The impulse to lump these two novels together is understandable, since Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida are co-founders of The Believer (a literary journal I’ve written for—just once.) But there’s actually very little evidence to support the notion of a shared Aesthetica Julavida. The Uses of Enchantment, which was published in October, is dense, multilayered and satiric, while Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is spare, linear and solemn.

Readers first became aware of Heidi Julavits in 1998 when Esquire published “Marry the One Who Gets There First: Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding Album,” a short story so vivid that I still remember certain scenes eight years after wolfing it down. But even those of us who’ve been fans of her writing ever since might be surprised by the richness and complexity on display in The Uses of Enchantment.

The new novel opens on the playing fields of a prep school in suburban Boston in 1985, a milieu rendered so precisely that I was slapped back to my own miserable high-school years (Milton, ’86). Mary Veal, a junior at Semmering Academy, goes AWOL during a field-hockey rain delay, gets into a 1975 Mercedes (cue image of the classic bubble-nosed sedan) and disappears without a trace. Six weeks later, she resurfaces, claiming to have no recollection of what happened to her. Psychiatric experts are called in, and soon Mary’s amnesia is seen for what it is—a ruse.

But why would a teenage girl fake her own abduction? One strand of the book is devoted to raising, and then discrediting, possible answers to that question, as Mary’s case becomes a hotly contested power grab between two therapists, each looking to promote their own pet theories at a time when recovered memories of sexual abuse were all the rage. Some of the most hilarious scenes come from the notes of Mary’s analyst as he struggles to pin down his clever, manipulative client. “She made direct eye contact with me—a confusing sign of ego defiance that did not coincide with the earlier abuse theory,” Dr. Hammer writes. “Typically when a patient lashes out at her doctor, she does so without the ability to make concurrent eye contact; to do so would mean taking responsibility for her actions. But Mary suffered no shame; in fact she appeared exultant. You seem to be insulting me, I said.” God knows how many psychoanalytic workbooks Ms. Julavits had to slog through—or how many couches she had to lie on, for that matter—to pull off such a great send-up of the talking cure.

Dr. Hammer publishes a book called Miriam: The Disappearance of a New England Girl, but Mary’s cover is quickly blown and she becomes the pariah of her family, school and town. Fifteen years later, after moving to Oregon, Mary is forced to go back home by the death of her mother, a formidable figure from whom Mary had desperately sought forgiveness. Her crabby, conspiring sisters and her alcoholic aunt make it clear that, in their eyes, Mary will always be the black sheep, but a discovery among her mother’s papers sends her on a search to find out just how well her mother understood her after all. Despite all Mary’s defensive cleverness, her feints and dodges and verbal jousting, her quest for redemption seems real and heartfelt.

IN LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME, Vendela Vida explores a culture far away from Boston’s WASP-y suburbs. The title is taken from a poem written by a Sami, the indigenous people of the Arctic region in Scandinavia where Ms. Vida herself has family and where her protagonist, Clarissa Iverton, goes to track down the secret of her parentage. Clarissa has just discovered that the man who raised her and whom she’d called Dad was not her biological father. What’s more, when Clarissa was 14, her mother, who seemed to love stray cats more than her own children, disappeared from a mall in upstate New York, abandoning her family for good. “In preceding weeks, my mother had been unusually affectionate toward me. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, her warmth, so I followed it like a sunbather at dusk, chasing the sun,” she remembers.

Now a young adult, Clarissa renews her chase all the way to Lapland, where her mother went to research her dissertation before Clarissa was born. The failings of her loved ones, it seems, have hardened Clarissa. “Travel is made for liars. Or liars are made by travel,” she thinks when she arrives in Helsinki and a local asks her why she’s there and she answers that her fiancé just died—a fabrication. “I had given a different explanation to the Belgian deejay sitting next to me on the flight from New York to Brussels. She grated on my nerves, and I wasn’t sure why. She was too eager, too loud, and I decided I could be mean to her. ‘Do you think that’s the Great Lakes?’ she asked, looking over me and out the window. Two hours earlier, we had departed eastward out of Kennedy.”

