John Leonard. (Photo by Rodney Brooks)

John Leonard estimated that he read 13,000 books and published more than five million words in his lifetime. For 50 years, before his death of lung cancer in 2008, he was the most relentless and generous of critics. He started out, before he dropped out of Harvard, in the pages of the Crimson, parodying the Cambridge coffeehouse scene and panning Monocle, a humor magazine run out of Yale by Victor Navasky, who invited him to write for Monocle, where he parodied National Review, which got William Buckley to give him a job there, at a time when the contents page—featuring Joan Didion, Garry Wills and Renata Adler—read like a preview of the New York Review of Books. At National Review he could throw acid on Greenwich Village, which was apparently spoiled before Bob Dylan got there, and declare the death of the Beat Generation, but he had to move to Pacifica Radio in Berkeley to hate on Nixon with impunity and put Pauline Kael on the air.

Leonard wrote four novels by the time he was 34, but had to follow the money, which for him was in criticism. It was at The New York Times that he became a force, joining as an editor in his late 20s, becoming the paper’s daily book reviewer, then ushering in the “golden era” of the Times Book Review, at age 31 in 1970. All the while he was an active and public member of the left; you don’t see many big-time editors these days signing on to high-profile tax protests against foreign wars. In 1975 he became the paper’s culture critic, and from 1978 to 1980 wrote a column, called “Private Lives,” about his family and work life. He left the paper in 1980 to go freelance. He wrote about television, for Life and New York, and edited the back of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard. He took over the New Books column at Harper’s when Guy Davenport died in 2003, served as a critic on CBS, NPR and public television, and freelanced just about everywhere else, except The New Yorker, which he once called “the preferred periodical of an educated American middle class that wanted regular reminding of its cozy status and an early radar warning against sneak attacks by the avant-garde.”

The new collection Reading for My Life: Writings 1958-2008 (Penguin, 381 pp., $35) includes a few short takes on classics (Nabokov’s Ada, Said’s Orientalism, DeLillo’s Libra) and short, medium and long looks at minor works by grandees (Phillip Roth’s Patrimony, Pynchon’s Vineland, Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost). When old reviews are packed into an anthology, they’re no longer about the books under consideration; they’re about the critic. Every Leonard piece was a performance, but he always made sure it was also the Lessing show or the Didion show or the Kundera show or the Chabon show. He never used a review as an occasion to advance a theory about feminism (though he was a feminist), multiculturalism (though his tastes were culturally promiscuous) or realism (he had nothing against it, but knew it wasn’t the only style in town).

So what, besides providing a portrait of the reviewer, is the use of a book of old book reviews? For one thing, you get a telescoped history of recent literature—first-reaction reports on One Hundred Years of Solitude (positive) and Thy Neighbor’s Wife (negative)—and glimpses of history in progress (the Kitchen Debate; Chicago in ’68, remembered in 1988; AIDS; Clinton; 9/11). For the uninitiated the authors under scrutiny here form a useful canon. Not that there aren’t big omissions. We get Leonard on Mailer and Roth but not Updike; Said but not Sontag or Foucault; Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and Richard Powers but not Jonathan Franzen or Donald Antrim or Colson Whitehead or David Foster Wallace; DeLillo and Pynchon but not Barthelme or Barth. Grace Paley and Joan Didion but not Marilynne Robinson; Garcia Marquez and Eduardo Galleano but not Bolano; and writers from just about everywhere else except Ireland or Great Britain, unless you count Salman Rushdie. Not that Leonard’s to blame: you can’t fit five million words into 400 pages. (The volume was edited by Sue Leonard.) He doesn’t seem to have ignored much, although besides a passing mention of Kathy Acker you get the feeling that avant-garde poetry ended for him with the Beats.

Books like these are where young reviewers go to learn the trade. Leonard is a perilous writer to try to imitate. You start making lists, alliterating, punning, assuming a casual tone toward your betters, and reaching for a range of connections you haven’t yet earned. Not that it isn’t fun to try. You have to read Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fiedler, William Empson, Cyril Connolly, Stanley Edgar Hyman, V.S. Pritchett, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, Elizabeth Hardwick, Anatole Broyard, George Steiner, Frank Kermode, Michael Wood, James Wood, James Wolcott, Lee Siegel, Wyatt Mason, Daniel Mendelsohn and Dale Peck, too. Did I just make a list? I must be under Leonard’s spell.

When he wasn’t reading books (at least five a week), he liked to point out, he was watching television. Writing about writing, he always trained his attention on the single intelligence that had brought the book into being. Television, on the other hand, was collaborative and corporate; what came on the tube was a symptom of the culture:

Sitcoms hardly daring to do more than suggest coping mechanisms for such routine domestic crises as incompetence and mischief were not about to explore the mysteries of intimacy, much less promote a secret social agenda in favor of working women, class war, teen sex, racial justice, secular humanism, gay rights, and spotted owls ... [G]ag writers were trying to sell a fail-safe concept to network programmers, who were selling audiences in the tens of millions to ad agency account executives who were selling floor wax and reek to a benumbed republic and themselves to greedy clients. Then as now these gag writers read the same magazines and newspapers, saw the same movies, listened to the same music and skimmed the same reviews of the same best-selling books as everyone else. They also stole from each other. Yes, if a concept survived pilot-testing, and the public liked the actors, and the series lasted a couple of seasons, and the nation in its living room was ready to tolerate a NutraSweet version of the ideological fevers that already raged on the streets outside, then and only then, and even then only maybe, would the private pain, politics, and passion of the writer surface in a pointed wisecrack, a problematic new character, or a surprising ambiguity. And always after the culture already knew that it had major trouble on the event horizon, after the zeitgeist had already sneezed that sneeze.

