Houellebecq.

In The Atlantic, Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs books, examines what happens when Amazon sells books for $1.49.

The Millions examines what keeps bookstores alive in Germany. Price controls, it turns out.

The shortlist for the German Book Prize has been announced (for those of you who speak German.)

Bloomberg reports that the French novelist Michel Houellebecq has ditched his book tour and gone missing. In lieu of his book tour, here's his Paris Review interview.

IdeaLab reports on HuffPo's forays into e-books.

HuffPo reports that J.D. Salinger's son is threatening legal action after a memorabilia dealer posted a letter written by Salinger online, claiming any publication of his work without permission is illegal.

Freddie Highmore: Slacker in the Rye

In the sudden current rush of coming-of-age movies, there is nothing especially inventive or original about The Art of Getting By, but thanks to talented first-time writer-director Gavin Wiesen, it has more charm and wit than most of its J.D. Salinger-inspired cousins in the same genre, and is undeniably engaging.

At life’s crucial turning point of age 17, brilliant but cynical George (played by Freddie Highmore, who made a splash at 11 opposite Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie’s adolescent muse who inspired Peter Pan in Finding Neverland) is a high-school senior who doesn’t believe in homework. In fact, George hasn’t cracked a book all year.  Like most kids today who don’t know anything unless they read it on their laptops, George says, “6.8 billion people on the planet, and none of them will survive. Why should I spend my life figuring how the square root of a hypotenuse will alter my fate?” George has gotten through 12 years of school just by showing up, a loner with no friends who calls himself a “Teflon slacker.” If he doesn’t get into a decent college, how is he ever going to land a job or earn a living? George doesn’t care.  A talented artist, he withdraws into his art books, listens to Leonard Cohen, reads Camus and dotes on Truffaut movies, avoiding confrontations with anything that sounds like real life.

Until, that is, he meets “The Girl”—a popular, defiant misfit named Sally Howe (Emma Roberts, who starred in the disastrous Nancy Drew)—when he takes the rap after she’s caught smoking on the school roof. Sally introduces him to parties, kissing and breaking all the rules, even going so far as to aggressively offer to help him lose his virginity. In Sally, he finds a soulmate. These are affluent New York kids in private schools, filled with anxieties and prescription antidepressants like their parents, no strangers to Ritalin, Lexipro and Valium, living in fabulous apartments and brownstones and fraught with the daily rituals of domestic crisis. Sally has a twice-divorced mom prowling the singles dating-hell scene with a vengeance who treats her more like a roommate than a daughter. George’s security blanket suddenly lands in the rag bin when his perfect stepfather (the excellent Sam Robards) goes bankrupt and files for divorce, leaving his estranged mother, Vivian (Rita Wilson), a brittle businesswoman, with her credit cards maxed out and their apartment on the market. Meanwhile, George’s principal (Blair Underwood) offers him an ultimatum: either make up every test and homework assignment for the entire year or face expulsion before graduation. And he’s got only three weeks to do it. With all of his resourcefulness, and Sally’s help, George realizes at last that the art of getting by is no longer an option.

Mr. Highmore, who has surrendered his cute-kid status, does a very nice job of portraying a modern-day Holden Caulfield. Unfocused, he has a lot of sensitivity and intelligence, but not much talent for applying for a position in the world at large. He’s not sure where he’s going, or where he’s been, but he’s very certain he can stay grounded as long as he stands still long enough to make sense out of wherever he is. Mr. Wiesen’s screenplay makes him a likeable character of contradictions—sweet but obnoxious, a good enough student that his teachers want him to succeed despite his resistance, an isolated brat still compassionate about his parents and desperate for affection. The divide between the kids and the adults is very realistically drawn. Unlike most recent coming-of-age movies, this one gets by on more than capricious eccentricity and sentimentality. It has something called heart.

rreed@observer.com

THE ART OF GETTING BY

Running time 84 minutes

Written and directed by Gavin Wiesen

Starring Freddie Highmore, Emma Roberts, Michael Angarano

3/4

"Omg!!!!!!! I just won prince of the ball!!!!!!!" he posted on his Twitter account.

The 32-year-old blogger/actor/writer hybrid took to the dance floor at Marquee with his princess Kari Ferrell for a suggestive round of tug-of-war with a purple boa. His fellow nominees for the crown included NonSociety founder Julia Allison.

"I've never read her blog, but I'm ultra-ultra controversial, so she couldn't touch what I'm doing," he said of Ms. Allison, standing near an ice sculpture in the shape of a Dentyne gum packet. "I'm the first Internet reality show that's ever been."

Ms. Allison, wearing a powder blue vintage prom dress, a tiara, and a thick layer of Ranjana Khan jewels, approached Mr. Kade. She recently returned from a several-week stay at a yoga ashram upstate.