As Clarissa travels farther and farther north into sunlessness, she begins to uncover clues that her teenage hunch had been true—she had inadvertently driven away her mother. But with these revelations come elisions: At each dramatic moment, more seems to be left unsaid than said.

Harsh, cold landscapes blanketed in snow and Laplanders speaking broken English are a perfect match for Ms. Vida’s economical, though not humorless, prose—more fitting, in fact, than the Manhattan portrayed in her first novel, And Now You Can Go (2004).

Heidi Julavits is a show-stopping maximalist compared with Vendela Vida, whose elegant restraint is sometimes a little too unflinching. If these books are any indication, the artistic reservoir beneath The Believer runs both deep and wide.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg writes for Elle and is at work on her first book.

Forget all that. Welcome to a new, user-friendly criticism, warm, gentle, inviting and personal; welcome to literary exegesis that addresses you—yes, you—and the issues in your private life. There’s no specialized knowledge required (though it does help to have read the books) and no need to sign up for ideological boot camp. This is criticism for everyday readers of acknowledged classics, readers who feel that books are important and salutary—good for everyone, if taken in moderation.

Did sophisticated comp-lit types laugh at you in college for confusing heroes and villains with real people and liking or disliking them accordingly? Well, listen to this: “A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.”

Whom should we thank for this empowering insight? Oprah? Heidi Julavits? Wrong and wrong again. The new champion of the common reader is Edward Mendelson, a tenured professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of a two-volume biography of W.H. Auden. Mr. Mendelson wants to turn our attention to The Things That Matter—a title that lets us know right off the bat that his criticism is relevant and straightforward, not academic and convoluted.

The book is a study of seven novels— Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts—which, his subtitle promises, have something to say about “the stages of life”: birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood and (a touch of euphemism here) “The Future.” The Things That Matter makes very few startling claims (provocation isn’t friendly), but taken as a whole, it is startling—especially in the way it relates novels to the “inner life” of the reader.

In the old days, lit crit would teach us how a novel works (or fails to work, due to the tragic disconnect between signifier and signified), or how the world works (or fails to work, due to the perfidy of capitalism). Mr. Mendelson is more like a highly literate self-help guru: He wants to teach us about ourselves as “autonomous persons”; he wants to reach “readers … who are still deciding how to live their lives.”

Note that he’s chosen only novels by women (three of them by Virginia Woolf). His justification for this choice makes good sense: In the 19th and 20th centuries, “a woman writer … had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing.” Moreover, he believes that these are the seven novels written in English that “treat most deeply the great experiences of personal life.” (Well … you could argue that claim until The Future is a distant memory and Woolf’s Between the Acts is long forgotten—but I’m going to give him a free pass, if only because he also calls Middlemarch “the greatest English novel”—irrefutable evidence of sound judgment.)

Mr. Mendelson’s readings of the individual novels are cogent and plausible but not particularly stimulating. Nowhere does he produce a dramatic revisionist argument. At times his emphasis is surprising, as for example in his examination of Mrs. Dalloway, which gives more play to Peter Walsh than to Septimus Warren Smith. Mr. Mendelson’s relatively narrow point of view (in this case, he’s focused on Peter’s old and pure and hopeless love for Clarissa) produces, in the end, a distorted image of the novel. The same thing happens when he discusses Middlemarch solely in terms of marriage: Other important parts of the book—about social change and politics, say—get short shrift.

On the whole, he’s more interested in giving the reader tips about “real life”—a phrase he repeats with notable frequency. He wants you to be autonomous, equal, integral, committed and … well, virtuous: a good parent, a faithful lover, a loving spouse.