Note the dig at book reviewing, the sympathetic imagining of the TV writer’s predicament, the ennobling but pessimistic “benumbed republic” and the slapstick conception of history as a series of sneezes. That’s from “Family Values, Like the House of Atreus,” a history of televisual repression culminating in an account of a hysterical Movie of the Week about child abuse in the early 1990s. It wasn’t all bad, though. The other big TV essay here, “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins” revels in the tube’s early glories, particularly its benevolent effect as a unifying cultural force, before there were hundreds of channels and multiple sets in every household. Even if you’re not one for cultural unity, John Leonard himself was about as benevolent as such forces get.

editorial@observer.com

His resume will, of course, be well-covered in the obituaries: he appeared on CBS Sunday Morning and reviewed television for New York and books for The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and the Times. He filled so many column inches for so many different outlets that he sometimes repeated his references and quips. You'd go crazy counting up the mentions of Shane or trying to figure out how many times he alluded to the joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger, surrounded by an Indian war party, outnumbered, totally screwed, a blaze of glory their best and only option, the punchline of which is: "What do you mean we, white man?"

If this were a Leonard-penned obit, he'd wish the departed bon voyage while listing their every possible destination: the rush-covered islands of Aaru, the grey, weird plains of Elysium, the undescribed sheol, the dance hall of Valhalla, the animistic paradise as plentiful as a supermarket, the luminous cumulus-covered angel-thronged heaven, the next stop in samsara as a dog, dragonfly or the doctor their parents secretly hoped for. I don't know whether John Leonard really wanted to come back to earth or persist eternally or provide a perfect feast for beetles and worms, although this paragraph, from his review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking probably gives it all away:

But it would be too depressing to end with that and he was too joyful a reader, too wild a writer. Instead, I'll offer one of the many other passages of his I loved. He wrote it about Elizabeth Hardwick, but it applies equally to him:

I was 26, had barely published anything, let alone a piece of criticism that could be considered "serious." I was a somewhat newly affirmed, politicized feminist, and deep in a phase of reading every book by Kate Millett I could get my hands on in preparation for reviewing her book Mother Millett, about caring for her aged mother. John would come by the office sometimes—he was still The Nation's lead book critic then—and sit in one of the two offices where you could smoke, and crank out the end of whatever huge review he was doing: about Rimbaud, or Bill Ayers, or Isaac Babel. He always came by my desk to say hello which, when you are the lowest person on a totem pole, is the kind of thing you really appreciate.

The week my review appeared, John was in the office for some reason or another. After making the rounds, he came by my desk, and leaned on the top of the short wall of my cubicle. I wish I could remember the precise kind words he said about my review, but they were overshadowed by this: "You should write for the magazine more."

When John had edited the Nation's books section, with his wife Sue, from 1995-1998, it was a haven for young writers: New Yorker editor Emily Eakin, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz (who also edited The Nation books section for a time) were all published by John Leonard. He was a rare champion of the untested and new; he encouraged where others might have scoffed.

A few months after my Kate Millett piece, emboldened by John's words of encouragement, I wrote a review of Jennifer Egan's novel Look at Me for our Fall Books issue. I loved the book, though momentarily doubted myself a bit when I saw that other reviews were mixed. Did I see something that wasn't there? John, who was on the selection committee for the National Book Award that year, told me that he had fought for that book to be on the list of finalists. He prevailed, and the book was nominated, though it didn't win. (Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections did.) He told me that he thought it was one of the most interesting and moving novels he'd read in a while, affirming what I'd thought which, again, stuck with me.

The next time he came by the office he brought me a copy of his book, Lonesome Rangers, which had just come out from The New Press. He signed it, "With admiration, John." He was a wonderful writer, and a wonderful man.

In addition to writing weekly for that magazine (last week he wrote about returning dramas), Mr. Leonard, who was 69-years-old, wrote a monthly books column for Harper's. He also served as a contributing editor for The Nation, contributed to The New York Review of Books and wrote regularly for The New York Times Book Review, where he had previously been an editor.

Let me explain. For some reason, I had the good fortune to watch a screening of the Scorsese documentary up at PBS with one of my lit-crit faves, John Leonard. I’d been a fan of his ever since college, when I read his underappreciated black-comic novel, Crybaby of the Western World (somebody should reissue it), and I’ve come to admire the way that his prose in The Nation and The New York Review of Books has become, to use a Dylan analogy, critical language gone electric. There was one stretch a while back when his remarkable reviews of Pynchon, Roth and Bellow made them suddenly new for me by the sheer force of his will and wit.

And when it comes to Dylan matters, I even admire his support for the pro-folkie, Joan Baez wing of the culture that Dylan left behind (expressed in Mr. Leonard’s beautiful NYRB essay on David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street)—even though I’m a pro-electric-Dylan guy myself and don’t see the need to disparage one to appreciate the other. But it matters that someone like Mr. Leonard cares about such things.

In any case, in the course of watching the three-and-a-half-hour, two-part Scorsese Dylan documentary in the PBS screening room, it occurred to me that I should express the gratitude I felt to John Leonard and tell him how much his work—especially the way he opened up non-academic lit-crit writing to a kind of inspired, allusive, pun-intensive playfulness—meant to me over the years. Not that it should matter to him, but it mattered to me.

And I felt gratitude to Dylan, too. Even though the story’s been told over and over (and over) again, Scorsese’s focus on how much Dylan persisted in his electric vision despite its bitter unpopularity among his folkie base was inspiring. He was onto something, he knew it, and he wasn’t going to let go of it because of some envious carpers.

