Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer who fashioned herself as the central figure of her astoundingly popular book. Not only did she conceive of the project, but she also had the honor of walking into a theater where lucky ticket holders would spend two hours watching the wish-fulfillment of her tri-pronged globetrotting fantasy-all of which is now re-enacted by Julia Roberts. We can only hope a sequel will depict her being fêted by Oprah, seeing her paperback clutched by disillusioned women the world over, and attending the premiere of a summer blockbuster that features herself as the protagonist-in New York, the city that drove her abroad in the first place.

Eventually there were screams and shuffling at the front of the red carpet, so everyone followed suit and slipped their Blackberrys back into their pockets and paid attention again. James Brolin emerged with a shaggy goatee, and gave featured Eat Pray Love actor Mike O'Malley a fierce bro hug.

"We did a project together, The People Speak-he's a real inspiration to me," O'Malley, who just scored an Emmy nomination for his guest spot on Glee, told me, as if a simple hug between two ruggedly attractive men needed any explanation. "He said the same things about me, I'm sure."
Javier Bardem-who plays love interest Felipe in the film-strolled by, doing his best to avoid any sort of human contact, and soon after came Julia Roberts, her eyes locked firmly toward the ground as she walked, flanked by a squad of guards.

The third in line was Gilbert herself, and the real Liz attracted nearly as much attention as the actress playing her. She was beaming-it was hard to imagine this woman desperately in need of sustenance, scripture, and/or sex. She left the onlookers with little more than a smirk and made her way into the theater.

Luckily, guest Russell Simmons was not in as much of a hurry. He stood unfazed amid an onslaught of cameras and recorders and rattled off his new favorite rap albums. So, he was asked, have you ever had an Eat Pray Love experience of your own?

"I don't know," he said as he walked up to the end of the red carpet, his white Yankees cap turning away. "I haven't seen the movie yet!"

Jessica Olien went to the heart of Eat, Pray, Love territory—Bali—and found herself pulling an Elizabeth Gilbert. Despite disdaining the "caftan-wearing women" who travel alongside her, Olien lives out their dream and finds romance with a Dutch man named Jorick. She and Jorick ride motorbikes through the island paradise and have lots of sex. Olien becomes "completely, embarrassingly Gilbert-like." She comes to terms with this, however:

It is only when I arrive home that I fully comprehend the irony of the past month: Cynical writer goes to Bali to make fun of Elizabeth Gilbert wannabes only to become perhaps her closest emulator.

I feel stabs of guilt for being so harsh on those women, searching the island for their romantic bliss. Who am I to laugh at their longing? By all means, ladies, come to Bali, I want to tell anyone within smiling distance. Find a wonderful man in a wonderful place. But if I could tell those women one more thing, it would be that maybe they should stop looking so hard. Because if there's a romantic cliché that's held true -- for Elizabeth Gilbert, and now, for me -- it's that bliss usually happens when you aren't hunting it down.

She says she doesn't expect a book deal out of her adventure, but she has gotten some mileage out of chronicling it online. Recently, she wrote for Jezebel about how Eat, Pray, Love "ruined" Bali.

On HuffPo, Lea Lane seems faintly irritated that Gilbert gets all the attention:

My book Solo Traveler came out in 2005, not long before Elizabeth Gilbert's cult-inducing phenomenon. Like her, I wrote about the freedom and joys of traveling on your own, but emphasized I was not looking for love.

Besides selling reasonably well, my book spawned a website and a brand, and besides how-tos on eating alone and packing and such, included a couple dozen personal essays, including ones set in Italy, India and Bali. I can't complain.

Well, if pressed, perhaps she can complain: turns out she too went to Bali all she got were bug bites. Her loins burned not with passion but with fire ants.

And Emily Gould cops to an "obsession with the weirdly hamfisted EPL marketing and tie-ins." Which, indeed, are PRETTY WEIRD—even when they aren't using bogus-seeming words like "sensorial."

Final verdict: Eat, Pray... Sort of Like?

