Chastain in The Heiress. (Joan Marcus)

A great play deserves more than the mediocre revival The Heiress is getting at the Walter Kerr—and it’s too bad Walter Kerr is not around with a few well-chosen words to say so. It’s a great favorite of mine, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from the novella Washington Square by Henry James, and it’s nice to see how well the story holds up, even in a dull and dismally miscast production like the one currently on view. If you want to see perfection, drop in at the Paley Center and check out the “live” 1961 CBS-TV production with Julie Harris. You won’t see anything of that quality in the lackluster and utterly predictable version here. 

This, of course, is the powerful story of a wealthy and privileged but lonely woman, emotionally abused by a cruel, heartless and implacable father, at last brought to life by the first blush of romance, then betrayed by the fortune hunter who wins her heart, and finally hardened by bitterness into the status of a vengeful old maid. Catherine Sloper, the starring role in The Heiress, like Blanche DuBois and Hedda Gabler, has always been a magnet for actresses. The great Wendy Hiller had a personal triumph in the original Broadway production in 1947, Dame Peggy Ashcroft was the toast of London, and Olivia de Havilland won an Academy Award for the distinguished 1949 film by William Wyler, which has become something of a cult classic. Julie Harris remains my personal favorite in the role, but Jane Alexander scored her own success in the 1976 revival, as did Cherry Jones in 1995. No similar crown of laurels deserves to be bestowed on the fledgling movie actress Jessica Chastain, who works diligently as the new reincarnation of the ill-fated heiress of Washington Square, but to little avail. Without the stage experience to bring Catherine to three-dimensional life, she wafts across mahogany floors past Derek McLane’s fussy, oppressive and very old-fashioned rust-colored brocade curtains and velveteen wall fabrics under massive crown moldings—the perfect embodiment of a velvet tomb—as if she’s waiting for a camera angle, or the kind of forceful guidance nobody ever gets from the wooden director Moisés Kaufman.

She is not alone. With the exception of Judith Ivey as Catherine’s giddy, gossipy, clucking Aunt Lavinia, always encouraging in others the joys she’s never found for herself, the entire cast rarely rises above community-theater standards. As much as I have admired David Strathairnelsewhere, he never brings the role of Dr. Austin Sloper to life. He never forgave Catherine for her beloved mother’s death in childbirth, so he raised his daughter to believe she was a drab, socially awkward failure, ignoring her pain and oblivious to her desperate need for affection. In his disappointed eyes, she could never live up to his late wife’s beauty and grace. Mr. Strathairn has a bizarre uncertainty about who Dr. Sloper is and what he feels; one minute he’s concerned for Catherine’s welfare, the next minute he’s stripping her dignity and self-confidence to shreds. How one misses the arrogance, selfishness and overwhelming electricity of Ralph Richardson’s stern patriarch in the film. Dr. Sloper has so little faith in his daughter’s ability to attract a suitable mate that when she meets a handsome, charming suitor named Morris Townsend, he becomes instantly suspicious of his motives and cuts off the engagement. With the bland Dan Stevens as Morris, you can hardly blame him. This cardboard blond from the TV series Downton Abbey is no Montgomery Clift, but he’s no Morris, either. Morris is an impecunious bachelor, always described as “dashing and suave,” but Mr. Stevens, gesturing wildly with his hands on every verb, shaking his head like someone with palsy, and hiding his British accent behind a clumsy American cadence, comes off as little more than a callow amateur. Monty Clift played Morris in the film with more subtlety, and therefore more danger. Mr. Stevens doesn’t present much of a challenge.

Ms. Chastain, who was memorable in The Help, is out of her element here. Deserted on the night of her elopement after Morris overhears her refusing her father’s inheritance, the roses in her cheeks flushed by desire wilt fast, and she closes herself off like a metal lockbox. Two years later, when he returns, broken and needy himself, Catherine has turned frosty and cynical. Now it’s her turn for revenge. In the play’s most haunting and heartbreaking scene, she draws the drapes, turns out the lights and slowly climbs the stairs, ignoring Morris’ futile knocks at the beaded glass doors. Every actress I have ever seen in this scene sent a chill down my spine that stayed there. In this production, I was completely unmoved. Ms. Chastain is too attractive for the part (hard to believe she couldn’t find a boyfriend, even in 1850). She’s made-up to look plain as a potato, right down to the severe hairstyle, but so lovely (cheekbones for days) that she fails to make convincing the transitions from a brave, hopeful girl on the threshold of love to weathered, pallid, steely-spined spinster. They’re all playing the text, but not the subtext. They say the words in the careful, precise script, but there is no richness in the sound, no discovery in the characterizations, and with the exception of Judith Ivey, no vocal energy. Mr. Kaufman’s direction, like the acting, is shallow, external and mystifyingly lacking in passion.

The Heiress is classy material, the kind of skillful and well-structured drawing-room drama that is a rarity in these days of empty “concept” theater. It’s still a first-rate play—refined, intelligent and well worth seeing again—even when it’s poorly served by a second-rate production.

NOTHING BLAND ABOUT The Whale, a depressing slice of in-your-face intensity at Playwrights Horizons starring Shuler Hensley. Maybe you remember his Tony Award-winning performance as gloomy, doomed Jud Fry in Oklahoma! A celebrated opera singer with an international reputation, he can also act. In the most punishing role of his career, he plays Charlie, a 600-pound artery explosion waiting to happen, with a blood pressure of 238 over 134, literally eating himself to death. In what is clearly a performance equally dynamic and horrifying as Daniel Everidge’s autistic 18-year-old in the dynamic play Falling (which has now resumed performances down at the Minetta Lane Theatre in West Village), Mr. Hensley is not to be missed for pure shock value. 

Tasha Lawrence and Hensley in The Whale.

Samuel D. Hunter, the playwright, may be making a cautionary wake-up-and-smell-the-formaldehyde statement about the fatal dangers of obesity in American society, or he may just be throwing a live electric wire into the audience with the hope that nobody gets electrocuted. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what the point of The Whale is. I just know I was glued to the stage for one hour and 50 minutes without an intermission. No time for a bathroom break. Maybe you won’t need one. The play is so riveting you don’t want to miss anything—like figuring out how Mr. Hensley manages to stand erect in a costume the size of a grain elevator.

He can’t leave his cluttered shambles of an apartment (designed by Mimi Lien with such cramped realism you can smell the pot smoke and the vomit), so he makes a living tutoring students online on how to write and edit essays interpreting literary classics. Right now he’s obsessed with finishing his own essay about Moby Dick, which he considers a metaphor for his own life. Whale ... victim ... destined to die in the end—get it? Charlie is also a weepy, self-loathing homosexual who has been a maudlin recluse since the death of his lover Alan, who was the son of a Mormon bishop. His only friend is an enabling nurse named Liz, a lapsed Mormon who drops by to bring him a fat-boy wheelchair, then saves him from choking to death on a meatball submarine. The misery escalates with the arrival of a 19-year-old door-to-door Mormon deacon who offers spiritual guidance, and Charlie’s sullen teenage daughter Ellie, whom he hasn’t seen for nearly 15 years. Ellie is a high-school Poison Ivy who insults the father she hates, hooks the devout Mormon on dope and reluctantly finishes the essay after Charlie promises to leave her his life savings of $150,000. In the end, the human Humvee is deserted by all.

