Mr. Trautwein, who came to publishing from magazines, has been at Bloomsbury since 2006; while there, he edited such titles as Edmund White's A Boy's Life, Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess, Kingsley Amis's Everyday Drinking, and The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac by the blogging collective Free Darko. Before that, Mr. Trautwein was an assistant under Harper editor David Hirshey, working on books like Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and Buster Olney's The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty in addition to becoming known for having some of the best copyediting chops in the business.

Mr. Trautwein leaves Bloomsbury at a moment when the house is beginning to regroup from a turbulent year during which its longtime publisher, Karen Rinaldi, and its editor in chief, Colin Dickerman both decamped for Rodale Books amid financial uncertainty.

"I've known about him for a while, but mostly became aware of him as we went into this process," said Ann Godoff, president and publisher of Penguin Press, referring to the search undertaken at Penguin Press over the last month or so to find a replacement for Ms. Mobley. During that period, former associate editor Laura Stickney was also promoted to full editor. 

"He's an old-fashioned editor with a young mind," Ms. Godoff said this morning of Mr. Trautwein. "I think he's a roll-your-sleeves-up editor, and that's enormously attractive."

She added: "He knows the difference beween a magazine story and a book-length opportunity, and I think that's right up our street, given that the balance of our list is very much nonfiction." 

Bloomsbury publisher George Gibson, who took over the house last July, was not available for comment.

Mr. Trautwein did not immediately return a call to his office at Bloomsbury. He starts at at Penguin on April 6. 

In Experience , the memoir he published last year, Martin Amis confessed to a sad truth: "A writer's life is all anxiety and ambition." The memoir was more concerned with other matters-his father, the late Kingsley Amis; a murdered cousin; an illegitimate daughter; his famously bad teeth. But now we have The War Against Cliché , a fat collection of essays and reviews, abundant confirmation that Martin Amis is indeed anxious and ambitious.

The anxiety of writers is always the same, its engrossing object being the failure of writerly ambition, which comes in two flavors: the personal and the artistic. The writer's personal ambition, mostly a simple top-of-the-heap scramble, finds its classic expression in the ranking of talent, an activity Mr. Amis pursues with gusto. Artistic ambition is more interesting and varied: There are writers who dream of coining words, others who aim at inventing unforgettable characters, a few who will settle for nothing less than epic achievement. Mr. Amis has written some hefty novels, but always his preoccupation is with prose style. His eye is fixed on phrases and sentences, even le mot juste -everything else is background. In a long and overexcited essay about Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March , Mr. Amis assures us that "style is morality. Style judges." In a review of Fay Weldon's Words of Advice , he warns that "Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart. Cliché always does." Surface dazzle clearly means a lot to Mr. Amis; ditto its absence.

Mr. Amis is a huge fan of the ever-dazzling Vladimir Nabokov, and so fans of Mr. Amis will be eager to hear what he has to say about the "irresistible and unforgivable" Lolita (I'm sorry to report that the tenor of the essay is established early on when he refers to the novel's "livid and juddering heart"). As Nabokov did, Mr. Amis worries about "forces of democratization"; he fears that the egalitarian impulse has bulldozed the "structure of echelons and hierarchies" upon which literary judgment rests. And yet Mr. Amis is confident that the threat will pass, that "literature will resist levelling and revert to hierarchy." Honest critics will go back to the invidious and sometimes hurtful task of identifying the "talent elite"-a responsibility Mr. Amis has never shirked in the 30 years he's been turning out reviews. In The War Against Cliché , he makes nice noises about a handful of living writers, including Mr. Bellow, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and John Updike. (The verdict on Rabbit's progenitor: "I sense genius, but not the heavy impact of greatness, not yet.")

Does Mr. Amis himself belong to the "talent elite"? He sure hopes so. This book can be seen as an attempt to bully posterity, personified here in the figure of "Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don't." A collection of miscellaneous essays and reviews makes sense if Mr. Amis is a truly important novelist: If our great-grandchildren will be revering him, then by all means, let's gather up every casual scribble. Let's preserve the review he wrote in 1971, at age 21, of The Guinness Book of Records (18th edition), and his racy 1973 review of The Best of Forum , and the relentlessly sour attack he launched two decades ago against The Best of Modern Humour , edited by Mordecai Richler. Are you itching to know what Martin Amis thought of The Malacia Tapestry , by Brian Aldiss?"Bewilderingly trite." Do you yearn to discover his opinion of posthumous Capote? "Even with running heads, broad margins and fancifully aerated line-spacing, Answered Prayers is nothing more than a frazzled novella." Because Mr. Amis enjoys chess, soccer and poker, a section of The War Against Cliché is devoted to these topics.