Here’s a passage from his chapter on Jane Eyre that’s typical both in method (tripping lightly from the pages of a novel straight into your personal space) and message (casual sex is a no-no): “Charlotte Brontë understood that an unequal sexual relation between adults is necessarily an unloving one; she also seems to have sensed that sex is experienced differently—that is, produces different physical and emotional feelings—in unloving relations and loving ones.” A footnote elaborates: “Post coitum homo tristis —‘After sex the human is sad’—is far truer about unloving relations than loving ones; if the union between two partners is limited to the sexual act, then loneliness inevitably follows it.”

Elsewhere (in a discussion that segues from Mrs. Dalloway to Plato to the boudoir), he abandons the prescriptive posture for a conspicuous display of tolerance: “[P]robably the only moral question it makes sense to ask about anyone’s sexuality is to what extent you use it as a means of treating other people as instruments and objects—something that can occur in a conventional married bedroom as readily as in more unconventional settings.”

It may be that I was too thoroughly brainwashed by the bad old lit crit to truly appreciate the benefits of Mr. Mendelson’s kinder, gentler approach. I’m still thrilled by the vaulting ambition of criticism on a heroic scale: the grand architecture of Northrop Frye’s classifications; the anthropological wizardry of René Girard; the nerdy, specialized systems engineered by Roland Barthes; the daring historical acrobatics of Stephen Greenblatt; the unstoppable ego of Harold Bloom. And then there’s the patient examination of technique provided by critics like Erich Auerbach (whose chapter on To the Lighthouse in Mimesis is simply breathtaking—minutely accurate at first, then sweepingly broad). Auerbach tells me something that won’t matter to everyone but that I want to know just the same, which is how a book’s intricate machinery turns, what makes all those clever parts click into place, and how this particular machinery compares with that of other devices he’s tinkered with.

But The Future, I suspect, belongs to Edward Mendelson and his neat, modest meditations on novels that address you and me and our everyday human problems. The things that matter most to him are the bonds that link “autonomous persons”—and who would want to argue? But I do wish he were less of a goody-goody.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Because no caption accompanied the photo with Heidi Julavits' essay on hot-tubbing it in Northern California yesterday in the New York Times' T magazine, The Transom wondered: who are these nubile young literary folk depicted in the buff?

Apparently it was supposed to go unnoted that some of the nude party animals were the staff of Ms. Julavits' magazine, The Believer.

Unaccounted for: the dark-haired woman standing in center, back looks a lot like Believer copy editor Sarah Manguso. And goddamn if the guy bottom, right doesn't bear a resemblance to Dave Eggers.
— Choire Sicha

So, on Monday night, the army of spouses and unangry ironists that publish The Believer presented an evening of literary entertainments to aspiring Believer contributors at the New School Auditorium; tickets, $5. I say "spouses" with a little rancor: I've decided all right-thinking heterosexuals should make a lovely idealistic stand and refuse to marry until the gays can. This should be right up the Believer alley.

But the Believers are not by their nature radically disgruntled with the world. They are sweetly, intellectually dismayed. And yet things have worked out so well for them. The result: Their New School evening was a mishmash of celebration and discomfort with celebration.

The centerpiece of the evening was a panel about the state of fiction after 9/11, moderated by Heidi Julavits, co-editor of the monthly. Ms. Julavits enjoys the long question. She prefaces each with a little speech; then she'll eventually say, "I guess my question is … " and surprise the question's recipient-in this case, Look at Me author Jennifer Egan-with something a little off-putting. My notes look something like this:

H.J.: ENDLESS WARM-UP. "Why no fiction best-sellers [about 9/11] after 9/11? … JESUS. ETC., ETC. "I guess the question is … why wasn't your book a bestseller"? [!!!]

J.E.: "Goddamit, I don't know." Laughs … "If I felt ignorant and wanted to educate myself, I wouldn't go to fiction." (J.E. seems like a psychiatry student, or a slightly stern but kindly and insightful social worker.)