"I really want to go back," she said. "I feel like I found my balance at the ashram, and I lost it here. Part of me wants to go all J.D. Salinger."

While we discussed the perils of the New York tech-media scene, Mr. Kade took another opportunity to update his 810 Twitter followers. He snapped a photo of himself with Allison in the background with the caption: "The new york observer interviewing me and julia allison."

Fameball nominees mingled freely with the founders and techies behind new startups (like men's outfitter V Bespoke) and established megabrands (like Groupon and Tumblr).

"We don't have the slightest idea of how Tumblr should be used," Tumblr founder David Karp said of mainstream print outlets like Newsweek and The New Yorker making forays with the blogging platform. "The value in Tumblr to them is something we never realized in building it."

The party was designed by Gawker TV editor Richard Blakeley to be a sort of prom for Internet Week while raising money for City Harvest. And, in true prom fashion, balloons covered the dance floor where groups of people in thick-rimmed glasses danced (ironically or otherwise) to house remixes of Jimmy Eat World and Lady Gaga. A couple smooched outside the bathroom.

"For one night, people put their differences aside for charity," Mr. Blakeley said. "Yeah, some people hate each other on the Internet. It's a lot harder to hate people in real life."

The Morgan’s exhibit reveals more than just a perpetual teenager or, as we’ve come to know him now, a cynical recluse. Mr. Salinger’s letters to Mr. Mitchell—a painter and friend who was commissioned by the author to design the dust jacket for the first edition of Catcher in the Rye—display a far more complex character.

Above all, he was a passionate father. He treated fatherhood with a dumbfounded maturity that defies the image of the pee-drinking diet nut, obsessed with homeopathic medicine, in Dream Catcher, the memoir of his daughter Margaret (in the letters, referred to as “Peggy”). “I loved sitting up in bed, reading, and watching their sleeping bodies in the same room,” Salinger writes about a trip to New York with his children in 1966. “I love going anywhere with them.”

But a darker side of the author teems beneath the surface of these letters, which sat in a reading room of the Morgan Library alongside rare editions of the Bible, Dante, Goethe and Molière. Salinger didn’t publish a word after 1965, but he thought about it frequently. “It ain’t easy, at best, to be in [my] forties and still writing. So many middle-aged disbeliefs and burdensome doubts at work in the mind. The trick is to use the disbeliefs in the work. I mostly mean that it’s more important to write and paint only what we want to, in whichever way it comes, and as slowly as it comes.”

Even more frustrating for fans of Mr. Salinger’s writing is that the writing did come. “I have ten, twelve years’ work piled around, but I don’t know how soon it will be before I feel up to unloading any large part of it. I have two particular scripts—books, really—that I’ve been hoarding and picking at for years. I don’t know, though, when I’ll feel moved to take any action with them.”

The letters, 10 in all plus one postcard, are revealing, but also reinforce Mr. Salinger’s nearly psychopathic desire for privacy. In 1993, Mr. Mitchell wrote to Salinger, asking the author to sign his copy of Catcher in the Rye. Salinger turned down the request, afraid perhaps that Mr. Mitchell would try to sell the autographed book, reconnecting the author with his reading public, however rudimentarily. The two cut off their decades-long correspondence, and Mr. Mitchell sold the letters soon after.

But this exhibit helps break the silence of an author who rarely gave any interviews in his long life, and who was not seen by the general public save for one image caught unexpectedly with a zoom lens by a New York Post photographer in 1988. The photograph is straight out of a bad dream: Mr. Salinger’s fist is clenched, his mouth curled into a frown that sinks past his chin, his eyes propped open with terror, with hatred, but above all with grief. That image seemed to haunt the room as Declan Kiely, the exhibit’s curator, discussed how the access to these letters was restricted during Mr. Salinger’s lifetime.

“Now his privacy is not of any import to anyone,” Mr. Kiely said. Maybe, but those frightened eyes gazed at me from behind the typewritten text of Mr. Salinger’s pensive invitation to Mr. Mitchell to come and visit him at his home: “Come as you are or with any number of companions,” Mr. Salinger wrote. “Up to one in number.”

mmiller@observer.com

GERALD HOWARD (Random House):

Gerald Howard, an editor, recalls a "piece of publishing lore" passed down by J. Randall Williams III—Howard's father-in-law, and general manager at Little, Brown's trade division when they published Franny and Zooey.

Salinger had requested "house paint white" for the cover of his book, and after seeing around 20 proofs, he still wasn't satisfied. The art director was getting desperate. In final bid for authenticity, he sent over a paint swatch from Benjamin Moore.

"That did the trick," Howard says. "Cover approved!"