So there I was: leaving PBS, thanking John Leonard, walking down Ninth Avenue, grateful to Dylan. In an “attitude of gratitude” mode, as some friends of mine might say. And I found myself thinking about someone else who deserves my gratitude, props from us all. Someone on the folkie scene who was probably burned for good by being too close to the wheel on fire that was Dylan.

I was thinking of Phil Ochs. I was thinking of his beautiful, perfect song, “There But for Fortune,” and how much gratitude I had for it. How it probably changed my life, or my way of thinking about life. And I was thinking about what I might have said to Phil at that dinner we’d had in L.A. not long before he killed himself.

You all remember Phil Ochs, right? Anyone … ? Bueller? (About half the people I asked recently didn’t.) Back when Dylan was just becoming Dylan, Phil Ochs was a rising star on the folkie protest-song scene before Dylan eclipsed all other stars. His anti-war anthems like “I Ain’t Marching Any More” galvanized people at Vietnam-era rallies. He also did quieter, more personal folkie ballads that showed considerable singer-songwriter talent—“Changes” and “Pleasures of the Harbor,” for instance.

And then there was this one beautiful, perfect song which was, perhaps on the surface, political—but on a deeper, far more primal and powerful level, a song that was pre-political, even spiritual: “There But for Fortune.”

“There But for Fortune”: It was a kind of ur-politics with a killer melody, one of those songs that forever inscribed itself, melody and meaning, on some deep level of the self—well, of my self when I first heard Joan Baez sing it. But Phil’s version is, if possible, even more haunting.

I know that in some ways it shaped the way I think about politics more than any written document, it carried such a powerful emotional truth.

By all rights, that song should have been enough to immortalize him and make him feel fulfilled forever, but things didn’t work that way, what with the “star-making machinery” of the nascent celeb culture that came to bohemia looking for the “next Dylan.”

One of the things that Scorsese’s documentary dramatizes, as well as one of the best parts of Dylan’s Chronicles and what’s most appealing about David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street, is the cumulative picture you get of the bubbling ferment of oddballs and geniuses that was the early 60’s Greenwich Village. When everyone was unconventional, but not in conventionally unconventional ways. You know the song “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool”? (I was, by the way.) The early bohemians were unconventional before unconventional was cool. They were just inventing what would later become conventionally unconventional lives and works—commodified New York bohemia. And you have the feeling from Scorsese’s film, and from Dylan’s Chronicles, that no one really knew who was going to turn out to be a genius and who was an imitator, who was a clown, who was Tiny Tim.

But then, suddenly, Dylan broke out and broke though with “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and a whole new typology emerged. There was Dylan, and then there were what we might now call the alt-Dylans (Dylan contemporaries and rivals like Phil Ochs and Eric Anderson), and then the “New Dylans” like John Prine, the future Dylans, the un-Dylans. Suddenly everything in that once-fractal world had a Copernican center. There was Dylan and there were the planets rotating around him, judged, identified—defined—by their distance from the sun.

Phil Ochs inevitably, against his will, became one of those planets. There but for fortune, perhaps, a star. Instead, he had the misfortune to be a “Dylanesque figure” without being Dylan, always defined by, in the shadow of, Mr. D.

And then when Dylan turned his back on the folkie world, when he “went electric” and abandoned politics for irony and surrealism, Phil Ochs became the anti-Dylan, the one who stayed true to acoustic folkie lefty politics, you might say, still writing protest songs, seeming to those of us who liked the sneering punkiness of the electric Dylan a little—I’m ashamed to say it—uncool.

For a while, I was part of a small circle of friends or friends of friends that included Phil, and when we ran into each other in the Village now and then, we’d sometimes hang out. I liked the guy, but his bitterness at being the not-Dylan clearly rankled him, and his critical attitude toward Dylan turning his back on the folkie world—not just by taking up the electric guitar, but by putting down those who played acoustic and stuck to politics (see “My Back Pages” with its ecstatic preaching against preaching)—was rarely absent when the subject came up, and it often did.

Still, I respected the guy, and when I was out in L.A. one time, I gave Phil a call and we got together for a meal in the hotel dining room. As things turned out, it was the last time I saw him.

Oh yeah, he was out there in L.A. because he was almost persona non grata in New York for a misconceived—or misunderstood—Dylan-goes-electric type of move. He’d given a concert dressed in a gold lamé suit, playing electric guitar and sort of posing as Elvis. And giving a quote that “if there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.” (He’d actually gotten Nudie, Elvis’ tailor, to make him the suit.) Either way, it didn’t seem like a compelling argument to many, although, looking back, it spoke to the Left’s difficulty in connecting with popular culture.

Well, to be kind, let’s say it was a miscalculation. Perhaps it’s true, and it was pretty much a way of saying that this country is never going to have a revolution, because Elvis is never going to become Che Guevara. Rock may be revolutionary, but rock stars are not—let’s face it.

Anyway, almost everybody hated it. Pro-Dylan types hated it because they thought it was a hostile parody of Dylan going electric. And anti-Dylan types hated it because they thought Phil was “selling out” by making a Dylan-type rock-star move. Political types rejected its “analysis” of the revolutionary situation. It was universally proclaimed a fiasco.

So that’s why, the last time we met, Phil was in L.A. He was, in a way, hiding out, doing a lot of drinking, claiming not to be able to write. As I recall, I was kind of hiding out, too: I was supposed to tape an interview with a fugitive on the run, one Abbott Hoffman, so in a way I was on the run, trying to keep a low profile while awaiting secret phone-booth rendezvous messages.