I'm guessing that Mr. Amis' anxiety about membership in the "talent elite" is mild compared with his panic at the thought of stylistic failure. The pieces in this collection, even the recent ones, are (as he says of Augie March ) "extraordinarily written "-and if you were reading them in a newspaper or a magazine, you'd be grateful. Sentence by sentence, Mr. Amis works hard for his reader's pleasure. In five consecutive reviews (this is a randomly selected sequence), we hear "the clip-clop of the hobbyhorse"; we watch Malcolm Lowry "wallow in the ooze and booze beneath Popocatepetl"; we inventory Raymond Chandler's mug: "spectacles, receding hairline, lips so thin they seem to be licked away"; we cut the very tall Michael Crichton down to size: "the artist in him (a diminutive personage, true, but a definite presence)"; and we anatomize Elmore Leonard: "the essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle." Five hundred pages of this kind of cleverness can be exhausting. And it tempts you to play gotcha! , to try to catch the clever one coasting or-heaven forfend-smuggling in a cliché. Don't bother: The essence of Mr. Amis is to be found in his ceaseless vigilance. Not in a million years would he kick back, let a sentence slide.

But is he a good reviewer? Yes. It's no surprise to find that his great strength is in selecting quotations, which he rightly identifies as "the reviewer's only hard evidence." He knows how to communicate the feel of a writer's work. Sometimes he skimps on the reader's-report elements, which can be annoying if you're more concerned with content than style. But where the point is the writing (as in his brilliant, revelatory hymn to Mr. Leonard's Riding the Rap , or in his devastating takedown of Richard Rhodes' Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey ), he's delightfully exact.

At least one item is of enduring importance: a 1993 New Yorker essay about Philip Larkin. Mr. Amis' mission is to defend the poet against the attacks that followed the publication of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (a good many of which were addressed to Kingsley Amis). The letters revealed that Larkin had been a mean old man with ugly habits (he made racist and sexist remarks in private, used pornography and aired-again in private-some repellent political views). When word got around that he had harbored offensive attitudes, critics suddenly slashed at his reputation as a poet (Mr. Amis calls this the "process of literary disposal"). The "anti-Larkin crusade" was in fact brutal and short-sighted; Mr. Amis' recap makes it look ludicrous. He shares with the reader a telling glimpse of the man himself: "slightly fussy, cumbrous, long-suffering." So far, so good. But the essay is built around a review of Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin, and here Mr. Amis is led astray by the otherwise laudable urge to protect the memory of his father's old buddy (defending Larkin is also a roundabout way of defending Kingsley, who kindled his own share of politically correct outrage). Mr. Amis detects a "tone" that offends his ear: "In Andrew Motion's book we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by (for instance) Andrew Motion." In fact, Mr. Motion's book is both sympathetic and unfailingly honest. Sure, it makes Larkin out to be a sad case-but that's what he was. (In a rare relaxed sentence, Mr. Amis gets it right: "In a sense, none of this matters, because only the poems matter.")

Often Mr. Amis ends with a long quotation; I think I'll do the same. Here he's passing judgment on a collection of reviews and essays even fatter than this one:

"A rather workaday grumble to be made about Picked-Up Pieces is that many of its pieces ought never to have been picked up …. Complaints about … a book's margin-sizes may look well enough in the columns of The New Yorker but appear footling between hardcovers …. [H]ere, plainly, Mr. Updike is more interested in his personal filing-system than in his normal courteousness towards the reader. And then, too, the hot snort of the hobby-horse can be felt on and off throughout books of this kind."

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

In London, thanks to a series of absurd pseudoscandals whipped up by the British press, every reader of novels knows the dirt on Martin Amis. They know where he lives, how much money he's made, how many kids he has and who their mothers are. If ever it looks like "Smarty Anus" is misbehaving, headlines tell the tale.

In New York, the press has yet to develop a sustained fascination with the intimate details of his existence, and only the media junkies in the book business care about his terrible teeth, his divorce or his ex-lovers (one of whom, Tina Brown, is publishing his new book, a memoir called Experience ). Readers here know him as the author of two best sellers, London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995), though perhaps they've also read Money (1984) and a few of his 11 other books. His fans prize his cleverness and playfulness, his daring and his bold, energetic and beautifully controlled prose style.