WELLS TOWER (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned):

As a "broodingish" teen, Wells Tower made the mistake of trying to lay claim to Holden Caulfield. He walked into his 10th grade English class the Monday after Catcher was assigned and announced that he'd finished the book.

"It's kind of a book about me," he explained to a friend, who he assumed hadn't bothered with the reading. This friend was in fact a good deal more brooding than Tower—and he too had done the reading.

"I remember him looking at me like I told him I'd just made out with his girlfriend."

The class ultimately saw "a five-way war" for the title of most Holdenesque. "There was real hostility," Tower says.

RIVKA GALCHEN (Atmospheric Disturbances):

"My mom learned English from this book called 50 Great American Short Stories," Rivka Galchen explains. It included "For Esmé, With Love and Squalor"—prime material for an eighth grade oral presentation.

Galchen didn't know who Salinger was, but she remembers being amazed by two things: the ping pong table described as "an ax-length away," and the moment when the narrator watches Esmé's nostrils flair.

Galchen did not make enough eye contact during her oral presentation, and received a 7 out of 10.

SAM MUNSON (November Criminals, out in April):

Sam Munson wrote his first novel from the "slightly frenzied" adolescent perspective of an aspiring Latin scholar/pot dealer. Holden Caulfield, as the patron saint of boy-angst lit, loomed large.

Munson had mixed feelings about this: While he later came to appreciate Salinger, he hated Holden when assigned Catcher in the eighth grade.

"I couldn't stand him," Munson says. "I found him so annoying. Little fuck."

Munson named a character "Phoebe," but didn't recognize the name as Salingerian until his editor pointed it out. So he inserted an appropriately ambivalent backstory: She's named after Holden's sister, but goes by "Digger" because she dislikes the book.

Joanna Smith Rakoff worked for Salinger's agent, Harold Ober & Associates. She answered his fan mail.

"I was given a form letter to copy, it was written around the time he became a complete recluse. Something like: ‘Dear _____, As you know Mr. Salinger does not wish to receive fan mail. Goodbye.'"

She was ordered to throw away all fan letters, but eventually began responding to them personally. Salinger called regularly, and Ms. Rakoff always knew when her boss was speaking to the author.

"My boss would say, ‘Oh Jerry, HA HA HA!’ She would only laugh when she talked to him. A divine nervous laughter."

Talese would go on to pioneer New Journalism, publishing such works as Thy Neighbor’s Wife and Honor Thy Father, as well as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” in Esquire. “For individuals who were as shy and curious as myself, journalism was an ideal preoccupation, a vehicle that transcended the limitations of reticence,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir. And given Mr. Talese’s talent for exploring the boundaries of public and private life, Salinger’s self-imposed isolation would seem like fertile ground.

But looking back on Salinger’s heyday, Talese says, none of that matters. The important thing about Salinger was the printed word on the page, nothing more. Late last week, Talese spoke to The Observer’s Molly Fischer about being young in New York and excited about writing.

What was so special about the writing and maybe the mystique of Salinger was that his work for a magazine represented a kind of epoch of the printed word. What I mean is, when we think of print today, we don’t think of much, because it doesn’t have the impact. But in those days, a printed word in a magazine was preceded by word of mouth.

All of us who were young in those days, in the 1950s and ’60s—I came to New York in 1956 to stay—we all sort of thought we knew somebody who was a clerk at The New Yorker, and who would say, “Hey …”

Word got around that there was a story in the works that was going to be published soon, and we waited for it. I was in my mid-20s at the time; I’m 77 now so I’m looking back on this from a half a century’s perspective. It was still the era of Eisenhower. And yet it was a kind of beginning of a kind of identity with youth—it wasn’t a youth movement, as would happen later with the Beatles and Bobby Dylan and the war protests of the ’60s and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that stuff—but there was really something that gave identity to young people in the work of Salinger. A sort of an epochal time for the printed word.

I don’t remember anything before it, because I was too young to know anything before it—when Hemingway was around. It was the Sundance of the short story in those days. People really wanted to be writers. We didn’t give a shit about Oscars, it seemed to me. It was the literary word, and the printed word—it was the quintessential time for the printed word.

Salinger didn’t appeal to everyone. It was our generation. It was before civil rights, and it was before any identity with drugs. It was almost when Lenny Bruce was being prosecuted for what he was talking about from the stage—it was really the ’50s. Salinger was a person of the ’50s. He is a product of the pre-Kennedy time. I mean, that was the period of being old. It’s the last of “I like Ike” and playing golf, and here’s this new voice, and it’s a young voice.