Ms. Brockes is hardly the first person to throw a bucket of cold water on the phenomenally successful Ms. Gilbert. USA Today's Carol Memmott wondered in February 2008 Pray tell: Is Elizabeth Gilbert self-absorbed or true seeker?; The New York Post's Maureen Callahan offered her take on the book under the unambiguous headline EAT, PRAY, LOATHE in December 2007; and Slate's Katie Roiphe wrote, "I have to admit that I felt a twinge of embarrassment on the subway when I opened Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love..." in July 2007 assessment. (Don't feel too bad for Ms. Gilbert: Eat, Pray was an international bestseller; Oprah Winfrey has backed the book; Time Magazine anointed the writer one of its Time 100 in 2008; and a talented up-and-coming actress named Julia Roberts is attached to star in the movie version.)

Buried in Ms. Brockes' profile is this interesting quote from Ms. Gilbert, who has been nominated for a National Magazine Award three times:

Ms. Gilbert also says that while living in New York and writing for magazines like Spin, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and others, "I had to put on a cynical personality that really wasn't me, to be a little bit more sarcastic than I am."

Not so long before these dark days, Ms. Alter had been calling herself a writer: Her byline appeared with some regularity in prominent magazines and newspapers, and in 2004 she put together a book, Virgin Territory: The Road to Womanhood, for a major publishing house. Now, she was working a dead-end day job and spending all her free time getting loaded. For lunch she ate animal crackers and Doritos from a vending machine, and for a midday snack she was having sex on her desk with a guy named Bruno who worked in the cubicle next to hers.

“With everything coming together in this unhappy life I’d created for myself,” Ms. Alter said last week, “I thought, ‘Jeez! What can I do?’ I had to do something.”

And so she did. Following an increasing number of writerly dames in distress, who hit middle age, or near-middle age, and wake up one day to realize their lives are a mess (or worse, miserable!), Ms. Alter came up with a clever one-year plan to put her life back on track, and went about getting a book deal so she could write a memoir of her travails (and get paid to go through them, of course).

She conjured a plan to spend a year reading women’s magazines like Cosmo, Glamour, Elle and O, and to follow all the advice they offered her—an idea with all the cartoonish, “O.K., get this” appeal of a great reality show and the eminently marketable gravity of an earnest self-help book. It was a hell of a concept—much better than the one she had been pitching right before, which was to spend a year learning how to blow glass—and the Atria Books imprint of Simon & Schuster signed her immediately.

“I thought giving myself a project where I wouldn’t, like, freak out once I signed the contract would be a good idea,” Ms. Alter said. “I wanted to succeed, and I thought that this way, the structure was sort of imposed and the story arc was defined. I could focus on a different area of myself each month, whether physically or emotionally, and that would provide the chapters. And there’d be an introduction and an epilogue, which I thought I could do.”

Greer Hendricks, the editor at Atria who acquired Ms. Alter’s book, didn’t know exactly what she was signing up for. The experiment hadn’t yet been conducted, and there was no guarantee that Ms. Alter’s data would prove worthy of a book.

“I think she had just bought the magazines and knew that she was about to start on this quest. She hadn’t gone through her year yet,” Ms. Hendricks said. “So we really took a chance that her year was gonna be interesting.”

And why not take a gamble? Clearly the formula sells. Witness the blockbuster success of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about her devastating divorce and the year she spent traveling in an attempt to get over it. Ms. Gilbert’s publisher, Viking Books, has shipped almost 4,700,000 copies of the paperback to date.

If Eat, Pray, Love—in which Ms. Gilbert travels to Italy, India and Indonesia and explores “one aspect” of herself in each place—resonated with readers so profoundly, surely there was something to this formula.

Thoreau, What Hast Thou Wrought?

Although Eat, Pray, Love may have shocked publishers into paying attention to the moneymaking potential of this “how I turned my life around in a year” mini-genre, it was hardly the first book of its kind. In 2004, Julie Powell published her efforts to overcome her depression and save her marriage by cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in her book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Ms. Powell’s project began as a blog at Salon.com, but before long, that blog turned into a book deal. “There’s no easy way to say this, certainly not without arousing the ire of those who may think I’ve already gotten Too Big For My Britches. But it’s true. I have landed a book deal,” Ms. Powell wrote to her loyal readers in September 2003. “A really obscene book deal. I am, in fact, officially What’s Wrong With Publishing Today.” The book was a national best seller and a film adaptation of Julie and Julia recently began preproduction, with Nora Ephron directing and Amy Adams and Meryl Streep starring.