American readers confronted with Experience will surely agree that the press should get off his back, that he should be allowed to go about his business unharassed. Indeed, American readers may wonder why the 50-year-old Mr. Amis, "a novelist … trained to use experience for other ends," has chosen, as he puts it, "to speak, for once, without artifice" in the now-ubiquitous autobiographical mode.

His excuse is the death of his father in 1995. Kingsley Amis, a novelist, poet and critic, was very well known in the United Kingdom (he was knighted in 1990), and was once upon a time a best-selling author in the United States, though nowadays on this side of the Atlantic, his ferociously comic first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), is pretty much his only claim to fame. Experience , Martin explains, is a commemoration of the irascible Sir Kingsley, and also an account of a "literary curiosity"–a father-son duo of prolific, successful writers.

In Britain, the month of May has been an Amis double whammy: In tandem with the son's memoir came the father's collected letters, a 1,000-page tome. Kingsley's correspondence has not found a U.S. publisher, which is too bad, because his brawling comic genius and fearless honesty–especially in the letters to his great friend, the poet Philip Larkin–more than compensate for a profusion of curmudgeonly harumphing. A tiny taste: Writing to historian Robert Conquest about the breakup of his second marriage, Amis notes with bitter bravado that he hasn't "set eyes on the bag" in eight years and wishes the end had come a decade earlier. Then he waxes philosophical–"Well, it's all experience, though it's a pity there had to be so much of it."

Unfortunately, Martin's Experience is more about his own than his dad's. Unfailingly unchronological (we learn about the day 15-year-old Martin lost his virginity–to a girl he met in a Wimpy bar–on page 294) and diffuse in its apparent aims, the memoir wanders off just when we want it to settle down and concentrate. There's the story of Martin's cousin, abducted and murdered by a serial killer, her fate a mystery for two decades. There's the story of his illegitimate daughter, whom he meets for the first time when she's 19. And there's the story of his terrible teeth. There's not enough, as far as I'm concerned, about that "literary curiosity"–the business of father and son being in the same business.

Martin excuses Kingsley's habitual drunkenness with the observation that a "writer's life is all anxiety and ambition–and ambition, here, is not readily distinguishable from anxiety." How fully did father and son share the writer's ambition and anxiety? How did they manage, if they managed, to keep from making it worse for each other? Booze takes the edge off, sure–but then why isn't Martin a drunk, too?

Amis père and fils forged a strong, enduring bond of love, though in his last years Kingsley strained it with blasts of right-wing provocation and a sorry physical dependence. Did we need to know about the old man's "Irritable Bowel Syndrome"? Or about the time he "openly peed into a mop-bucket"? (His son assures us that he would have omitted this humiliating tidbit from his memoir had it not already been published elsewhere.) Martin yearned for a second father: his literary hero, Saul Bellow, whose novels Kingsley scorned. Martin claims that he is Mr. Bellow's "ideal reader"; and though Martin clearly treasures Kingsley's books, he states–without elaboration–that he is not his father's "ideal reader." There are depths here as yet unexplored.

Freud, Mr. Amis reminds us, had much to say about teeth: "how, for instance, dreams of tooth loss are manifestations of sexual doubt and fear." Dental drama dominates the first half of this memoir; it inspires this dazzling passage: "I know all about the expert musicianship of toothaches, their brass, woodwind and percussion and, most predominantly, their strings, their strings (Bach's 'Concerto for Cello' struck me, when I recently heard it performed, as a faultless transcription of a toothache–the persistence, the irresistible persuasiveness). Toothaches can play it staccato, glissando, accelerando, prestissimo, and above all fortissimo. They can do rock, blues and soul, they can do doo-wop and bebop, they can do heavy metal, rap, punk and funk. And beneath all this anarchical stridor there was a lone, soft, insistent voice, always audible to my abject imagination: the tragic keening of the castrato."

Yes, Mr. Amis had tooth troubles; he had them all yanked out. To pay for his oral and maxillofacial surgery, he demanded a $1 million advance for The Information . To get that advance he ditched his old agent (Pat Kavanagh, wife of his pal Julian Barnes) and hired Andrew Wylie (known in the British press as "the Jackal"). At about the same time, Mr. Amis left his wife, the mother of his two sons, and moved in with the writer Isabel Fonseca. The British press turned all this into a sordid story of betrayal and vanity, and Mr. Amis' unstated aim here seems to be to assert beyond any doubt that he had his mouth rebuilt not for "a Liberace smile," but because he had no choice. If you don't already know about the gossip column calumny ( cosmetic surgery? Shame on him! ), if you don't know who Pat and Julian and Andrew and Isabel are, Experience will seem cryptic and coy, its insistence on dentistry baffling.