Here comes this voice not of protest but of a most uncommon character. This young character—of the Glass family. And it really seemed to be the first legitimate young American voice on the printed page that had all the power and song of what would later be in the words of Bobby Dylan, or the Beatles, or the music of Motown. That was later stuff. This one character—that was Salinger. And the word of mouth: I’d be in the city room, and someone would tell me in the cafeteria—we had a coffee break—“Hey, I heard Salinger …”

Before Tina Brown thought of buzz, there was this buzz. I’d never heard any word of mouth on an about-to-be-published short story in some magazine—I know The New Yorker wasn’t just “some magazine,” but I don’t care. It never happened with Roth or Updike or Don DeLillo or anybody. Some Mailer stuff—“The Steps of the Pentagon”—and the New Journalism era, but that was nonfiction.

Then there was a conversation! There was a debate. Half an evening’s meal was spent discussing this. This was very much what was going on. From Chumley’s down in the Village—maybe, if you had the money, even Toots Shor’s, the old sports bar—you heard about Salinger.

Nothing was quite like it. I don’t think we had another person. And Salinger was not self-promoting—the opposite. That’s what so special. It was all about his work.

You can always drop Salinger’s name to people twice as young as my daughter, and everybody seems to know who he is. On the basis of being in print—not being in the movies. Many of the books that we think are famous are famous because of a movie. Godfather might not be famous were it not for the film.

The stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Love and Squalor”—I mean, I read all these stories six times when they came out. I’d read them again and again and again. They’re just beautiful.

You couldn’t dare think that voice would be something of your own voice. It was a special voice, not to be imitated—or that you could even think that you understood fully what was in that brain of his. But you loved the fact that he was saying something that you could identify with. It wasn’t that his language was so evocative—he just had control of his story and his era. He just was a new man on the planet. And he carried us away.

mfischer@observer.com

“Yeah!!!” Mr. Ellis had tweeted on Thursday as the Salinger news spread. “Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!”

Perhaps Mr. Ellis would like to write an essay along those lines? Perhaps give a quote?

There were of course other prospective eulogists—Mr. Bogaards had heard from parties interested in Lorrie Moore and Toni Morrison.

Salinger was a celebrity death for The New Yorker set. Instead of TMZ’s lurid photos or grainy video footage, the high-minded press’s sought-after stock in trade were personal essays and precise insight.

The people we think to ask suggest what Salinger means to us. There’s the issue of reclusive personal weirdness—Joyce Maynard’s voice mail could accept no new messages.

The ambiguities of enduring literary merit—Roth and Didion (“I’m on deadline”) had retreated into dignified silence. And, most of all, the status as a writer beloved of the young and sensitively bookish—Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer were “overwhelmed” by requests for comment, according to their publicists.

It makes sense that literary deaths prompt eloquent grief. But there’s a ravenous quality to the pursuit of Salinger that’s at odds with the writer himself. Why all this noise about America’s most silent author?

He was, as Norman Mailer grudgingly called him in Advertisements for Myself, “everyone’s favorite.” Through his work, in spite of himself, Salinger made friends with an entire nation of readers.

So the outpouring is predictable but ironic. Salinger would surely have hated the fuss.

“He’d have nothing to do with this!” said Tom Beller, co-editor of a book of essays about Salinger, With Love and Squalor. He’s written two pieces about Salinger since his death.

“If there was a Salinger for Salinger—probably Fitzgerald—and he was asked to comment on his death, he would detest the idea of doing an interview or writing a piece.”

In a 2001 essay, Janet Malcolm recounted a Salinger episode that played out in the pages of The Observer:

Salinger's own perilous journey away from the world has brought many misfortunes down on his head. His modest wish for privacy was perceived as a provocation, and met with hostility much like the hostility toward the Glasses. Eventually it offered an irresistible opportunity for commercial exploitation. The pain caused Salinger by the crass, vengeful memoirs of, respectively, his former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, and his daughter, Margaret, may be imagined. A redeeming moment occurred a few weeks after the publication of the latter book, when a letter by, of all people, Margaret's younger brother, Matt, an actor who lives in New York, appeared in The New York Observer. He was writing to object to his sister's book. "I would hate to think I were responsible for her book selling one single extra copy, but I am also unable not to plant a small flag of protest over what she has done, and much of what she has to say." Matt went on to write of his sister's "troubled mind" and of the "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" she had liked to tell and that he had not challenged because he thought they had therapeutic value for her. He continued:

"Of course, I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes. I do not remember even one instance of my mother hitting either my sister or me. Not one. Nor do I remember any instance of my father 'abusing' my mother in any way whatsoever. The only sometimes frightening presence I remember in the house, in fact, was my sister (the same person who in her book self-servingly casts herself as my benign protector)! She remembers a father who couldn't 'tie his own shoe-laces' and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even-specifically-how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away."