I can't possibly be the first to note that this charming quirk of Ms. Julavits' betrays too many afternoons doing lit crit in cozy seminars.

Another panelist, Stephen Elliott, is the recent editor of Politically Inspired . Mr. Elliott is known for providing a weekly report of his poker game on McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Let me summarize each of his filings: "Help! I'm a raving alcoholic!"

The consistently hung-over Mr. Elliott did not disappoint Monday evening. His first line: "I don't want to vindicate James Wood, who's a jackass." (Eight people clapped.) Like the inebriated uncle at the family reunion, Mr. Elliott was there to vent mustard gasses a little too close to the German potato salad. His off-tone remarks were the evening's sole divergence from the McSweeney's -style calm wryness that dominated: "I can't really speak to the taste of the masses," said Mr. Elliott, and also: "If you want to read dumb books, that's your prerogative."

But he also said things like, "Good literature is about truth." (But how? Is good music?) As he staggered onward, Susan Choi, the author of American Woman -a re-imagination of the Patty Hearst story-looked like she wanted to disappear.

Is fiction-in a bold devil's advocate by Ms. Julavits-always "escapist and a palliative"? (And how would that be bad?) These novelists agreed to convince themselves that fiction has to be strong, honest medicine . But so many great novels are stagey, fake things-has anyone read Wuthering Heights recently?

"'We' have a huge interest in entertainment," said Ms. Egan. She didn't actually make the air quotes with her fingers, but she did them with her voice. "Entertainment" is evidently on the Believer list headed "Not O.K."

But still, they love to entertain. And the Believers love comedy, but seem uncomfortable that comedy is often mean and always cheap. Author Tom Bissell played Appalachian banjo music while wearing a $79 Texan hat. The evening's master of ceremonies, writer John Hodgman, presented the idea that in all jokes about banjos, the phrase "literary novel" could replace the musical instrument. To wit, Mr. Bissell quoted Mark Twain: "A gentleman is someone who can play the banjo but doesn't."

Funny, smart and troublesome. "We" evidently have a huge discomfort as artists. These post-confessional confessors know that a novel is a collection of lies. But they love novels, and more important, they are junkies to writing them-and so the idea that fiction is a higher truth becomes their addict's denial.

Vendela Vida, Believer co-editor, former Premiere copy assistant and Eggers spouse, came out to entertain with Ben Marcus, the spouse of Ms. Julavits. Mr. Marcus is bald with glasses, and a little beefy. You sort of want to see him in chef's pants, up to his knees in an icy stream, holding up a big fat salmon.

The two re-enacted an early Believer interview mix-up where only the interviewer's questions had been recorded. Mr. Marcus played the part of the philosopher interviewed. Ms. Vida would ask a question; he would mime an answer for a long time with shrugs and gestures. After a long minute of silence, Ms. Vida asked, "And are you a vegetarian?"-which was really funny, thank God. The banjo played us off to intermission; New School students swarmed the neighborhood pizza place.

Milton Glaser, design guru and inventor of "I [heart] New York," delivered a lecture later on the subject of ambiguity. Mr. Glaser was to have a conversation with book designer Chip Kidd, the 23Envelope of the book world. "Sadly," Mr. Kidd was trapped in Connecticut.

Mr. Glaser is self-effacing and grand at the same time. His speech is like those Chuck Lorre vanity cards, the little journal entries that flash for one second after the credits on Dharma and Greg . "Only through ambiguity," Mr. Glaser said pointedly, can the truth be revealed. One hopes that idea was directed at the monofaceted Ms. Julavits. He also did a little slide show of some of his recent work. His last slide contained the slogan: "Art Is Whatever Remains."

Writer Tony Perrottet delivered a pleasurable, rather conceptual piece. He has gray hair and an odd Australian voice and wore a pinkish shirt. He gave a short speech that asked, "Did readings contribute to the fall of the Roman Empire?" The literary readings of that era, said Mr. Perrottet, became mere entertainment. "The sheer volume of words debased the gold standard." It was absolutely unclear how much of this reportage was fiction, comedy … or truth.