Actually—and this is not the digression it might seem to you—in one of the big arguments I had with Abbott Hoffman (whom I’d come to like while covering him for The Village Voice), I invoked Phil’s song, “There But for Fortune.”

You know it at all? Maybe—and this is not a digression within a digression—I should give you a feeling for it. Here’s the second verse:

Show me an alley, show me a train,

Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain,

And I’ll show you a young man with so many reasons why,

And there but for fortune may go you or I ….

You have to hear it, of course; you have to hear its aching Blakean simplicity and urgency. In a way, it has a classical purity—and when I say “classical,” I mean a going back to basics, back to Sophocles and the role that fortune and character play in man’s fate. As a song, it’s a sentiment that serves as a kind of Rorschach test, a defining revelation about how one views the unfortunate of the world. And the panhandler in front of you.

It’s a big subject, fortune. No wonder the post-Sophoclean debate about it consumed not just classical and medieval thinkers: Are we where we are because of who we are, and thus “deserve” to be there? Or are we where we are because of the cruel whim of fortune, fate?

So back to this argument I had with Abbie Hoffman: We were walking around Soho, and we passed this panhandler who’d kind of adopted me, because I almost always gave him a dollar bill when our paths crossed. He seemed like a nice guy down on his luck—there but for fortune ….

But Abbie launched into this lengthy denunciation of giving money to panhandlers—because, he said, it only postponed the confrontation with “the system,” which needed to be changed entirely so that there would be no more panhandlers. For him, it was “There but for the system goes that guy.”

Now I have to say this surprised me, because I’d often found Abbie a generous guy, one of those Falstaff types whose excesses could be forgiven because he was both witty and the cause in wit in others. (Read Murray Kempton on Abbie some time.)

But I somehow felt that this panhandler probably could use a cup of coffee and a roll or something the dollar would buy him now. And to make him bear the weight (and the wait) until the overthrow of “the system” was unfair: Why also deny him the comfort of the moment?

“There but for fortune.” If it separated me from some radicals, it has also separated me from some conservatives, who tend to react against the idea that one’s position in life is the result of mere good or bad luck, or anything but hard work and proper values or lack of same. That bum is not there because of fortune, but because he deserves to be where he is, and they deserve to be where they are.

It’s not true of all conservatives, of course, but just recently I was telling one of my more conservatively inclined friends about the sort of gut-level pre-political effect “There But for Fortune” has on me (and, I imagine, others). And we ended up in an argument.

I think it’s the line that precedes “There but for fortune,” the one that goes “I’ll show you a young man with so many reasons why.” It seems to strike conservatives as some excuse for people’s stupid and immoral choices. That, under a meritocracy, the guy merits being out on the streets.

It implies explanations, excuses, the “evils of dependency,” and before five minutes of our argument had passed my friend had raised the subject of “school vouchers.” If only the education system were better suited to inculcating better values, the guy wouldn’t be a panhandler.

But maybe some people, even with good education and the right attitude about the system, fall down on their luck: There but for fortune …. Perhaps it’s my own low self-esteem speaking, but I always feel I’ve been a couple of lucky breaks away from being the other guy. (I know: “Once upon a time you dressed so fine / You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”—B. Dylan.)

I suppose I could have told Phil Ochs about how much his song meant to me at that last dinner we had together. How powerful that single, simple song was and how it would last. But, knowing Phil, he might have been thinking of another song of his: “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” He spared no one. And knowing him, there was one thing I knew I couldn’t do: make him Dylan.

He was certainly depressed that evening we had dinner. He drank a lot and seemed obsessed with boxing. He was determined to go to some old Hollywood arena for the fights that night. Don’t ask me why a pacifist folkie loved boxing, but he was, as they say, a man of contradictions. Or maybe he was still angry about a lot of things. But not being Dylan was at the bottom of it all. The subject of Rodney Crowell’s recent song, “Beautiful Despair,” is the despair every songwriter feels at not being Dylan. I think that on some level it afflicts us all.

Anyway, as it turned out, I turned down Phil’s invitation to accompany him to the fights that night. I had my secret contacts to worry about, and I never liked boxing anyway, so I declined, and he went off into the night.

And then, less than a year later, he hung himself in his sister’s house.

So it’s too late. And not that it would have made any difference even then, but: Phil, I’ll always be grateful for “There But for Fortune.” And it won’t be forgotten, and it will change people’s hearts for a long time to come.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times , confirmed rumors of Mr. McGrath's departure in a Nov. 13 e-mail to the Times staff. "Since dissembling is one of the few skills Chip McGrath has NOT mastered, it is by now no secret that he has been agitating for a return to the writing life," Mr. Keller wrote. "Since getting Chip as a full-time writer is almost adequate repayment for losing him as editor of the Book Review, we have come to terms." Mr. Keller's memo said the Book Review under Mr. McGrath was "much like Chip himself: intelligent and witty, sophisticated without being self-important."

After spending 23 years as a writer and editor at The New Yorker , Mr. McGrath was named editor of the Book Review in 1995. "I think I've had a great run as an editor," Mr. McGrath said. Editing the Book Review is "a job that one shouldn't do forever," he added. "I think you need to stay fresh and you don't want to get stale in your responses." Mr. McGrath said he'd been feeling some wear and tear: "I have too thin a skin for this job," he said.

Does Adam Moss, The Times ' newly appointed "culture czar," know what he is up against as he conducts the search for Mr. McGrath's successor? Mr. Moss said The Times expects to interview candidates in the next several weeks and name the new editor "probably in a couple of months." As of Monday, The Times has had "absolutely no-zero-conversations with anyone about the job," Mr. Moss said. "We are just beginning the search now."