What is astonishing, almost eerie about the letter, is the sound that comes out of it--the singular and instantly recognizable sound of Salinger, which we haven't heard for nearly forty years (and to which the daughter's heavy drone could not be more unrelated). Whether Salinger is the rat his girlfriend and daughter say he is will endlessly occupy his well-paid biographers, and cannot change anything in his art. The breaking of ranks in Salinger's actual family only underscores the unbreakable solidarity of his imaginary one. "At least you know there won't be any goddam ulterior motives in this madhouse," Zooey tells Franny. "Whatever we are, we're not fishy, buddy." "Close on the heels of kindness, originality is one of the most thrilling things in the world, also the most rare!" Seymour writes in "Hapworth." What is thrilling about that sentence is, of course, the order in which kindness and originality are put. And what makes reading Salinger such a consistently bracing experience is our sense of always being in the presence of something that--whatever it is--isn't fishy.

And so, though we want very much to hear about it, we mainly desist, respecting as we must almost any desire so strenuously asserted. Which is not to say that there have not been a few opportunistic violations, including Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography, In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988), which the subject's lawyers fought mightily to counter; Joyce Maynard's 1999 memoir, At Home in the World , detailing her relationship decades past with the writer; and now–each presentation striking closer to the epicenter of that famous silence–daughter Margaret Salinger's Dream Catcher: A Memoir .

Though authored in some secrecy–to forestall preventive legal interventions– Dream Catcher is not a particularly scandalous or even revealing work. That Mr. Salinger is eccentric, self-involved, often unsupportive and insensitive–this we have heard. That he is Yankee-tight with a buck, an evangelist of homeopathy; that he has been drawn to various kinds of cultic devotion over the years, including Buddhism, Christian Science and Dianetics–also no great news.

The most useful part of Ms. Salinger's memoir sets out more fully than anyone has before certain key facets of Mr. Salinger's early history–his confusion and ambivalence at discovering, in his youth, that his mother had only pretended to be Jewish for his father's family, that she was in fact Catholic; that his time as a soldier (he was part of the landing at Utah Beach on D-Day) was deeply and lastingly traumatic to him; that his cultic and ascetic relation to sexuality made his first marriage–to Claire, Margaret's mother–stressful. Ms. Salinger puts together a convincingly detailed background picture of the early years of family life.

For the rest, however, when she is not discoursing windily on American anti-Semitism or the documented personality profiles of cult adherents, she is telling us the story of her own sometimes tormented coming-of-age, disclosing everything from her summer camp friendships and private school angst to her ups and downs with boyfriends. As this Salinger is no Salinger, much of the book is tedious reading. Nothing about the famous father takes us much past his own succinct observation in the story "Teddy": "[I]t's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to."

Still, the publication of Dream Catcher affords us an occasion–there are so many of these occasions–to page through the primer of issues relevant to the production of memoirs.

The first of these involves the delicate business of children writing about their parents, which is not unrelated to the business of ex-lovers writing about one another. It seems to me that these are relationships that are private not merely in popular designation, but in their ontological essence as well. Which is to say that they constitute, emotionally and psychologically, worlds of their own. They are profoundly contextual. Wrest them into the public glare and they often collapse into near unrecognizability or become caricature. This does not mean that personal memoirs of this sort ought not to be written, simply that they should be viewed by readers as intrinsically suspect. Only where a writer is skillful enough to recreate the complex atmosphere of interactions is there a chance that the figures will live. Ms. Salinger is not a writer of this caliber.

Second, I would invoke–or propose–the worthiness law: that the memoirist ought to be, in some core perceptual way, the equal of her subject. It seems evident that the lesser cannot comprehend the greater. This holds true especially where the subject is a creative artist. Contrary to what many believe, the writer does not just spill his bejeweled phrases on command. To put a world onto the page–vivid, compelling, self-sustaining–the writer must find and perpetuate a very delicate alignment with the forces in his life, a kind of interior feng shui . Finding that alignment can be all-consuming, and it must be respected, even if the process can make the artist personally difficult.

I have sympathy for this daughter's pain. But at the same time I want to assert that there is a trans-therapeutic perspective. William Faulkner captured the terms most winningly in his Paris Review interview: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

Finally, we confront again the basic issue of privacy. I can't speak for those individuals who seek out and willingly accept life in the public eye–they sign over title to certain parts of their non-public lives. But for the rest, including the artist who, like J.D. Salinger, used his public platform to declare his desire to be left alone, and who with every honest gesture has made clear his need for isolation, there should be no question. We should no more think to invade that artist's creative sanctum–no matter who we are–than impose physical duress on a pregnant woman. And for the same reason: The person is carrying something that has its own inalienable rights, that must be allowed a chance at unhampered development. Though in all of her 400-plus pages Ms. Salinger gives no hint as to whether or not her father is still producing, we should assume that he is. More honorably still, we should acknowledge the work he already did and extend the respect that is the mark of our gratitude, receiver to giver.