Would you believe me when I say I found it as engaging as it is bewildering? I couldn’t tell you what it means with a gun pointed at my head, but Mr. Hunter’s writing and Davis McCallum’s direction formed an impassioned and arresting clash of minds and emotions that held my interest. And when all else fails, there is the marvel of Mr. Hensley with his head protruding from a gargantuan mountain of lumpy flesh that makes Ionesco’s Rhinoceros look like Tom Thumb. Throwing up a meatball sub is a far cry from singing with the New York Philharmonic, but that costume will be the talk of the town at next year’s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

rreed@observer.com

Above all, there’s the pair of pieces on which his reputation rests. The two-part 1978 profile of Ahmet Ertegun is a tour de force that’s even better than its title, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse.” Two years later came “Within the Context of No Context,” a one-of-a-kind meditation on America falling and television rising, which is almost as good as its title. “Context” is, among many other things, surely the only jeremiad (and make no mistake, that’s the tradition it belongs to) ever to dwell at length on People magazine, the Pointer Sisters, the 1964 World’s Fair and the impossibility of now wearing a fedora without irony.

Trow had an impeccable, fedora-filled pedigree. This is where the earlier of his two author photos comes in. It appears on the dust jacket of Bullies (1980), a collection of stories; on the book version of Context (1981); and on an oddly inert novel, The City in the Mist (1984). Trow, who also wrote several plays and had two film scripts produced, could pass in that early photo for a more effete version of Dick Cavett in his who-ever-heard-of-Charlie-Rose heyday: grinning, blond, suffused with a wholly unaffected preppie enthusiasm. It was a look he came by naturally. The scion of a well-to-do publishing family, Trow grew up in the pages of a Cheever gazetteer: Greenwich, Cos Cob, Bedford. He went to Exeter, like his father. At Harvard, he was president of the Lampoon. Later, he helped found National Lampoon.

Trow’s Harvard timing could hardly have been better. The West Point class of 1915 came to be known as “the class stars fell on,” owing to the many cadets who later became generals; the Harvard class of 1965 was the one Eustace Tilly fell on. Its members included Trow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Jacob Brackman, Jonathan Schell and Wallace Shawn (who qualifies as a legacy, if not a hire). After a stint in the Coast Guard, Trow remained on staff at The New Yorker until he quit in disgust over Tina Brown’s depredations. His Times obituary quoted her arch response to his resignation: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.” Trow had the last laugh. Soon after Brown decamped for Talk, he was back in The New Yorker with two long pieces excerpted from what would be his final book. My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999) simultaneously sharpens, expands upon and occludes the themes of “Context.” It says a great deal about Trow’s capacity to astonish that the hero is someone as square as Ahmet Ertegun is hip: Dwight Eisenhower.

My Pilgrim’s Progress bears the other Trow author photo. He’s bald now, not so much aged as worn down. Boyish charm has given way to a well-muscled wariness. He looks far more like a truck driver than a New Yorker writer, let alone one so highly mannered. There was such rigor to Trow’s stylization that it became an almost solid thing on the page, as likely to affect content as form. He became increasingly fond of coming up with highly opaque categories, or “Big Topics,” as he calls them in Progress. A mild tendency in “Context,” this fondness for categorization verges on mania in Trow’s last book: “Big Human Interest,” “Modern Academic Vectors,” “Mainstream American Popular Artifact.” They sound like a parody of sociological jargon, except that Trow deploys them in all sincerity. Part of what makes his writing so unnerving at times is its blending of earnestness and hauteur. And the hauteur can be breathtaking. He was that rarest of things, a true American aristocrat.

Mandarin prose and mandarin pose often coincide, of course. What’s rare is their sharing the page with an abiding sense of civic virtue. That idea of patriotic engagement sets him apart from Henry James, with whom one might think Trow would neatly align. James often seemed slightly pained at being American. Trow would have fit right in as a James character, except that he would have terrified James. Even if there weren’t something forbidding about the intensity of scrutiny in Trow’s best writing, the fierceness of its intelligence, James would have been confounded by so profound an attachment to the public realm. That attachment may have been the least complicated thing about so exquisitely complicated a man—unexpected, yes, but also direct and heartfelt. Edmund Wilson once described Robert E. Lee as having belonged to “the Roman phase of the Republic.” However anachronistic, Trow belonged to it too, even if he lived in an age closer in spirit to Roman decadence. Robert E. Lee, after all, never went to Studio 54 with Diana Vreeland for Bianca Jagger’s birthday party.

America, Trow wrote in the class report for his 15th Harvard reunion, “is a glory of a country, and a glorious idea for a country, and we would be saved now by the love of it if the idea of the love of it hadn’t been strip-mined and left ugly.” Imagine that Henry Adams’ and Edith Wharton’s friendship had taken an intimate turn; Trow could have been their grandson. The dates line up nicely. So do the obsessions and the sorrows.

Mark Feeney is the author of Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press). Next spring he will be Robbins Professor of Writing at Princeton.

“And I am generally in my 20’s,” she continued, “full of aspiration, very much overlooked, very diffident, very envious, very aspiring—all those things.” Then she added after a pause, “I have stood still and the decades have passed.”

For a woman who has “stood still” as the decades passed, however, Ms. Ozick has accomplished some rather remarkable feats.

During the 50 or so years since she was a “diffident,” “envious” and “aspiring” young writer, Ms. Ozick has become known as one of the most rigorous scribes of her generation. Long hailed as a writer’s writer, she is one of those rare literary double-threats who is as comfortable scribbling the lyrical prose of fiction as she is thundering away in a polemical essay. She has written five novels and five books of essays, several collections of stories, a smattering of poetry and a play called The Shawl, based on her haunting story of the same name about a broken survivor of the Holocaust. In February 2005, she was nominated along with Philip Roth, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez and several other literary titans for the first Man Booker International Prize for achievement—which is to say, all-around literary titanism—in writing.

Ms. Ozick didn’t win in the end (the prize went to the Albanian author Ismail Kadaré), but it was a powerful acknowledgement of a career that has flared increasingly brightly in recent years. For the first 15 or so years of her writing life, the young Ms. Ozick scribbled and imagined largely in obscurity, without publishing a single book or story (though several poems did make it into print). Even later, when her books had won acclaim and admirers, she was often assigned the role of “Jewish writer,” a title that still makes her bristle—not out of shame or self-denial, she says, but because the notion of a Jewish writer is an oxymoron.