As the crowd of young writers filed out of the auditorium, you could almost smell the unease, the greed to wear the name tag writer ; it sweat out of every hand, along with a puritan pride for taking part in an evening of guilt-free entertainment. They could have been home watching Friends , but no! They ennobled themselves, unambiguously … for them.

Is it a fair criticism that the Believers, despite their fine if flawed principles and good manners, have expressed little sense of a personalized relation to the pain of the world? (No, probably not.) And is it wrong to wish they would reconsider the meaninglessness of the entertainments "we" make? Love your entertainments or reject them, oh no doubt, but get on with the show.

"I definitely felt that by agreeing to do this, I was putting my head in the lion's mouth," said Ms. Julavits with a nervous laugh-and all her laughs were nervous-as she nursed a Coca-Cola at Sebastian Junger's bar, Half King, on 23rd Street.

Ms. Julavits was self-conscious because she recently named The Observer one of the "laboratories" of a nefarious "disorder": "I call it Snark," she wrote in an essay of some 10,000 words, "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing," which appeared in The Believer 's premiere issue in March. In it, she earnestly chides the literary-industrial complex of book reviewers for succumbing to a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt" that is suffocating the creative lives of the literati.

"It's a tone, " she insisted. "I was trying to isolate the virus, so to speak." (Nervous laugh.) "Not to say that you're a virus!"

The tone of Ms. Julavits' own essay-its tagline is "We're sick and tired and really excited"-is spiritually akin to the Gen-X haiku in the opening pages of Mr. Eggers' beloved 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : "I am tired. I am true of heart!" The essay, intended as a statement of purpose for the new magazine, defines a "believer" as a kind of holy book zealot, best exemplified by the New Republic book critic James Wood.

As Ms. Julavits herself points out, complaining about the state of book reviewing is an old chestnut, going back to George Orwell's 1936 essay "In Defence of the Novel." Ms. Julavits feels, however, that the cycle of complaint has reached a moment of fresh urgency. It's not, she wants to make clear, that she's against criticism, or even negative criticism; she points to Norman Podhoretz's notorious takedown of John Updike in 1963 as a prime example of an "intellectually honest" negative critique. But at some point-she doesn't say when-the nastiness always lurking in the world of book reviews simply got out of hand.

Ms. Julavits' essay is the most aggressive attempt yet by the McSweeney's -of-heart to draw a line in the sand against the unbelievers. And it's loaded with the kind of literary conflicts that even a 10,000-word essay isn't likely to resolve. After all, why should a massively popular grass-roots literary movement-whose members have not only established their own rigorously anti-mainstream literary value system (emotional abundance and cultivated sloppiness, good; chilly insincerity and flashiness, bad), but who also have their own publishing house-care about, say, The New York Times Book Review ? And how can an acknowledged literary insider like Ms. Julavits-whose second novel, The Effect of Living Backwards , is about to be published by Putnam-call out the establishment? And ring in a "new era of experimentation"?

Ms. Julavits straddles a dodgy fence.

Part of the genesis of The Believer was Ms. Julavits' own bad experience with reviews. Her first novel, The Mineral Palace , was published (also by Putnam) in 2000, and its reviews were a mix of the enthusiastic and the less so-par for the course for a first novel. But the bad ones got to her.

"I would read a review with the tiniest little criticisms in it, and I would be completely under the table for three days," she said. Ultimately, she swore off reading her own reviews: "In the end, since I'm not able to sort out the good and the bad, and I just focus on the bad, it's better just not to read them at all."

She said Mr. Eggers had had similar experiences, and a subsequent desire to see a more thoughtful, sophisticated kind of book review.