In one passage fairly early in the book, Ms. Salinger remembers how, when she was quite young, she and her best friend one day knocked on the door of the little shack in the woods where Mr. Salinger wrote:

"Daddy opened the door, surprised, but happy to see us. We came in and sat on the army cot that took up almost the entire wall. There were bookshelves above the cot with cool things on them like tins of salty corn parchies, and glass honeyjars full of silver coins or peppermints. Lots of my drawings were taped up on the wall.… At the far end, way up in the air where I couldn't reach it, was an old, brown leather car bench seat that my father used for a desk chair.… He showed me how he sat, lotus position, legs crossed beneath him.… On the plain slab of wood he used for a desk was an old manual typewriter, which he used in his self-taught, two-fingers-only style.

"Light shone onto his desk from a milky skylight above, a thing that positively delighted my father. Lots of small yellow pieces of paper with notes written in dark, soft-lead pencil were taped, here and there, to almost every surface within reach of the desk–the wall, the lampshade and so on."

A perception like this, a memory like this, is the best argument I can muster for why Ms. Salinger should have let matters be. The stillness she broke in on is–for better and worse–apart from all the considerations of dailiness. Whatever goes on at that plain slab of wood holds the key to everything else. Ignore that, or get it wrong, and none of the rest makes any sense–or any difference.

Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of Readings, a collection of essays.

He's divorced, with a son and daughter. He has a sweet apartment with high ceilings near Union Square. He works a lot, doesn't sleep much. He plays tennis at Manhattan Tennis Center.

Recently, Mr. Elliott, who is 45 years old, had a little heart attack. He has been doing a decent job of not letting it affect him. He's still out there, having a good time.

We were in a cab in Greenwich Village.

"I've been around so long," said Mr. Elliott. "I've played at all these places. The Back Fence, Kenny's Castaways, the Red Lion. I'm exactly what I didn't want to be. I didn't want to be one of these guys who's my age, walking around, stopping in clubs where everybody knows me, in part because I've just been around so long."

I came upon Mr. Elliott almost at random: One night, at Marylou's on Ninth Street, I lost half the contents of my wallet, and he found it. He called me up, and, a few days later, I bought him dinner at Pete's Tavern on Irving Place.

He said that he had once bedded four women in a 24-hour period. He told a funny story about a famous actor hitting on him. He also gave me his basic life story. Grew up in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Married at 19. Attended Yale and Yale Law. Two kids. Divorced. Moved to Manhattan in 1984.

By 1990, he said, he had made a small fortune in prepaid calling cards and a telephone number (900-VIP-SOAP) he created for soap opera fans. For $5 a call, they could hear plot updates from people like Susan Lucci. At one point, he had a three-bedroom duplex off Central Park West, a place in Los Angeles and a limo with a chauffeur. Mr. Elliott blew loads of cash.

Now things are a little less flashy. He's still making the rounds, though. He said he has some Internet venture in the works. He's hoping it will net him at least $20 million. Can't talk about it. Too early.

Mr. Elliott and I met again a few months later at Tavern on Jane restaurant. He told me his Mickey Mantle story.

"I'm sitting there talking with Mickey Mantle," Mr. Elliott was saying as we shared fried calamari, "and at the time I guess I was the same height I am now, but I weighed about 135 pounds–I was really thin. I had a close-cropped beard, I was wearing a V-neck polo sweater, tight corduroy pants and boots, I think. Mickey looks at me, looks up and down, and he goes, 'You queer?' And I said, 'No, no, no! I know why you're saying that, because the close-cropped beard–' 'No, no, no, just checking. I like to know where I stand with somebody.' So we talk for about 10 minutes, and I'm thinking, 'My sports hero is begging me to stay and bribing me with alcohol!'"

The waitress appeared. Mr. Elliott joked with her about maintaining his "girlish figure" and ordered a buffalo burger. Then he told the story about a well-known actor of the stage and screen. In the late 80's, it seems, Mr. Elliott used to go to Columbus restaurant on the Upper West Side, and one night he bumped into the actor there. Mr. Elliott had some time to kill before meeting his girlfriend, and the two guys ended up watching a video at Mr. Elliott's place. There was a problem with the tracking, so Mr. Elliott went up to the TV on his knees.

"All of a sudden, there's these hands on my shoulders, these legs pressed up against my back, and I'm getting a massage," Mr. Elliott said. "'You feel really tense, you know what, let me–' And I was like, 'Wha–wha–I'm all right.' 'No, no, you do feel really tense, let me do this.' And all of a sudden, there's a knee in my back kind of pushing me down towards the floor. He's like, 'Lay down, man. I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm doing here.' And I'm like, 'All right.' I don't know what to expect, because we've talked about girls and I'm like, 'Huh?'"