“The Jewish side represents all kinds of sobriety, responsibility, civic decency,” she explained. “The writer side represents the vilde chaya [wild beast]. And the beast and the citizen can’t live side by side in the same person.”

But in recent years, with the publication of 1997’s The Puttermesser Papers and last year’s Heir to the Glimmering World in particular, the landscape of perception has begun to shift. Each novel was greeted as a kind of literary event, showered with praise and nominated for awards. There was a sense that Ms. Ozick had arrived, finally achieved the potential of her awesome writerly powers and claimed her place among her generation.

Ms. Ozick, however, finds the idea perplexing. “I don’t feel any difference between how I wrote when I was 22 and how I write now,” she said. “I just feel that it’s the same flame.”

“Flame” is the essential word for Ms. Ozick, who holds writing as a kind of sacred rite, a ner tamid, that must be carefully nurtured and honored. True writing, she has said, is not a profession or anything so grubby and striving as a “career”—a word she “repudiates”—but rather is a devotion demanding an almost “religious immersion.” Never mind that she has often, and paradoxically, railed against this literature worship as a kind of paganism in her essays; she has honored it, practiced it, upheld it in her own daily life.

“Writing comes to genuine writers in this way of no choice, ein brira,” she said, punctuating the thought with Hebrew. “I often quote Martin Luther: Ich kann nicht anders. I can do no other.”

Ms. Ozick knew that she was a writer “as soon” as she was sentient, she said. Growing up in the Bronx, the daughter of Jewish immigrants who ran a local pharmacy, she began spouting stories before she could even read or write. “My mother was my amanuensis,” she recalled. “She recorded some poems that I was writing.”

The young Ms. Ozick embarked on a formal writing path at 22, after returning from Ohio State University, where she had received her master’s degree in literature (she wrote her thesis on Henry James, who has remained one of her most enduring inspirations). It was not an easy beginning.

Her first effort was a “philosophical novel” called Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love (or MPPL) that she eventually abandoned after several long and fevered years of work. From there, she moved on to another massive novel called Trust, which took nearly seven years, and a novella, which she dashed off in six weeks. The novella never made it into print, but Trust went to press in 1966. (Despite its lack of critical recognition, she maintains that Trust displayed some of her best writing.) Ms. Ozick was nearly 40.

“Along with despair, I had a great deal of envy of my age cohort—to use a sociological term—who were publishing and distinguishing themselves with a great deal of recognition,” she said of those early, struggling years. “But along with this envy and suffering, there was a great deal of reading and enormous determination.”

This determination began to bear fruit in the late 1960’s, as Ms. Ozick turned for a time from novel writing and began scratching out short stories and, later, essays. Tracing many of the Jewish themes that have continued to define her writings, these stories, like “The Pagan Rabbi” and “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” were incisive and lyrical, and they quickly established her as a nascent force in the small but influential world of Jewish intellectuals and authors. Work begat work. She spilled out stories, novellas, and fierce polemics on feminism, anti-Semitism, Israel, Palestinians, art, Holocaust denial and a library’s worth of other combustible topics. Along the way, she raised a daughter, Rachel, who is now the director of Jewish studies at SUNY Purchase.

These days, the daughter has her own children and Ms. Ozick is a white-haired grandmother. But little has changed in the force of her writing beyond, perhaps, her habit of working late into the night rather than beginning early in the morning.

“[I sit] in a tiny room off the bedroom,” she said. “It’s got a window, and I don’t face the window because I don’t want to be distracted. It has no plants in it, because I don’t want anything to breathe or live around me. The phone doesn’t ring; it’s very still. It’s not the real world then.”

The unreal world—or, more precisely, creating unreal worlds—has always been Ms. Ozick’s true passion. As a young woman, she always imagined that she would write “many novels.” That was her dream, and she confessed that she is “disappointed” in herself for not writing more fiction.

And so, as she looks to the coming years, she has decided to devote herself primarily and pre-eminently to the world of the unreal, to writing short stories—including one she is finishing now called “What Happened to the Baby”—and to weaving novels.

“I just essentially want to keep writing fiction,” she said. “That’s my very old ambition, unaltered.”

The title of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Line of Beauty, refers to, amongst other things: Hogarth's theory of pictorial composition; the line of cocaine snorted by the book's hero, Nick, from the back of a Henry James novel; and the snaking line traced by the body of Nick's gay lover as they engage in punishing sessions of sexual make-believe beneath Guardi's Capriccio and S. Giorgio Maggiore. Mr. Hollinghurst's novel-his fourth-won the Booker Prize earlier this year and was judged a worthy winner, if only because it meant that at some point in the awards ceremony, the great and the good of literary London were required to hoist themselves up from their tables, champagne flutes in hand, tuxes bulging, to toast a novel which hymns the joys of al fresco anal intercourse: "His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a boy's, his fingertip pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that Leo let out a happy grunt." I wonder what everyone had for dessert.

The novel is bookended by the elections of 1983 and 1989, the prime Thatcher years, and any American reader worried that they may have a hard time unraveling the warp and weft of Thatcher's Britain-lovingly inventoried, from its property market spirals to its newfangled "Talkman" portable phones-will find instant connection with Mr. Hollinghurst's summary of the Tory re-election in 1983: "The men did something naughty, and got away with it, and not only did they get away with it but they'd been asked to do it again, with a huge majority." Oh, that kind of re-election.

Our hero is Nick Guest, self-proclaimed aesthete and Henry James fan, who, after graduating, moves in with the family of a college friend, the Feddens, in their Notting Hill townhouse. A social butterfly eager to show off his wings, Nick is soon drawn into the orbit of father Gerald, a blithely brutish Tory M.P., at whose dinner parties and fund-raising soirées he encounters all manner of social climbers, clingers, creepers and other assorted human foliage. "What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?" one of Gerald's guests inquires of Nick. "He'd have been very kind to us," comes the reply, "he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us."

Which is pretty much what we get here: beautiful, wonderful people, who are given lots of incredibly subtle things to say, and who realize only too late-or, in some cases, not at all-that we can see right through them. Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror. Here's a fat-faced M.P. "pop-eyed already from the tussle between pompous discretion and a natural love of scandal." Here's a gaggle of graduates "rowdy and superior at once in the Oxford way." And here's Nick's lover, the fabulous Antoine Ouradi, descended from the cloud strata of the international rich-France? Beirut?-to hold forth at the dinner table: "His technique was to hold a subject up and show his command of it, and then to throw it away in smiling contempt for their interest in it."