Mr. Moss said The Times would evaluate its other publishing coverage along with the Book Review . Last spring, The Times killed its publishing column, written by Martin Arnold and considered puzzling and often wildly off-base by the publishing world, and since David Kirkpatrick was reassigned to the media-business beat in mid-2002, the paper doesn't have a full-time reporter on the publishing-industry beat.

But for now, it sounds like status quo is the goal. "We're big fans of the Book Review we publish now. We're just looking for an exciting editor," Mr. Moss said. The Times is looking for "a person who can do as good a job with the Review as Chip did and who will bring his or her own ideas. We're not looking for a person to execute a plan we already have," he continued. "The important thing is, we're not looking for radical change."

Mr. Moss' words should placate anyone who feared the Book Review might turn into fluff, but they will be grating to those-and there are many-who think the Sunday section needs a substantial overhaul. With its hokey illustrations and often tepid prose interspersed with full-page advertisements for "broad spectrum" anti-depression lighting, it has become so familiar that millions of readers can hardly imagine a Sunday without it. But few would say that sitting down with the Book Review is a bracing experience these days. Rarely does a Times Book Review piece make a ripple in literary conversations.

Yet even the Book Review 's harshest critics are hard-pressed to come up with a recipe to improve it-and this may be because the Book Review 's problems are written into its very DNA. As John Leonard, now a book critic for Harper's and the television critic for New York magazine, put it: "It's an anomalous publication." Mr. Leonard's tenure as editor of the Book Review , from 1970 to 1975, is often mentioned as the publication's last golden age, a time when its pages played host to charged intellectual battles and reviewers regularly took on questions central to the culture-a time when book reviews mattered . (Mr. Leonard said that at the time, the publishing establishment greeted his regime with terror.) "It can't be a strictly literary magazine because it's part of a newspaper, it's a source of advertising revenue," Mr. Leonard said. "It's got to be journalistic. It's got to cover too many things, therefore it's very hard to get a consistent tone."

Or, as Mr. McGrath described it, the Book Review falls "between The New York Review of Books , say, and the book coverage in Time or Newsweek . Its blessing and its curse is that its mandate is to cover the waterfront." The curse is that it can never review enough of the hundreds of thousands of books published each year to live up to its reputation as the book review of record, and yet it will always be too much like Time or Newsweek -that is, too middle-of-the-road, too beholden to mass tastes-to engage in meatier literary criticism.

Mr. McGrath's successor will arrive at a time when there is actually some larger debate about book reviewing going on. It's all a bit strangely polarized: On one end of the spectrum are the likes of the militantly mild Believer editor Heidi Julavits, issuing rambling screeds against "snarky" book critics. On the other are bomb-throwers like the novelist Dale Peck, who routinely goes after big quarry in his long reviews in The New Republic , and whose supposed acts of critical derring-do got him an anthropological profile in The New York Times Magazine last month, as if an ambitious, bloodthirsty critic were some kind of special case that demanded to be analyzed.

Some see these extremes, and the attention they're getting, as reactions to the wishy-washy state of the Book Review . "If The New York Times ' critics were a little bit mouthier and brassier, Peck's bad boy persona-as it were-would not quite have felt like such an emancipation," said David Kipen, the book critic of the San Francisco Chronicle . In Mr. Kipen's assessment, The Times Book Review features "too many New Yorkers reviewing too many other New Yorkers and not wanting to have drinks thrown in their face" at the next book party.

Even more than the critics, it's the editor of the Book Review who's likely to be on the receiving end of an errant glass of warm Chardonnay. The editor appears to the world at large as the bouncer of an elite literary club. Writers feel they've hit the big time when they're invited in, and are full of righteous indignation when they-or their friends-get left out in the cold. Publishers and editors let it be known that they feel their livelihoods are on the line with every issue-or else they nonchalantly dismiss its clout, especially when their authors get bad reviews.

It's clearly not a job for anyone who depends on a regular diet of general approval. "You're painfully aware that no matter what you do, you make somebody unhappy," said Mr. McGrath. "A lot of people feel that part of their job is to let you know in various ways how unhappy you've made them. That's wearing," he said. He said he began choreographing his exit when he started "to think of the books coming in as your enemies, not your friends."

"The job wears you out," said Mr. Leonard. "I lasted five years. It's not so much that the books keep coming, but the complaints keep coming. You can never satisfy the publishing industry."

Even the task of bringing standout critics to the Book Review 's pages is not as easy as it sounds. Mr. Leonard pointed out that many seemingly frisky reviewers freeze up when handed a plum New York Times assignment. "People tend to write differently for The Times than they do in the venues you found them in originally," Mr. Leonard said. "They become pompous and straight-laced."

The Times Book Review 's editor also has to have a high tolerance for the creaking Times bureaucracy. Small wonder that the list of rumored potential candidates isn't exactly long. The names being bandied about include Alexander Star, the editor of the Boston Globe 's new Ideas section and the former editor of Lingua Franca . Mr. Star, known as an erudite and politic editor, declined to comment, but Times sources said Mr. Star is interviewing for the editorial-director job at The Times Magazine that was vacated by Gerry Marzorati when he became the Magazine 's editor in September.