Ms. Alter, Ms. Gilbert and Ms. Powell all seem to have created the perfect marriage between classic recovery memoir and stunty, yearlong-experiment book. This latter has become a formidable cottage industry in recent years—a fact especially baffling in light of how narrowly defined its formal properties are. Which is to say, while there have probably been no more than 50 books that fall under the “year’s experiment” umbrella, the number is still pretty staggering given that they are all variations on the same simple conceit.

The contemporary pioneer of the genre, by most accounts, is Esquire writer A. J. Jacobs, who has contributed two emblematic titles to the canon: first The Know It All (2005), in which he spends a year reading every volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then The Year of Living Biblically (2007), in which he spends a year following every rule in the Bible literally. There’s also Danny Wallace’s Yes Man (2005), in which the author says yes to every offer and opportunity that comes his way and documents the crazy hijinks that ensue, and Maria Dahvana Headley’s similar but different The Year of Yes (2006), in which the author agrees to go out with any single guy who asks her on a date. Judith Levine’s My Year Without Shopping (2006) covers exactly what you’d think. Barbara Kingsolver has contributed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), and Sara Bongiorni the book A Year Without ‘Made in China’ (2007).

The list goes on! There are a lot of things one can do or not do for a year.

Perhaps inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 memoir Walden, in which the transcendentalist roughed it in a cabin for two years, the genre has become about as fashionable in our post-Super Size Me world as the micro-history was about a decade ago (Remember Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World?) If you’re feeling ungenerous, many of the books that fall within this genre can seem like cheap gimmicks, allowing those who lack vision or a compelling life story to score a book contract and publicity in exchange for time and a willingness to suffer. After all, what is The Year of Living Biblically if not a Jackass-style stunt crossed with the whimsy of a Liar Liar-era Jim Carrey movie?

The future looks bright, meanwhile, for Ms. Alter’s book, which will be published in July as Up for Renewal. “We sent it out for blurbs, and Carolyn Parkhurst”—author of Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found—“said something that I thought was so dead-on,” Ms. Hendricks said. “She said that it was like a fairy tale masquerading as a memoir of self-improvement.”

Ms. Hendricks thinks Up for Renewal could potentially do even better than Eat, Pray, Love. “Most people cannot take a year off of their lives and travel to Italy, India and Indonesia,” she said, referring to the cheeky “I”-themed itinerary that Ms. Gilbert followed in her journey. “Why that struck such a cord with so many people, I don’t know. I think more people can pick up a magazine—that’s much more accessible than picking up and traveling.”

365 Days of Despair

Ms. Alter, of course, is not the only one to swim in the cool wake of Eat, Pray, Love. Indeed, she is just one of several women who have attempted to deal with a large-scale personal crisis by channeling their despair into a book project.

For Charla Muller, whose book 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy comes out in July, the crisis came with the birth of her daughter, whose demands made her and her husband, in their 10th year of marriage, start feeling more like roommates than lovers.

“She found that the tension of not having sex with her husband, of finding ways to avoid it, was really stressing them both out,” said Sharon Bowers, Ms. Muller’s agent. “They might be snuggling on the couch in front of the TV, and instead of lying there and enjoying it, she’d think, ‘Oh, God, does this mean he’s gonna want to have sex?’”

So, on her husband’s 40th birthday, Ms. Muller decided to, uh, take action, and declared her intention to have sex with him every day for the next year, regardless of whether the two of them were in the mood.

“She realized that she could probably count the number of times they’d had sex in a year on one hand,” said Andie Avila, who acquired Ms. Muller’s book for the Berkley imprint of Penguin Group USA during the 11th month of the experiment. “And in an effort to find that emotional connection through a physical one, she decided to go ahead and do this in a big way. She considered a week, a month, but decided that a year would be most challenging and would allow for a lasting change in their lives. And a lasting change takes a while to achieve.”

Ms. Avila added: “A year is something people can easily imagine, anything less or more might not be as easy to mark. A year is a cycle that people can work with.”

And why is that? What’s so appealing about a year?

For Noelle Oxenhandler, who will publish The Wishing Year: An Experiment in Desire in July, timing was crucial, as her experiment began just as she turned 50. Her book chronicles a year that involved Ms. Oxenhandler suspending her Buddhism-bred skepticism about “the power of wishing” in order to see if she could get a new house, a new love and a resolution to some spiritual turmoil she suffered at her Zen Center in Northern California.