Ouch. In fact: double ouch. This sort of compounded disdain-Antoine's for his listeners, Mr. Hollinghurst's for Antoine for disdaining them-is so wonderfully beguiling that it may be some time before the reader plucks up courage to ask if this is all the novel is going to be: a thousand deft flicks of the knife, carving one of those glittering, heartless ice sculptures that command our admiration rather than our love. If you put this novel down, unpraised, what might it say about you behind your back? Better to go on reading. Something of the same queasy gravitational pull keeps Nick bobbing at the Feddon's dinner-table, registering his delicately modulated disapproval, only to return and start his ascent up the greasy pole all over again. The reader may well find himself tiring of the Feddens a little sooner than he does, however, and longing for some breath of fresh air beyond the rococo gilt frames, damask curtains and Louis Quinze tables. How adequate a response to snobs is it to feel subtly superior to them? Isn't it like teaching a thug the error of his ways by beating him up? Just like Waugh's Brideshead Revisited before it, The Line of Beauty can at times feel queasily caught in its own honey trap.

It might have been written, in fact, in order to illustrate the proposition that aesthetic snobbery and social snobbery are two sides of the same coin. Jamesian aesthete turned Tory stooge, Nick's sensibility settles on and conforms to the shapes and surfaces of this world as beautifully, and limply, as gold leaf. When Maggie Thatcher herself puts in a cameo appearance-"her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticists and the Baroque"-you're not sure whether to give him an A in art history or a D in political science. It's hard to pin down the tone here: a kind of bitchy rapture, half in love with the political kitsch of the Thatcher years. As a record of such, The Line of Beauty is unlikely to be surpassed-whether as exhibit or exposé is for the reader to decide.

Tom Shone, author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Henry James was speaking of death, but were he alive today, he might also be speaking of the election: curious to see how it is going to turn out, but filled with apprehension nonetheless.

This voter is going to pull the lever for Kerry-Edwards.

I will do so with a certain hesitation, realizing that this puts me on the same side of the aisle with a bunch of people—in the media, mainly—for whom it is hard not to feel unmitigated intellectual contempt, if only because their unreasoning, shrill and narrow Bush-hatred has engendered a revulsion in a great many thoughtful middle-of-the road Americans that has made this election a good deal closer than it should have been, and permitted doubt and indecision to linger much longer than they should have. We don’t want to be seen in public with Ann Coulter, say, but we equally don’t want to be identified with the crowd at The Nation. We no longer care what the Scaife gang may have done or not done to Bill Clinton; most of us feel that Mr. Clinton put himself in a bad spot to begin with. We no longer care about the 2000 election. Al Gore isn’t running in this one—which is the only election we care about.

My own mind was made up over the weekend. I am not an America-blamer, but I cannot help feeling some personal responsibility, some deep shame at the carelessness on our part that led to the murder of 49 young Iraqi men being trained to do a job whose objective is to let us get out of a situation we should never have been in. This event, more than any other, underlines the contemptible moral indifference and the criminal lack of grasp that is the essence of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s administration. Nor can any reasonable person continue to accept the administration’s claim that America is safer today, when enough high-tech explosive materiel to blow up half the globe has gone missing on their watch. Some of that stuff is going to turn up in this country, mark you: on an F train, in a container on the docks of Los Angeles or New Orleans, in the cargo hold of an Airbus, in the basement of 7 Liberty Plaza.

Whatever he is, or isn’t, John Kerry is not mad, and I am no longer certain that the President isn’t. Last week I referred to Mr. Bush as "George of Arc," and I believe the comparison with the voices-driven warrior maid of Domremy holds. As my Cambridge Biographical Dictionary puts it: "Belief in her divine mission made her flout military advice—in the end disastrously." As the news from Iraq has steadily worsened, the President seems to be increasingly faith-driven, relying on inner voices to drown out dissent or any suggestion that Iraq is a mistake—actually, Iraq is what you get when you hire a management consulting firm, a Mc-Kinsey, say, or an Accenture, to design you a war—and to reassure him that he’s done and is doing the right thing.

In a word, I think the President may be unbalanced; he may be playing with considerably fewer than the 52 cards we expect to find when we fan out the Presidential deck. Through all three debates, I kept trying to put my finger on what it was about the President’s tics and twitches that bothered me. "Trying to put my finger on"—oh, cut the crap! I was simply rejecting what my eyes and ears were telling me: This guy is f——— nuts!

And while he gives himself over to his private angelic chorus, the clever men, sensing a last good chance, fan out from behind the arras to complete the globalized larceny that has been Mr. Cheney’s thief’s-dream since the 2001 inaugural: to steal for his corporate and K Street controllers what can be. You want an example? Here’s a good recent one. The administration passed a bill, with much fanfare, to pay for AIDS drugs for disease-ravaged African countries like Uganda. Then the K Street boys got busy. Instead of using the U.S. subventions to buy readily available drugs at generic prices—between one-third and one-sixth of list—the initiative specifies that this particular withdrawal on the Public Capital buy the drugs from the big pharmaceutical companies at full price. More whimper for the buck, you might say, but what the hell: just as long as the fat cats get fatter. It has the doctors in Africa who are trying to stem the epidemic shaking their heads in disbelief.

At the end of the day, it is impossible not to feel grave reservations about both candidates. But there’s a big difference: Reservations with respect to Mr. Kerry are grounded in uncertainty. But the reservations I feel about Mr. Bush are grounded in certainty. With the former, I worry about the nation; with the latter, I fear for it. Those to me are grounds enough.

Mr. Marston has managed to avoid all the traps of this sensational and potentially sickening subject: the recruitment and exploitation of "mules" acting as human drug conveyor belts from Bogotá, Colombia, to New York. The writer-director obviously researched his material thoroughly and takes his time establishing the economic motivation for "mules" like Maria, who accept life-threatening risks on their comparatively high-paying missions.

Maria is from a small rural town north of Bogotá. She lives in a small house with her grandmother, mother, sister and infant nephew. Each morning, she leaves before dawn to catch the bus that takes her to work at the large industrial rose plantation just outside of town. Once there, Maria spends long hours removing thorns from the roses for very low wages (consistent with Colombia's annual average income of $1,830). Maria and her best friend, Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), both yearn for a better life.

Life in Maria's hometown is not all sweatshop sorrow, though, particularly when there's a party on the plaza on the weekends, with live salsa music. Maria dances feverishly with any partner she can find. As we slowly get to know her, we see signs in her eyes that she's restless with her limited options, embodied by her stick-in-the-mud boyfriend Juan (Wilson Guererro), who's content to mope around without ambition. Juan has managed to get Maria pregnant, however, and he even half-heartedly offers to marry her-except that they'd have to live in his mother's house with eight other people.

Maria counters that his mother hates her, but Juan will not hear of living in Maria's mother's house, because that would be "unmanly."

This grotesque level of machismo helps convince Maria to go to Bogotá with a shady young acquaintance who owns a motorcycle. The second act of Maria Full of Grace is thus set into motion. This leisurely development of Maria's character is characteristic of the film's unhurried, unruffled and unhysterical treatment of each stage of her descent into hell, all the way to her epiphany and eventual self-salvation.