He continued: "All of a sudden, the hands move off my back and move onto my thighs. And he's like on me, legs straddling, and I went, 'All right! Ah! Yeah, that does feel better, now that I think about it.' And I walked over to the couch and I'm sitting, hands on my legs, staring straight ahead."

Next thing he knew, the actor grabbed his arm and laid his head on Mr. Elliott's chest. "And he goes, 'Come on, turnabout is fair play.'" At that moment, the phone rang. Saved by the bell. It was Mr. Elliott's girlfriend.

Actor Fisher Stevens walked in and sat at a nearby table. Mr. Elliott noted that he had slept with women who had slept with famous men–among them John F. Kennedy Jr., Keith Hernandez, Donald Trump and J.D. Salinger. He calls it his "sharing list."

After dinner, we went to a Spanish-style bar nearby. I got whisky and he got a big glass of orange juice. He had had the heart attack the week before, and he wasn't drinking alcohol–doctor's orders. Next, we went to a sushi place on Bleecker Street, Shiki's. There was the owner, Laura, who used to give him the thumbs up or thumbs down whenever he came in with a date. She asked him how his sex life was.

"My sex life is always good," Mr. Elliott said, "because I always have me."

Later, we went to the Cub Room on Sullivan Street. He ordered an orange pineapple drink, and I asked him about the heart attack.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be funny if I went now?' I always joke about, you know, I haven't reached middle age yet. I probably have another 10, 15 years before I hit middle age, based on my genetics. My grandmother's still alive, she's almost 100. So I figure, 45, I'm not middle-aged yet. On the other hand, you never know. Kurt Cobain hit middle age when he was 13. You know, he didn't know it. And I thought, 'Holy shit, maybe I hit middle age when I was 22!' I don't feel my age. To me, I look in the mirror, and I think this is not a 45-year-old man. It's at best a 45-year-old boy. I don't know if I'll ever be a man."

He said the damage was "practically nil," but the heart attack spooked him. He had gotten a liver test and was awaiting the results.

"I was like, 'Do I have to face my mortality now, or what?' It was like, this is distinctive. What was going through my mind on a real practical level was, 'Holy shit, what if I have another one, and this time I just drop dead?' I wasn't worried about changing my life style–I was worried about dropping dead."

He looked over at the young blonde woman next to him. They chatted. Eventually, he made his move: "Monday night," he said. "Come in here and I'll buy you a martini."

On Monday night, Mr. Elliott and I returned to the Cub Room. The young blonde woman had indeed come back. "Hey, Doug!" she said.

Mr. Elliott, with the heart attack now a couple weeks in the past, ordered vodka. He chatted with her for a while, but it didn't go anywhere

"I'm worried about the liver thing," he said, sitting down for dinner. "When you're young, when you're a teenager, you have no sense of your own mortality. You don't worry about lines, boobs sagging, not getting it up. Everything is where it's supposed to be."

At the table next to ours were two pretty blond women around his daughter's age. Mr. Elliott shared a pickup technique with me: "You go like this: 'Excuse me, I hate to trouble you, but would you mind asking that person if they could please pass the piano?' Something stupid, asinine, that's my joke."

Mr. Elliott ordered another vodka. I asked why he always touched my arm as he talked.

"You know, I'm not conscious of it and you're not the first person to complain. In fact, who's the guy who's a writer, majorly gay fellow and well known, older guy, can't remember his name, here in New York. We're talking one night, yap-yap-yap, and all of a sudden he goes, 'You have to stop touching my hand, because I think I already love you and now I don't think I can leave unless you come home with me, and I know that's not appropriate.' Of course, he was waiting for me to go, No, it's fine!"

One of the girls asked Mr. Elliott for my cigarettes. Conversation began to flow. Their names were Lisl and Jill. Lisl had a fiancé, so Mr. Elliott focused on Jill. She was here from San Francisco for a wine festival. She was wearing a mint green sweater, black skirt. She looked a little like an Arquette, more Rosanna than Patricia.

"Will you have a drink with me later?" he said to her. "Maybe?"

Then Mr. Elliott ordered a filet mignon, and returned to me.

"I know that my behavior's flirtatious," he said. "It's gender-neutral flirtation." His voice lowered. "I would do the same thing if there were two guys or a guy and a girl sitting next to us. I think what it is, is I have some enormous animal attraction that human beings in general, irrespective of gender, can't resist. And that's a burden I have to carry."

He told a story about a big shot he knows in Los Angeles. The guy hit on him and Mr. Elliott made another narrow escape.