Then there's Sarah Crichton, the former publisher at Little, Brown and a former arts editor at Newsweek , who is seen as a strong editor not afraid to whip things into shape (Ms. Crichton famously clashed with Time Warner chairman Laurence Kirschbaum at Little, Brown). Ms. Crichton said that he hadn't spoken to The Times and declined to comment further. Laura Miller, a founding editor of Salon and longtime contributor to the Book Review who also writes a bimonthly back-page essay in it, is another book-world insider seen as a potential no-nonsense Book Review editor. Ms. Miller said The Times hadn't contacted her. Another name in the rumor mill is The Observer 's literary editor, Adam Begley. He said he hadn't received any calls from The Times , either. Messrs. Moss and McGrath wouldn't discuss names. "Some people have already gotten in touch with us, and we'll be reaching out to others who we think might be interested or interesting," Mr. Moss said.

Whether the incoming editor can translate a vision into a reality depends in part on how much power he or she will be given-or insist on. Indeed, sources at The Times say Mr. McGrath didn't make any big staffing changes, having inherited both an art director and six "preview editors," who vet book galleys and assign and edit book reviews. Besides choosing his deputy, Julie Just, Mr. McGrath has had just one preview-editor slot to fill. He first hired Sarah Mosle; when she left in 1999, Mr. McGrath brought in Dwight Garner, who currently handles fiction. As to whether the incoming editor will be able to reshape the staff, "Those sorts of questions are really of internal concern," Mr. Moss said. "I will say that the new editor will have the authority to make the Book Review he or she thinks ought to be published, because that's why we will hire this person."

Literary observers say Mr. McGrath's imprint on the Book Review was subtle but evident-he made his literary sensibility and support for serious fiction clear, and he changed the back page from a space open to hit-or-miss freelance pieces into a rotation of regulars: the "Boox" cartoon by Mark Alan Stamaty and two essayists, Pulitzer Prize–winner Margo Jefferson and Judith Shulevitz, who left the spot last spring and was replaced by Ms. Miller.

Some lauded Mr. McGrath for remaining dedicated to reviewing more esoteric books than the stuff that makes The Times ' own national best-seller list. "I think Chip's been a real friend to literary fiction in his tenure there," said Jeff Seroy, senior vice president and director of publicity at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "His taste in books aligns with what we tend to publish," said Nicholas Latimer, the director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf. "I'm going to be saddened to see him go."

Mr. McGrath said he was most proud of "improving the quality of the writing" at the Book Review . "It was never as good as I wanted it to be, but it is getting there. I think whoever succeeds me has a good base to start on," he said. Mr. McGrath said his other goal at the Book Review was "simultaneously to make it higher-brow and lower-brow"-by reviewing pop-culture books as well as weightier ones.

Even as they urge change at the Book Review , the nervous nellies of the publishing world are also worried about just what kind of beast might emerge. "Everyone holds their breath when changes are rumored at The Times , because we do not imagine that they're going to be suddenly upping the number of pages allotted to book reviewing," said Starling Lawrence, the editor in chief of W.W. Norton and Co.

"I hope that it doesn't get dumbed down, with a lot of short reviews about ephemera," said Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of literary stalwart F.S.G. "It should discover people, help make careers"-of book authors, he said, although the same could go for critics.

"I'd hate to see it go in for more interviews, author photographs, publishing news, even the gossip-anything that cuts down on anything devoted to the review of books," Mr. Leonard said. "I hope it won't go that way, but the whole culture is going that way, in a celebrity-fucker direction."

"I would change it-but by changing it, I would by definition be reviewing fewer books," said Benjamin Schwarz, the literary editor of The Atlantic Monthly . Increasing its depth while narrowing its range wouldn't be so popular with publishers. "If there's a wish list, it would be simply that there were shorter reviews of more books," said Nan Talese, editor of her eponymous Doubleday imprint. "In other words, the key is with no plots, no story plots," she said. "Make the reviews shorter and more pithy-you could lose a column and a half right there!" Now, the Book Review 's rigid template allows only reviews of strictly set lengths: 700, 1,100 or 1,400 words, plus shorter Books in Brief reviews.

To get more "wonderful writing" into the book review, Mr. Leonard advocated a method he used when he was there: overcommissioning copy and using only the best stuff. In other words: Kill, kill, kill! "One way to discover wonderful writers is by being profligate in that way," Mr. Leonard said. He said he'd often be swayed to review a book that wasn't really crying out for coverage, simply because he had a great review of it on hand: "Such-and-such who wrote about quantum physics and Buster Keaton submitted a piece that would knock everyone's socks off." It's hard to imagine The Times returning to that system. It's not just a question of wounded egos when reviews are killed; ad sales are down and the Book Review has had to shed pages in recent years, making it harder to take risks. But then again, it's The New York Times Book Review . Millions read it no matter what it prints. What has it got to lose?

My decision to spend a morning as assistant pastry chef at a neighborhood bakery and restaurant called Café Indulge was born of a number of factors. Not disillusionment with journalism, or with writing, which I still love in a love/hate fashion, but desire for a bit of contrast.

Of course, journalism has taken a lot of knocks lately. I loved Toby Young's book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People , laughed out loud frequently at many points, but his book's portrait of what journalism is-even glossy-magazine journalism-is kind of limited, mainly to the kind of professional freeloader and semi-official celebrity stalker whose ambition it once was his to be. (Although he does get big points for citing repeatedly one of my heroes, Ben Hecht, and his amazing memoir A Child of the Century ). But what about Murray Kempton, my ideal and inspiration? Yes, he was one of a kind, but he produced journalism that combined thrillingly precise observation, which comes from a joyful immersion in the world, with a complex, sometimes comic awareness of paradox and an idiosyncratic style that will make even his ephemeral works lasting treasures of American culture.