The flight from Bogotá to New York is nail-bitingly suspenseful, as Maria, Blanca and a new friend named Lucy must reassure one another that they will survive their ordeal. (If one of the pouches breaks in her stomach, the mule will very likely die from the resulting heroin overdose.) When Lucy begins complaining that she doesn't feel well, Maria has to reassure her that they will get a doctor in time in New York to save her. Maria also has to calm the perpetually fearful Blanca.

When she arrives in New York, Maria is immediately pulled aside by the authorities, who threaten to X-ray her stomach-until they realize that she's pregnant. Apparently, regulations forbid X-raying pregnant women. Maria is saved by her baby, in a sense, but Lucy is not so lucky. The utter ruthlessness of the drug cartel injects the single note of lurid melodrama into the film, but even here, the two thugs out of central casting who keep watch over the three "mules" until they excrete their precious cargo behave, in the end, with a modicum of decency and fairness.

But it's Maria who never falters, who faces every threat to her very existence with courage and resolution. Her angelic smile as she listens to the heartbeat of her unborn baby compares in its madonna-like majesty with Anna Magnani's smile at the miracle of her baby in Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (1948). Still, the inevitable futility of the so-called war on drugs-like, one fears, the war on terror-is suggested by the film's subtext: that there are millions of potential Marias in the Third World, just as there are an estimated six million addicts in the United States helping to make the drug trade a $46 billion industry.

It's become a piece of conventional wisdom that Prohibition was an unwise experiment, however noble its intentions. The fact remains that there was a marked decrease in spousal abuse and cases of liver damage during the years it was in effect. Still, all that was outlawed during Prohibition was the sale and transport of alcoholic beverages. If the mere possession or consumption of alcohol had been illegal, half the people in America would have been imprisoned. Let's legalize drugs and use the money saved to improve the living and working conditions of the world's Marias. Quelle illusion grande …. In the meantime, don't miss Maria Full of Grace ; it is the most amazing first film I have seen in a long time.

Couch Surfing

Patrice Leconte's Intimate Strangers ( Confidences Trop Intimes ), from a screenplay by Mr. Leconte and Jérôme Tonnere, is the director's 20th film in a 35-year career of pushing the envelope in a variety of genres. His most recent triumph was Man on the Train (2003), which celebrated the strange friendship between a whimsical bank robber and an adventure-seeking poetry teacher, who end up switching roles and life styles to follow their dream lives. Intimate Strangers explores the same path of psychic and professional dislocation, but this time between a man and a woman. Fabrice Luchini plays William Faber, a mildly repressed tax accountant with a quiet, well-ordered life; Sandrine Bonnaire plays Anna, a troubled woman who is seeking psychiatric help for a marriage that is going on the rocks.

As it turns out, Anna misunderstands some directions that she has received and opens the door to William's office, thinking it's the office of her psychiatrist, Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy). Before William can correct her mistake, Anna is pouring out all her most intimate secrets. William is so fascinated by her revelations that he decides to continue his role as an analyst just so that he can hear more. Not that the voluble Anna gives the dumbfounded William any time to explain her error: In a rush of confidences, she reveals that she has been married for four years to a layabout husband who stays at home while Anna supports them both working in an upscale luggage boutique. She hasn't had sex with her husband for six months and fears that she's going insane. But Anna is so exhilarated by the high she's gotten from letting everything out that she impulsively sets a date for a second appointment with William, and leaves without giving him either her full name or her phone number.

Of course, Anna could be forgiven for mistaking the couch in William's office (which he uses for afternoon naps) as that most telltale piece of an analyst's furniture. Yet she soon discovers her error when she calls the real Dr. Monnier, who has figured out William's deception. Yet nothing changes in Anna's relationship with William: She enjoys the intensity with which he listens to her innermost secrets, though she is angry at first over his passive betrayal. For his part, William begins consulting Dr. Monnier about his own infatuation with Anna and his peculiar role as her confidante. This three-way ricochet of unusual insights is typical of the civilized texture of Mr. Leconte's imagination. None of the main characters reacts boorishly to the sheer unexpectedness of the situation.

Hence, even when William begins to doubt the truth of Anna's assertions, and even when his jealous ex-wife warns him about her, he persists in his obsession with Anna and what she's come to represent in his life. And he's rewarded by a confirmation of Anna's truthfulness when her husband pops up in William's office with a bizarre request-that William make love to Anna in their home, where the husband can watch. This eventually leads to William and Anna separately deciding to change the routines of their lives-which, after many detours, leads them to merge once again in a very original manner.

The thematic key to the film is embedded in a reference to a book that William lends Anna from his own library, a book she finds too "literary" for her taste. William has slyly described it as a gloomy story of unhappy English people. The book is Henry James' magnificent novella, "The Beast in the Jungle," which projects the extraordinary Jamesian insight into a life not lived with some of the richest prose in the English language.

James' John Marcher finds himself in the same position at the beginning of the story as Mr. Leconte's William Faber at the beginning of Intimate Strangers . But whereas William accepts Anna's implicit challenge to uproot his stagnant life and pursue his heart's desire, Marcher retreats from a similar challenge represented by May Bartram until it's too late. As Marcher stands at May's grave, James writes: "He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened-it was close; and instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb."

Mr. Luchini and Ms. Baye brilliantly lead William and Anna to a far more life-affirming modus vivendi than that envisaged by James for Marcher and May. In the process, Mr. Leconte has achieved nothing less than a feat of cinematic magic.

The Love Train

Sun Zhou's Zhou Yu's Train , from a screenplay by Mr. Sun, Bei Cun and Zhang Mei, brings back the ineffable Gong Li, the glorious muse and mistress of China's greatest filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, and star of such classics as Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and Shanghai Triad (1995). Ms. Gong served the same function for Western audiences in their discovery of Chinese cinema as Machiko Kyô and Kinuyo Tanaka did in their awakening to Japanese cinema through the works of Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa.

Unfortunately, since Ms. Gong parted company with Mr. Zhang, the creative loss has been felt on both sides. Mr. Sun's Zhou Yu's Train is a case in point: Its relentless, dream-like lyricism is undermined by a curiously insubstantial narrative about a young painter, Zhou Yu (Ms. Gong), who works in a ceramics factory in Samsung, an industrial city in northwest China. Twice a week, she takes a long train journey to the rural village of Chongyang in order to see and sleep with her lover, Chen Qing (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a shy, reclusive poet who lives in a dusty library, where he writes verses celebrating his love for Zhou Yu.

It's a rather curious career conundrum: The poet can get his poems published in the newspapers, but he can't find any publisher-short of paying a vanity press-to put them in a book. I wonder if serious poets in America have it any easier?