More banter with Jill and Lisl. He tried to get Jill's number. After some negotiating, he ended up giving her his number. "I want you to know I'm not easy," he said.

"Right."

"Did you hear that disdainful response? Talk about a sweeping sexual generalization! She's going, If you're a guy, of course you're easy. Wasn't that what you meant?"

"How hard it is to seduce a guy?" Jill said.

"See what I mean? I'm on point, that's why I'm a good negotiator." The girls were laughing now. "That's why I'm a distinctive guy, because I'm not that easy, but I'll play with you this way. If you pulled your top down right now, flashed me, I would think that was funny, silly, and I'd be more embarrassed than you would."

The conversation died a bit right there. "I think it's over," I told him.

"No, no, no, it'll come back, whenever we want it to."

Eventually, Jill asked for another cigarette, but there was a lingering unease.

"She's mad because you asked her to take her top off," I said.

"Be serious for a minute," Mr. Elliott said to her. "Did you think I was asking you to flash? You knew I was teasing, right?"

Later, when Mr. Elliott got up and left the table for the bathroom, I asked Jill what she thought of him.

"He seems like someone who's not used to taking No for an answer. He also seems like someone who thinks that his company is the best reward. To me, he seems like a very typical New York guy. Very forward, very engaging, very up front, shy. But at the same time, maybe not so mysterious."

After Mr. Elliott came back, he got Jill to accompany us to Raoul's for caviar; Lisl went home to her fiancé. At Raoul's, Mr. Elliott was touching Jill's arm and telling her about the time he accidentally ended up in a gay bar.

"You know who the new gay diva is?" Jill said. "Cher."

"My buddy used to date Cher! My friend Rob–Rob Camaletti. He was called 'the bagel boy.'"

At midnight, Jill said, "I can't believe I'm still standing." We finished the caviar. Down the street, at Milady's, Mr. Elliott's (and Jill's) Jewish heritage came up. "I don't actually ascribe to any religion," he said. "I think religion is really a big cause of most of the grief in the world."

Jill said she knew he was Jewish right away. "I have Jew-dar," she said. "I mean, he does, too."

Mr. Elliott and I played some pool, then we walked her home. On West Broadway, we passed a picture of fat-lipped model Esther Cañadas. "See this girl?" he said. "She used to date the guy who lived downstairs from me, who's also a DKNY model. Then she moved in and then they got married. They got married!"

"There's an intelligent couple," Jill said.

"How stereotypically bigoted of you! Just because they're models doesn't mean they're stupid! It just means they can't read or write!"

Right then, Jill started making her exit. "Call me, don't call me, it doesn't matter," Mr. Elliott said, kissing her on the cheek. She was gone, trotting up some stairs.

He invited me to his place a few days later. Right as you enter, there's a life-size sculpture of Batman's butler, Alfred. There was his pipe collection, his Sherlock Holmes stuff, his chess sets and his video collection ( 9 1/2 Weeks and Bull Durham prominently displayed). On the bookshelf, there was Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From , various Hitler books, Amy Sohn's Run Catch Kiss , some Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis.

On his computer screen was a short story he had written in the first person as J.D. Salinger. It ends: "Yes, I am J.D. Salinger. Now please–please–leave me alone." Playboy rejected it but encouraged more submissions. He's shopping it around.

His two Shih Tzus, Pia and Oona, yipped as Mr. Elliott picked up a guitar and played a sweet love song he composed, "Miles Away," which begins, "I never thought I'd feel like I've begun to feel." It had a Dan Fogelberg air to it, and when his (excellent) voice got high, Mr. Elliott sounded like Graham Nash.

We left, got into a cab.

"It's a little weird for me to think that I am at this point in my life single," he said. "You do get to a point where, 'You know, I'm not a kid anymore. I may think like a kid, I may feel like a kid, but at some point it's all gonna end.'" I used to have a thing, I really liked blond-haired, blue-eyed, very kind of WASPy-looking girls, because I grew up on Cheryl Tiegs and I think that gets embedded. It's like that bonding thing when ducklings are born–whatever they see first they're attached to forever as their mother. That mold, the model, as it were, is kind of the thing that I like. I used to want someone 5-7 1/2 to 5-8, straight blond hair, blue eyes, about 112 to 108 pounds, little bit of a curve. I've eased off a bit."

The photographer for this article, Nina Roberts, fit his criteria. As she took his picture in the Cub Room, Mr. Elliott was putting the moves on her. MTV personality Kurt Loder was there–he's another guy on Mr. Elliott's "sharing list," by the way.

Back at his place, Mr. Elliott played a slow version of "Eight Days a Week." Next came Cat Stevens' "Wild World." Ms. Roberts asked him to pose on the couch with his dogs at his side.

"Don't make me look gay," he said.