“The notion of a year is very organically rooted in all of us,” Ms. Oxenhandler said. “I think there’s a way in which all of us have at least some tendency, each year, to feel some aspiration to renewal, to try living in a different way. This is simply a more explicit and committed way of doing that. … It’s serious because a year’s commitment is serious, but it’s also playful.”

And, of course, there’s that thing Ms. Alter mentioned: Since your book is about how you changed over time, the structure is a total gimme when you sit down with your notes to write it. The beginning, middle, and end are determined by whatever happened to you while you were experimenting on yourself. This little trick even works with fiction, as evidenced by Lauren Weisberger’s forthcoming novel, Chasing Harry Winston, in which the three main characters make a pact over brunch to make changes in their lives so that in a year’s time, their problems will have evaporated.

Ms. Weisberger’s book is an especially interesting case because it suggests that this formula is a catchy one not merely because it’s convenient for the writers conducting these experiments, but because readers—those people who buy the books—really respond to it.

“It’s this wonderful idea of what would we do if we weren’t doing what we’re doing—the idea that there’s this alternate universe,” said Judy Clain, who edited Julie Powell’s book on cooking. “I think there’s something about that blank template that is appealing, and the idea that someone actually goes out and does it is thrilling.”

This Time Next Year ...

Paul Slovak, who edited Eat, Pray, Love, said there is an element of escapism involved. “It’s a great fantasy,” he said. “Everyone kind of dreams of it—quitting your job, putting all your stuff into storage and finding out what you really want to do in your life. Especially when you’re in you’re in your early 30’s or late 20’s, and you’re not quite certain that what you’re doing is what you want to be doing for the rest of your life.”

In other words, informing the hybridization of the yearlong-experiment book and the recovery memoir is the uplifting notion that no matter how desperate and hopeless your life might seem right now, this time next year everything can be better as long as you come up with a game plan and adhere to it with discipline. Life is salvageable, it turns out! This is an idea that people like to read about.

Yet what most of these books offer, really, is a vicarious thrill. Readers at home are precisely that—readers, at home—while the people they’re reading about—who wound up onstage instead of in the audience because they came up with a snappy idea for a recovery plan and were savvy enough to pitch a book about it—emerge with their salvation and sense of accomplishment.

“I have to remind myself, just because your year is up, it doesn’t mean you’ve exhausted the power of wishing,” said Ms. Oxenhandler. “It is, for me, this kind of funny thing. … I realize, ‘Oh, I could wish for that!’”

Ms. Powell, meanwhile, is back to her old tricks, like one of those people who pops up on various reality shows. According to her editor, she is currently working as an apprentice at a butchery, in preparation for a book that will be about what it’s like to do that. “The idea of craft for her is a path to self-discovery,” Ms. Clain explained.

And what of our dear Ms. Alter, whose bad habits and workplace antics were, however symptomatic of an unhealthy chaos, so charming? She’s getting there, she says. Now married for a second time, she has regained control of her diet, refocused on her work and stopped partying so much. The experiment, that thing with the women’s magazines, was a success!

“I remember meeting with this one editor,” Ms. Alter said, “and we were talking, and she was asking me, ‘What did you learn from your year? What’s your big takeaway?’ And she asked me if I was perfect now. And I said, ‘Of course not!’ You’re never perfect. You’re never done, you’re never 100 percent there. But I am much closer.”

All that said, not all of these books have their origin in a nervous breakdown. Gretchen Rubin, for instance, said she started working on her book, The Happiness Project (out from HarperCollins in late 2009), at a time in her life when things were really going pretty well.

“I realized that I knew I should be happier than I was, that I almost had this obligation to appreciate it more,” said Ms. Rubin. “I owed it to my good fortune to have more happiness with what I had.”

She went on: “From a narrative perspective, it would be better if I had been [at a low point in search of redemption], because it would be a better arc, but I was basically pretty happy. … I love the radical stories of change. I find them totally exhilarating. But I couldn’t do that, it wasn’t what I wanted. I’m not an adventurous person at all. I thought, I want to change my life without changing my life.”

Oh, don’t we all!