Zhou Yu has a more practical suitor in Zhang Quiang (Honglei Sun), a veterinarian who has seen her on the train and can't get over her, no matter how many times she rebuffs him. The two men are not really rivals for the girl's love; the rivalry is actually in Zhou Yu herself-between her mind and her heart, between reality and illusion, between being awake or lost in one's dreams.

I cannot argue with critics who found the film pretentious and inflated, but I somehow enjoyed it for its deification of the female on her endless journey to eventual oblivion. Come to think of it, this emphasis on the desirability of the female is what I also liked about Maria Full of Grace and Intimate Strangers . I guess it's a subject I'm naturally interested in.

Film Notes

Film Forum is showing a beautiful new print of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), the film that first alerted us to the pernicious tyranny of the paparazzi. If you've never seen it, don't miss it-and if you have seen it, see it again.

In his new novel, The Master , the Irish writer Colm Tóibín has undertaken a triply difficult task. Historical fiction poses one set of challenges, fiction about fiction-writers poses another. To attempt a novel about no less a figure than Henry James might be seen as foolhardy. Yet Mr. Tóibín has stared the nearly impossible in the face and achieved a quiet tour de force: a work of deep seriousness and sympathy that gives us a genius in his full human dimensions.

James is an inconvenient colossus of American literature: essential, monumental, more respected than liked. This was true in his own time as now. At the turn of the century-the period in which Mr. Tóibín's novel finds him-James was an international celebrity of sorts, an American who had been living as an expatriate in Europe for 30 years, and a famously difficult man: arrogant, bloated, prickly and magisterial, his personal impenetrability of a piece with his infamously ornate prose. Early works like Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady , in which energetic and idealistic young Americans encountered and ultimately outshone cynical and devious Europeans, were clearly and forcefully written, and attracted a large audience. But as his style grew rococo, and his characters more ambivalent, James' books ceased to sell. Accordingly, he decided to become-as though such a thing were possible to decide-a successful playwright.

The memorably disastrous London premiere of his play Guy Domville , in January 1895 (taking the stage at the curtain call, James was booed), nearly destroyed him. Instead, it led him to the peak of his artistic career.

The Master covers five years in James' life, from Guy Domville to the fall of 1899, when, newly established in his beloved English-seacoast retreat Lamb House, James has just begun the first great novel of his major phase, The Ambassadors . The "arc" of The Master , then, is from failure to triumph, but true to its subject, nothing so vulgar as an arc is evident in the narrative, which closely follows the events of James' real life and, much like a Henry James novel (but strictly in the style of Colm Tóibín), is carried forward by the endlessly subtle play of human relations.

Early in the novel, James flees England and the Domville debacle to accept an invitation to a noblewoman's Irish estate-and, not surprisingly, finds himself surrounded by the boorishly rich and powerful. A wealthy woman shows up with her 10-year-old daughter, the only child on the premises. James takes acute notice of little Mona's elaborately concealed discomfort at her surroundings:

"He pulled himself back from the doorway just as Lady Wolseley let out another shrill laugh at some remark of Mr. Webster's. In his last glimpse of Mona she was smiling as though the joke had been a pleasantry to amuse her, everything about her an effort to disguise the fact that she was clearly in a place where she should not be, listening to words or insinuations she should not have to hear. He went back to his rooms."

There he speaks with a servant he has befriended, a handsome ex-military man named Hammond who, it turns out, has a sister just Mona's age. James asks:

"'Does Mona put her in your mind when you see her?'

"'My sister does not roam freely, sir, she is a real treasure.'

"'Surely Mona is protected by her nanny and, indeed, her mother?'

"'I'm sure she is, sir.'

"Hammond cast his eyes down, looking troubled as though he wished to say something and was being prevented. He turned his head towards the window and remained still. The light caught half his face while half stayed in shadow; the room was quiet enough for Henry to hear his breathing. Neither of them moved or spoke. Henry appreciated that if anyone could see them now, if others were to stand in the doorway as he had done earlier, or manage to see in through the window, they would presume that something momentous had occurred between them, that their silence had merely arisen because so much had been said. Suddenly, Hammond let out a quick breath and smiled at him softly and benignly before taking a tray from the table and leaving the room."

The Mona incident prefigures What Maisie Knew . But equally to the point, the scenes with Hammond are laden with sexual tension-tension which is, of course, never resolved.

Anyone who has even traipsed lightly through Leon Edel's magnificent biography of James knows that the novelist was a man of more than many parts-an infinitely fine sensibility, a wounded soul, a profound lifelong capacity for friendship, a sly and subtle sense of humor, and a tormented sexuality. It's all too easy to surmise that James' textual thickets are a metaphoric screen. By all evidence, he seems never to have had a heterosexual experience, though he had deep if conflicted relationships with a number of women, most notably his cousin Minny Temple and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, both of whom served him as models for fictional heroines (and both of whom we meet, in flashback, in The Master ). And while there's ample documentation that he had strong erotic feelings for men (including his doting and domineering older brother, the writer and philosopher William James), it appears doubtful he ever acted on his impulses-and in any case, in the end, it's impossible to know.

It's emblematic of the many generous pleasures of The Master that Mr. Tóibín, a gay man and a writer in whose fiction and nonfiction male homosexuality has figured strongly, has depicted with utter persuasiveness a genius who insistently, and to a certain extent tragically, sublimated his own sexuality. The great love of his life was a handsome Norwegian-American sculptor named Hendrik Andersen, 27 years old to the Master's 56 when they met. James lavished the young man with attention and affectionate letters, entertained him at Lamb House.

But in a scene of delicious ambivalence near the end of the novel, it becomes clear, as Andersen describes to James his great artistic dream, "a genuine world city, a place of great buildings and monuments," that though Andersen's form and youthful enthusiasm are magnetic, he's also a bit of a pompous bore:

"Henry's mind was half-filled with the work of the morning …. Compared to the city which Andersen was inventing, it was both nothing and everything. In its detail and its dialogue, its slow movement and its mystery, it stood against abstraction, against the grayness and foolishness of large concepts. But it stood singly and small and unprotected, barely present; it would take up a small space in a great and monumental library in a city where reading in solitude would not be part of his friend's magnificent dream."

This small space is precisely the space of literature, described by a writer who understands it deeply. And his quiet but profound novel is-dare one say it?-masterly.

James Kaplan, the author of Two Guys from Verona (Grove Press), is at work on a new novel.

Eakins' fine portrait of Whitman is also in the exhibition, and the parallel interests that united the painter and the much older poet have frequently been noted. Yet I have sometimes wondered if a very different American writer, Henry James, might not provide an ampler perspective on the famous troubles that Eakins faced in the course of his Philadelphia-bound career.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and Henry James (1843-1916) belonged, after all, to the same American generation. They were, in fact, the greatest artists of that American generation in their respective fields of endeavor. And while neither appears to have taken even the slightest interest in the other's work, they had a lot more in common than is usually recognized.