"We knew he'd be interested in book reviews, knowing he'd been reviewed a lot himself"-nervous laugh at the mention of Mr. Eggers-"and had been vocal on some of those fronts. I think he just doesn't even read them anymore."

Yet aside from the shock of her novel's not uniformly positive reviews, Ms. Julavits has had something of a charmed literary life. Her career took off in 1998, when her short story, "Marry the One Who Gets there First," was published in Esquire magazine, acquired from her agent, Henry Dunow, by fiction editor Adrienne Miller. Ms. Julavits was then working as a waitress at Alison on Dominick, having recently graduated from the writing program at Columbia University, where she befriended future Believer editors Ed Park and Vendela Vida (who recently married Mr. Eggers). Ms. Miller and Mr. Eggers, then an editor-at-large at Esquire, took Ms. Julavits out to lunch.

Ms. Miller said that Ms. Julavits' short story was an "instant classic." "I've got lots of letters from college English teachers who teach that story to their students," she said.

Soon after, Mr. Dunow sold Ms. Julavits' first novel and rights to her second for a whopping $500,000. "That was definitely uncomfortable," said Ms. Julavits of the sum. "But now, people get that all the time. I was at the beginning of a trend."

Thus began her life as a fixture at leafy writerly retreats like Yaddo and Breadloaf, and as a satellite member of the growing universe of Mr. Eggers. In the summer of 2002, Ms. Julavits cemented her place in elite literary circles by marrying the writer Ben Marcus, who was the former fiction editor for the downtown literary journal Fence and is now a professor in Columbia's M.F.A. program.

So, can someone who's had the literary good fortune of Ms. Julavits really shake things up in book-reviewing land? And how much is Ms. Julavits' cry of "Snark!" really a knee-jerk response to good old-fashioned, tough-minded criticism that happens to be about people she likes?

The single book review that Ms. Julavits said inspired her essay-Sam Sifton's takedown in the March 31, 2002, New York Times Book Review of Marc Nesbitt's Gigantic- is a case in point. In the most heated moment in her otherwise mild-mannered essay, Ms. Julavits calls Mr. Sifton's review "one of the more blatant examples of anti-intellectualism I've detected recently," accusing the New York Times Dining section editor of "espousing views that seem more fitting for a Bush cabinet member."

But more than a few eyebrows were raised by the fact that Ms. Julavits' critical bête noire is someone she knows personally: Mr. Sifton was, in fact, the best man at her first wedding, to freelance food writer Manny Howard. (The marriage ended bitterly, as Mr. Howard made clear in a 1999 Times Magazine piece that detailed how he secretly siphoned $6,000 from their nest egg to support a period of unemployment as a freelance writer, which sent Ms. Julavits packing.)

At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it's not dispassionate, I guess it's that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it-and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."

Ms. Julavits didn't see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd.

"It's definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it's all-everybody knows everybody in one way or another."

It comes with the territory, Ms. Julavits said: "At a certain point, you've met and had a relationship with a great many people, and that does not preclude your right to have a response."

(To Ms. Julavits' point, a disclosure: This reporter is an acquaintance of Mr. Eggers, and his wife has been published by McSweeney's .)

For his part, Mr. Sifton claimed a lack of interest in Ms. Julavits' essay.

"I have no inclination to wade my way though it," he said. "I hear it's quite long."

One gets the distinct impression that the debate between Mr. Sifton and Ms. Julavits existed long before The Believer appeared. In his review, Mr. Sifton criticized Mr. Nesbitt's use of what he considered overripe metaphors, describing Mr. Nesbitt's book as "the type of hipster fiction the Yaddo and Breadloaf crowd might call 'rich with meaning'" and calling Gigantic an "M.F.A. thumb-sucker."

Ms. Julavits said she would have preferred a more respectful and intellectually rigorous review from Mr. Sifton. He had used the review, she felt, to flex his opinions on a subject other than Mr. Nesbitt's book, namely his dislike of the world of writing schools and writing retreats-the world, that is, that Ms. Julavits inhabits.