And what about the journalism of ideas of the sort that Lingua Franca published? (O.K., Lingua Franca is dead, but that kind of journalism isn't.) I was just leafing through Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca , the forthcoming anthology from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. An anthology I'm pleased to say that, according to a note from editor Alexander Star, had its "genesis" in my column ( The Observer , Nov. 12, 2001) praising the magazine and lamenting its loss. Toby Young could have come to America and restarted the Modern Review (the magazine of "Low Culture for Highbrows") he founded and folded. Or, failing that, he could have become a star of Lingua Franca like Emily Eakin or Larissa MacFarquhar, who have since done quite well elsewhere. Toby Young is the quintessential quick study: highly educated, sees through sophistry, and can capture people and ideas with ease and flair. You can find all that in Quick Studies , along with glimpses of the great mysteries of existence and the nature of human nature. It makes you realize there's a lot of good journalism to be done that doesn't involve celebrities with a film to plug.

And just to mention some more examples of why journalism in America shouldn't be dismissed out of hand: In the realm of literary journalism, there's John K. Leonard's superbly knowledgeable dissection of Stanley Fish's new Milton book (in the July 18, 2002, issue of The New York Review of Books ). Mr. Leonard expertly demonstrates why Mr. Fish's original Milton book, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost , still deserves enormous respect, and how, in his new postmodern guise, Mr. Fish has clumsily remade Milton into a one-dimensional fundamentalist, virtually a Taliban poet.

And a word for a younger writer Daniel Pinchbeck, who has reinvigorated what might be called intellectual-adventure journalism in his forthcoming Breaking Open the Head , an account of his worldwide search for shamanic experiences, which raises provocative questions like whether 10 hours of puking your guts out during a yage ceremony in Ecuador is worth the "ten years of psychoanalysis" Mr. Pinchbeck suggests it's the equivalent of (the yage , not the puking, I think). And then there's Koba the Dread , Martin Amis' remarkably fierce and thought-provoking new study of Stalin, Stalinism and the legacy it's left on the Left. A book that reminds me in some ways of Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time , an enduring classic of political journalism.

So, as I said, I love writing, and I love reading the work of such talented colleagues, but like many people-many writers, anyway-I do entertain ideas of roads not taken, fantasy alternate careers. My two main, most persistent alternate-life fantasies are country-music songwriter (if I could just write one song for Rosanne Cash!) and pastry chef.

I guess country-music songwriter is not that much of a stretch from writer-O.K., in my fantasy life I'm a singer-songwriter, maybe like Rodney Crowell. (That's a stretch, but what do you think of the title of the song I've been working on for five years: "I'm Lookin' Forward to Lookin' Back on You." A good start, no?)

But pastry chef, that's a real alternative; living my life in a cloud of flour, butter, cream and confectioner's sugar. Turning out tarts and cupcakes (that doesn't sound quite right, but never mind) with buttercream icing, almond-cream filling, coconut-cream layering. Spectacularly intense sweet things that leave people in a coma of pleasure, moaning with gratitude.

Compare that with the thanklessness of being a writer. Yes, sometimes you entertain people, sometimes they enjoy reading what you write, but only rarely do they moan with gratitude. Most of the time what you seek in writing is to challenge readers; often you end up irritating them, angering them-all in the good cause of making them think more deeply, of course. All well and good, but part of the appeal of being a pastry chef grows out of that aspect of me that doesn't want to challenge people, but knock them out (in a good way).

I must admit that scones never figured heavily into my pastry-chef fantasy. I was never really a scone person. If I liked them on occasion, it was as a vehicle for clotted cream, Devonshire cream, that sort of thing, which I like a lot . But almost anything tastes great with Devonshire cream slathered on it. Scones occupied as well that border region between sweet things and, well, bread things. They never showed me much, and in most variations available in the city they tended to be bland, dry, disappointing, and sometimes sour and acidic-tasting. And then there's the ugly transmogrification of scones into muffin-like vehicles, the downright nasty varieties you find in coffee shops with the frosting and the filling and the fruit salad of cheap flavoring embedded in some concrete-texture, cardboard-tasting dough, giving them all the appeal and authenticity of Dunkin Donuts' blueberry "bagels."

But even with the allegedly high-end scones-like the Balthazar Bakery varieties you can now find distributed in various gourmet-coffee-shop-type places these days-you might as well be eating unflavored drywall.

What got me into the whole scone thing, what convinced me that I had to try out the pastry-chef fantasy, was the opening of what was originally a pastry shop in my neighborhood: Café Indulge. It's now a restaurant as well (you can find it at 31st and Second across from the Kips Bay megaplex), but originally it was just about pastry-really remarkable pastry. The place featured a remarkable pastry chef, a young graduate of the French Culinary Institute named Elyssa Robbins (now Elyssa Fournier-she recently married a French chef). From the beginning, Café Indulge employed the smart marketing device of placing Elyssa in the front window, steamy tendrils of butter flavor seeping out to the street-the fragrant tentacles of culinary temptation.

At first I was hooked on the buttery tarts. The sour cherry tart in particular, with its almond-flour-infused filling and smashing buttery crust, had my number from the start, though the blueberry and pumpkin tarts were capable of inflicting serious damage on my willpower as well.

Then there were the chocolate flourless cupcakes, which I resisted for a long time because lately chocolate has a tendency to give me mini-migraine-like symptoms. But then I tasted it and I decided that I don't care-bring on the headache, I'm not going to deny myself the pleasure. Sometimes I'd buy them in the morning, hot out of the oven, still gooey inside, and vow to wait until later to reward myself-a vow I rarely kept. Yes, I've had chocolate flourless cupcakes for breakfast! I try to rationalize it. I knew from reading 18th-century novels and memoirs that this was something writers and aristocrats would do-begin their morning with a strong cup of chocolate instead of coffee, a very literary thing. But who was I fooling? I would have done it anyway; life is short (and getting shorter for me because of my refusal to deny myself buttery treats).