Both were pioneer artists of the Realist school whose work encountered dispiriting opposition from a philistine public. In the pursuit of their artistic vocations, however, both enjoyed the unwavering support of exceptionally liberal fathers. Both devoted some of their finest works to the depiction of women, yet in the lives of both there is a current of homoerotic sentiment that is unmistakable. In the end, both died doubting that their greatest achievements would ever win the recognition they deserved. Fortunately for us, but too late for them, both came to be elevated to a posthumous but enduring renown.

It's certainly a pity that James, who studied painting with John La Farge in his youth and wrote a great deal about the visual arts throughout his career, never got to see any of Eakins' pictures. The only time James might have had an opportunity to see an Eakins painting was in 1904-5, when he returned to the United States after a 25-year residence in Europe and paid a visit to Philadelphia. He had been invited to lecture there on Balzac, and he also attended what he called a "soirée" at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

As he later wrote in The American Scene (1907), his masterly account of reacquaintance with his native land, what he saw in the academy's galleries were not only "Sargents and Whistlers by the dozen," but what he also described as the work of "native young upstarts." The latter remained unnamed, however. Eakins had earlier on been the greatest of the "native young upstarts" in Philadelphia, but the painting that won him a gold medal at the academy in 1904-the benign Portrait of Archbishop William Henry Elder (1903)-was anything but the work of a young upstart.

In The American Scene , James gives us a vivid glimpse of the nature of Eakins' revolt against the smothering respectability that governed the cultural life of his time and place. James described Philadelphia as "settled and confirmed and content." Philadelphia, he wrote, "then wasn't a place, but a state of consanguinity, which is an absolute final condition. She had arrived at it, with nothing in the world left to bristle for, or against ... she had nothing more to invoke; she had everything; her cadres were full; her imagination was at peace."

Eakins was famously a disturber of the peace, with his insistence on making use of naked models-male as well as female-for the art classes he taught at the academy. This inevitably got him into big trouble. The Philadelphia patron who had commissioned Swimming refused to accept the painting once he saw it, asking for a more respectable picture instead. This patron was Edward H. Coates, chairman of the committee on instruction at the academy, and in 1886 he asked Eakins to resign his position as director of the schools and professor of painting at the academy. Eakins promptly resigned, and his position was abolished-all because of the naked male models.

Eakins was never a man to forget a grievance, however. When, nearly 20 years later, the same Edward Coates awarded him that gold medal for the portrait of Archbishop Elder, Eakins turned on him and declared: "I think you've got a heap of impudence to give me a medal." Afterward, he cashed in the medal at the United States Mint for $73. The only serious money Eakins made in his old age came from Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who in 1914 purchased The Portrait of Dr. Agnew , a study for The Agnew Clinic , for $4,000.

One is reminded of a certain parallel with James in this matter, too: After publishing two of his most audacious novels- The Princess Casamassima , which dealt with the subject of political terrorism and its support by the radically chic upper classes, and The Bostonians , which dealt with the politics of the feminist movement and, by implication, the lesbianism that was sometimes associated with it-the market for James' fiction collapsed. When literary friends put James' name forward for the Nobel Prize, it was rejected. And unknown to James at the time, the great project of the New York Edition of his novels and stories-for which he wrote a celebrated series of prefaces-had to be secretly subsidized by Edith Wharton. It fell on a dead market, however, and when he died in 1916, James had no public following to speak of. Different as they were in so many other respects, Eakins and James were alike in having lived what was in their day the archetypal life of the artist in America.

The Thomas Eakins exhibition remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum through Sept. 15.

Oddly-or perhaps not so oddly-Andrew Solomon found a similar reaction when he visited Afghanistan and, as he reported in a recent talk sponsored by the New York Society Library, discovered many of the women still wearing burqas. When he asked them why, one woman said she didn't want to have to face the number of choices and the expense, while another said, poignantly, "I've been invisible for so long, it's too stressful to suddenly be looked at."

Who among us doesn't feel a twinge of recognition at that sentiment, or a sneaking sympathy when the Islamists denounce the decadent images and sexual exhibitionism of our media? There has to be some middle ground between burqas on one hand and see-through blouses, microskirts and Madonna on the other, between total repression and look-at-me narcissism. But where is it?

In our praiseworthy effort to liberate the women of Afghanistan, we act as if the burqa can be cast off in an instant conversion and selfhood and agency embraced, like a prisoner throwing off his chains. But even an ex-con has trouble adapting to freedom, and the burqa is more than a temporary figure of dress: It's interwoven into the fabric of society and the female self that emerges within it, an article of clothing that is both symbol and essence.

Nor is the concept as alien to us as we'd like to think. In the Times Sunday wedding listings, some brides announce they will continue to use their names professionally, but many others do not. One group is saying, "Hey, I'm my own person-I'm out there, ready to take on the risks and rewards that putting oneself forward in a male-dominated society involves," while other women prefer merging into the safer realm of coupledom, taking the veil of privacy or anonymity that a husband's name provides.

To look or be looked at, that is the question vexing women from the time they're born. Can we do both? Only with difficulty. From the anxiety about how we look (no recent phenomenon, but more high-stakes than ever in a youth-oriented, media-obsessed society) comes the fierce and time-consuming, if often pleasurable, quest for all the appurtenances of beauty, from clothes to cosmetic surgery-all of which militate against the unself-consciousness project of looking out at the world and at one's own place in it.

Some women are born knowing how to integrate their outer and inner selves; others grow early into their bodies, more not till they're in their 40's or 50's, and there are those that never do. Judi Dench, great actress and wise woman as well as enormously attractive, insisted in an interview that she is still too insecure to look in a mirror, preferring to preserve an inner image of a tall, willowy blonde.

I thought I'd reached some sort of truce between body and self until, four years after "terminating" analysis, I recently went back for a refresher course. In the 1980's, it was moving to the couch that spooked me: I was traumatized at first by the loss of control and visual contact, by not having him there to smile, however occasionally, and reflect me back to myself. But when I returned, instead of sitting up in the approved therapy mold, I scurried to the couch. I found I didn't want to be looked at, scrutinized, found wanting.