"I mean, maybe this reviewer-to be fair to him-thought that the problems this book brought up was that all writers and writing establishments are odious," she said. "Maybe that's what this book suggested to him. In which case, possibly it could be argued that it was a fair review."

Was Mr. Sifton guilty of snark in his review of Mr. Nesbitt's book? Daniel Mendelsohn, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books -and a critic Ms. Julavits singles out as having "the highest of standards" and being "impervious to publicity brainwashing and literary trends"-defined snark as "attitude posing as critical know-how." It has, Mr. Mendelsohn said, infiltrated book reviewing "as much as anything else." But he also said he didn't believe that Charles McGrath, the editor of The New York Times Book Review , "would ever allow a snarky note to enter his paper. I think Chip is a serious person."

(Mr. McGrath declined to comment for this story.)

Mr. Mendelsohn said that while he had not read Mr. Sifton's review, he himself had criticized works of fiction as "writing-schoolish" and that the use of overripe metaphors "is a problem" in those places.

Even Ms. Julavits' hero, James Wood-who has famously mowed down stars like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen-pointed out that when Virginia Woolf started reviewing for The Times Literary Supplement , "her own instinct was to say rude things …. You look back and there was a certain amount of snark in Woolf's stuff," he said. "It's not whether snark is, in itself, bad, but does the subject deserve it?"

"I mean, my whole argument wasn't about people being snarky," Ms. Julavits said. "That actually came out at the very end-even though that's what you're focusing on."

As for the title of the piece-"The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing"-Ms. Julavits said that "you should know that people give you titles, and titles happen to you," she said. "Titles are different from the animal-and you know that."

Perhaps Mr. Eggers wrote the headlines to juice up the cover?

"No," she replied, "all I'm saying is headlines serve a different purpose than the piece."

Finally, she confessed to having written it herself: "I'm guilty of doing it, yes."

In her essay, Ms. Julavits also took on the negative reception of Rick Moody's The Black Veil: A Memoir . The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody's bad press-most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic -was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."

But, she was asked, doesn't a piece like Mr. Peck's reflect a kind of admirable passion? Was Mr. Peck's fury at Mr. Moody's literary sins any less book-centric than Ms. Julavits' defense of Mr. Moody?

Mr. Julavits considered this, then conceded: "Maybe I should hope I get treated that way and take it as a compliment."

When asked if she thought the sort of Molotov-cocktail critiques for which New York intellectuals were once famous could add up to a kind of healthy, literary-Darwinian struggle, Ms. Julavits said no.

"Unless you see the struggle for the fittest being between reviewers and writers of books, and then the reviewers are going to win," she reasoned. "And then what are they going to write about? So that's not exactly an equivalent situation in my mind."

Mr. Wood said he felt the wavering line between criticism and hostility is a constant in book reviewing and criticism, and one that's not likely to go away.

"There undoubtedly is an awful tension between telling the truth and not being a monster," he said, "and I haven't resolved it myself. I've written things that hurt people, and I've read things about me that hurt. I don't know how you resolve that." Mr. Wood said that he sympathized with Ms. Julavits' true-of-heart intentions-to a point.

"The real battle for her is between what she sees as literature and an organ like The New York Observer , which she feels threatens it," he said. "It can be threatening, but I wouldn't go all the way with her."

Ms. Julavits seems to have stepped out-tentatively-onto her own personal platform, and she has future issues of The Believer to try to get her footing. "I'm not a grab-the-jugular kind of person," she said, calling her essay "about all I could manage." But to have any impact on literature, Ms. Julavits will have to shake the cage without hurting the animal-or risk falling into quiet, 10,000-word irrelevance. In the meantime, she said, she was in the middle of writing a review of Mr. Wood's new novel, The Book Against God . How did she find it?

"Um …, " she said, with a nervous laugh. "I still ultimately very much respect his mission as a writer."