Then every once in awhile, Ms. Robbins would just sort of come up with some new creation that would knock me out. First there were her pear muffins, an amazingly buttery, rich creation incorporating buttery discs of Bosc pears. (Did I mention they were buttery?) I wondered if I was just imagining things, but I started bringing the pear muffins and Ms. Robbins' cookies (particularly the ginger snaps and butter cookies) up to the Observer office, where I suddenly felt more popular (not that I wasn't tolerated before, but the muffins and cookies were a big hit).

Her next invention was off the charts: a deceptively innocent-sounding apple cake, a large cupcake-sized creation of buttery crumbs, almond cream and tender, buttery apple slices (did I mention that it was buttery?) that came close to making me moan out load when I tasted it. I know it sounds simple-"apple cake"-but you won't say that after you've tasted it. It's enough to drive you mad with pleasure.

Where was I? Yes, trying to talk about scones, but I got off the track in describing some of the more sensational treats. That was the thing, exactly: These scones had to be pretty remarkable to shift my focus away from their rivals on the pastry spectrum. But it was precisely their reticent perfection that won me over.

That, and the running argument I would have with Elyssa over what kind of scones she should focus on.

Basically, I thought that her currant scone was perfection itself, but she insisted on what I argued were unnecessary "improvements." About those currants: I've never had any respect for those shriveled-looking little bits (the Mini-Me's of the raisin world), but somehow they worked in Elyssa's scones, allowing her not to tart up the dough itself with too much sugariness, providing instead little spikes of sweet counterpoint to the powdery fusion of flavor and texture in the scone. They served to heighten the contradictions, to throw the qualities of each element into sharper relief.

Anyway, the argument began when Elyssa insisted on trying out what I thought were mere crowd-pleasing experiments with her perfect scones, making chocolate-chip scones, chocolate-chip almond scones-that way lies Starbucks. I had a deeply held philosophical position that chocolate and doughiness were clashing categories of taste that undermined each other, although I admit her meltingly good banana chocolate-chip muffins (very popular at The Observer ) almost persuaded me otherwise. Even when she added less distracting elements than chocolate, like raisins or cherries, I felt that it somehow affected the texture, the coherence of the whole scone experience.

Anyway, out of this good-natured sconology discussion grew the notion that she teach me how to make her classic scones, so I could make my own while she was entertaining the masses with the chocolate-chip variety. Perhaps she would disclose the secret that made her scones so unusual. And out of that grew the idea of my spending a morning as her assistant pastry chef, to get a taste of what my fantasy career might be like.

And so it was on a recent morning that I arrived at Café Indulge at 7 a.m., put on a chef's apron and went to work. I don't want to keep you in suspense: My scones, made under Elyssa's tutelage, totally rocked. I brought a bag of them up to The Observer after my stint that morning and-without my telling anyone I'd baked them-people loved them. My scones were better than Balthazar's by far !

But scones were only part of the pastry-chef experience. There was something exhilarating about bringing trays of brioche dough from the proofing box in the basement up to the oven in the tiny Café Indulge kitchen and watching them bloom into mahogany-coated beauty. That was our first task. Then, under Elyssa's guidance, I made dough for the shells of her incredible éclairs: a time-consuming process which, nonetheless, by the time I'd finished-covered with flour and pastry dough-had left the air perfumed with the mingled fragrances of butter and sugar. All of these infused with the varied fragrances of her muffins baking away, along with the dough for the chocolate flourless cupcakes that had become my post–Sept. 11 addiction. (Hey, we all have our different ways of coping with the stress of waiting for the day of the dirty nuke to arrive.)

After a couple of hours of being immersed in this fragrant atmosphere of butter and sugar and flour, along with mixing dough and sampling it (a little too frequently) and breathing its elements in, I had three insights:

1) Pastry is a language , with a lovely five-word vocabulary, a lingua franca that can be skillfully deployed to create a universe of sensual significations. The five words being: butter, flour, sugar, eggs (well, that's really three words when you consider the different ways yolks, whites and whole eggs are deployed) and cream.

Yes, cream-especially heavy cream, which is the key ingredient in Elyssa's scones. You can't compromise on the cream. A low-fat scone is an oxymoron; it usually tastes like the stale muffin it failed to be.

2) My second revelation: There's a difference between loving to eat pastry and loving to be a pastry chef. There's a lot of hard work, a lot of heavy lifting, but more than anything it's the breathing in of sugary, buttery fumes. You'd think you could never get tired of breathing in sugary, buttery fumes, but that's because you've probably never breathed them in for hours at a time. It would be like eating sugary, buttery things for hours at a time -too much of a good thing. Blake said that one never knows when one has had enough until one has had too much. I think I'll stick to eating pastry rather than cooking it.

3) And there was a third revelation: the secret of Elyssa's scones. It has to do with lots of heavy cream and with cold, buttery disks. She likes to cut the cold butter into small disks and mix it into the dough in that somewhat nonhomogenized way so that during the baking process, the disks melt locally within the gelling architecture of the dough. Somehow this creates buttery layers within the scones. It's an utterly unique texture thing, but not unrelated to the way the whole taste thing is organized, you might say.

Anyway, I've never done this before, but I'm going to include the scone recipe that Elyssa wrote out for me, because I'm a giving kind of guy (see box). By the way, I recently learned the tragic news that Elyssa and her husband will be leaving for the West Coast to open a restaurant of their own there. I have two words for her successor: butter and cream .