I never believed we could simply blame men for holding us hostage to a "beauty myth." When I've appeared on television, people-plenty of them women-comment on how I look, not what I say, and I'm guilty of similarly judging (or complementing) other women. We listen to men for substance, but examine each other for surface flaws, and television has upped the ante with its Dorian Gray image of a bland and unaging female ideal, endlessly replicated modular faces that could have been created by digital technology. It's not just the interchangeable cookie-cutter blondes the news shows promote; it's the women on the grittier and more intelligent dramatic series who've suddenly gone under the blade-if not the literal surgeon's blade, then the executioner's guillotine of a culture that says, "Be young or die." Is it my imagination, or did the wonderful Allison Janney as C.J. Cregg, The West Wing 's grace-under-fire press secretary, undergo a makeover-not a "structural" transformation into unrecognizability like Greta Van Susteren, but a glamour enhancement? This year, she no longer looked frazzled, overworked, like one of us-a serious professional who wasn't getting enough sleep, possibly because she was a little scared (like most women in a high-profile job). Instead, she looked chic, her hair highlighted just so, with that perfect curtain swing that only a professional blow dry can provide. Having adored her character, I suddenly felt repelled-well, that may be too strong a word, but I was at least alienated. This was not the woman with whom I'd felt a powerful kinship, but someone who'd gone over to the other side, who'd just come down to us from Planet Glam.

Novelists like Trollope, Henry James and G.K. Chesterton loved to make sport of the bright and shiny American Beauty, and preferred heroines whose looks took longer to appreciate. Hypatia Potter in Chesterton's The Scandal of Father Brown was "one of those people to whom the word 'radiant' really does apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she allowed what the papers called her Personality to go out from her in rays. She would have been equally beautiful, and to some tastes more attractive, if she had been self-contained; but she had always been taught to believe that self-containment was only selfishness. She would have said that she had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be truer to say that she had asserted Self in Service."

Today Hypatia would be "serving" the public as a television star, ready for her close-up at all times, in contrast to the inner-directed heroines (are there any left?), the ones who wear an invisible veil and lift it only with discretion.

This is a point worth bearing in mind for anyone who goes to see the work of the American painter John Koch (1909-1978), which is currently on view at the New-York Historical Society. Realism of a certain type–an avowedly anecdotal Realism that specialized in the genteel narcissism and snobbery of what used to be called "Upper Bohemia"–was Koch's forte. He was hugely adept at mastering the technical means appropriate to his fictional subject (which was mainly focused on the social pastimes staged in the artist's lavish Central Park West apartment and studio for pictorial purposes), with its glittering cast of friends and artist's models and the tasteful props that were still associated with upper-class money and privilege in mid-20th-century America.

The result is painting that is often very entertaining, but in the way that certain Broadway shows used to be entertaining–which is to say, diverting, shallow and instantly forgettable. Or, to put the matter another way, this is painting that can be amusing in the way that other people's fantasies about themselves can sometimes be amusing–until, that is, you come to understand that they actually believe in the fantasies they have invented for themselves.

Don't be concerned, by the way, if John Koch's work, or even indeed his name, is unknown to you. Outside a certain circle of reactionary artists and their patrons, Koch was ignored in his lifetime and remains more or less unknown today. He prided himself on being at odds with the art fashions of his time–whether or not the art itself was great, indifferent or somewhere in between–and the museums that specialize in trendy developments in art returned the compliment by refusing to show his work. He wasn't a needy case, however. He enjoyed a loyal and lucrative following among a segment of well-heeled, well-connected people who were similarly disinclined to find any merit in the innovations of 20th-century painting and believed themselves to be upholding "tradition," whereas in fact they were only indulging their own incomprehension.

For collectors of this persuasion, Koch served as a kind of court painter, producing flattering family portraits and other inducements to self-esteem while at the same time producing for himself and his non-portrait clients pictorial celebrations of what passed for la vie de la bohème among the haute bourgeoisie. Many of these celebratory paintings of the artist's life are themselves group portraits–or pseudo-portraits–in which the artist himself is prominently represented along with his handsomely dressed wife and a sufficiency of naked models, male and female, to lend a note of erotic suggestion to the otherwise very genteel mise en scène .

Koch made a point of insisting that the attention he lavished on naked flesh in his paintings had nothing to do with an erotic intention, but his paintings suggest that he protested rather too much on this score. He was clearly fixated on beautiful physiques as sexual objects, and he was extremely shrewd in judging exactly how far he could go–if I may paraphrase Jean Cocteau–in going too far, especially in his pictures of young, naked, handsome couples in their well-appointed bedrooms and baths. Frankly, I think these are some of the best paintings in his entire oeuvre , for Koch tended to lose interest in his beautiful people when they were fully clothed. They became mere mannequins when his sexual interest was in abeyance. Even worse are the really dead landscapes that are devoid of figures.

Except for the sexual interest in his naked models, Koch's talents were most vividly engaged when he was painting expensive objects–old carpets and antique furniture, china and glassware, bedding and drapery, and the cornices and moldings in the beautiful rooms that are the settings of so many of the paintings. As I made my way through the exhibition at the New-York Historical Society a number of times the other day, I found my attention more and more drawn to these details rather than to the paintings as artistic wholes. And this, in turn, reminded me of a passage in one of Henry James' essays, when he was writing about the Paris art scene in the 1870's.

The painting under discussion– Friedland , by the French academician Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier–is of a military subject in the Napoleonic period. James clearly found it hilariously awful, and this, in part, is what he wrote: "It seems to me it is a thing of parts rather than an interesting whole …. The best thing, say, is a certain cuirassier, and in the cuirassier the best thing is his clothes, and in his clothes the best thing is his leather straps, and in his leather straps the best thing is the buckles. This is the kind of work you find yourself performing over the picture; you may go on indefinitely. That great general impression which, first and foremost, it is the duty of an excellent picture to give you, seems to me to be wanting here …. "

The difference, James added, is "like the difference to the eye between plate glass and gushing water." There isn't much "gushing water"–which is to say, painterly vitality and invention–in the paintings of John Koch, but there is an abundance of the pictorial equivalent of plate glass.

Needless to say, this isn't everyone's view of the current exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. My friend and colleague here at The New York Observer , Michael M. Thomas, is in radical disagreement with this adverse assessment, and he's played an important role in bringing the current show, which is called John Koch: Painting a New York Life , to the New-York Historical Society. He has also written a spirited essay for the exhibition's catalog. Unlike myself, he has the advantage of having been a friend of Koch and a participant in the social life that is so graphically illustrated in the artist's pictures. If you want to sample the kind of nostalgia for old times which Koch's pictures continue to elicit even now, when so much else in New York life has changed almost beyond recall, Michael's essay is the thing to read. For myself, I never regarded black-tie openings at the museums or an over-consumption of martini cocktails at fashionable parties as the summit of human happiness, and so my view of the past that is so lovingly evoked in Michael's essay is somewhat different.

Still, it is one of the functions of the New-York Historical Society to remind us of our past, and in this sense it is altogether appropriate for an exhibition like John Koch: Painting a New York Life to be mounted at this particular institution, where artistic distinctions are not the first order of business. Social fantasy is as much a part of history as artistic achievement, and in this exhibition it has certainly been given its due. As a painting exhibition, however, it remains–for some of us, anyway–a paltry experience.

John Koch: Painting a New York Life remains on view at the New-York Historical Society, 2 West 77th Street at Central Park West, through Jan. 27.