Mr. Amis doesn't seem to think much of memoirs (which is odd when you consider that his other literary hero is Nabokov, and Speak Memory , Nabokov's autobiography, is his masterpiece). The author of Experience declares that "the fit reader, the ideal reader, regards a writer's life as just an interesting extra"; he argues that "writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang." Though there are lovely moments here (as when Martin is playing pinball in a cafe in Spain, "feeling the warm breath of raptly attendant niños on my fingers"), he doesn't seem willing to stretch on every page. He claims, of course, to be speaking "without artifice"–that's both not true (remember the toothache aria) and too true.

So skip this scattered self-defense and read instead two great first novels, Kingsley's Lucky Jim and Martin's The Rachel Papers (1973)–see whether they twang in harmony.

Adam Begley is books editor of The New York Observer.

The restaurant is in a small, attractive hotel called the Mayfair New York on West 49th Street. It is named after the 17th-century Shakespearean actor David Garrick, who founded a club called the Garrick in London. (Among its many illustrious members was the late Kingsley Amis, who was often to be found at the bar and once remarked that the saddest words in the English language were "Shall we go straight in?")

I first visited the Garrick on a Saturday with a friend and our two children for lunch, before a matinee of Annie Get Your Gun . We were immediately charmed by the look of the place. Both the lobby and the dining room have an intimate, clubby feel; their walls are paneled in cherrywood and hung with wonderful 1940's photographs of old movie stars such as Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, lent by the Museum of the City of New York (including a great one in the bathroom of a soulful-looking and very young Tallulah Bankhead). Perhaps it was the setting, but the customers looked out of the 40's, too. The dining room proper is long and narrow and feels a bit like the restaurant car on a train 50 years ago. It is rather too brightly lit (but they lowered the lights when we asked). The paneled walls are lined with brown leather banquettes and hung with plain mirrors and small lamps with frosted glass shades.

The food is an intriguing combination of Provençal cuisine and dishes from the 40's–oysters Rockefeller, clams casino and lobster thermidor. I had tasted chef David McKenty's cooking at Côte Sud, and before that at Pitchoune, Kokachin and Leda. I like his zesty Mediterranean touch. At lunch, despite the fact that the dining room was fairly empty, the service was excruciatingly slow. I ordered a spinach salad with pears and walnuts served with a Roquefort vinaigrette. It would have been excellent had I not come across a small foreign body lurking in it (not animal or vegetable, but mineral). The waitress brought me another salad–this time, even though I believe lightning doesn't strike twice, I opted for mesclun with goat cheese croutons.

"There will be no charge," she said as she set down the plate before me. "Enjoy your lunch."

"Enjoy your last lunch," whispered my son who was scowling into his plate. He had ordered crabcakes with wild rice salad and whatever he was doing to them, eating did not seem to be a part of it. "The wild rice tastes like a roasted Nutrigrain bar."

He was right. It was undercooked and chewy and the crabcakes didn't have much character, either. But my mesclun salad was beautifully seasoned and my friend's mussels and calamari, steamed in garlic, tomato and white wine broth, were terrific. So were the lemon-pepper linguine with scallops and clams, and the brick-roasted baby chicken with green beans, mushrooms and mashed potatoes flavored with roast garlic. We wound up with a creamy crème brûlée and chocolate pot de crème, which cost a lot less than the candy we bought later at the theater.

The following week, I returned in the evening for the Garrick's pretheater dinner, which sounded like a bargain–a three-course meal for $25–before Death of a Salesman . (It made sense to eat early since the play didn't get out until 11 o'clock.) I walked in behind a couple of bewildered-looking tourists who were dragging suitcases into the lobby. This time, a very different scene met my eyes. At the back of the lobby, tables spilled out of the dining room and were filled with theatergoers having dinner. We hung our coats on a peg and waited to be seated.

I remembered Mr. McKenty's delicious escargot pissaladière, one of my favorite dishes at Côte Sud, and ordered it to start. The puff pastry was a little bit gummy on this occasion, but the topping of garlicky snails, olives, caramelized onions and tomatoes was still great. The oysters Rockefeller were good, too, although rather rich, since they came under a thick layer of spinach, butter and cream.

Our main courses were also satisfying. Seared salmon fillet, served on braised red cabbage with green pea sauce, was perfectly cooked, the cabbage providing a pleasant foil for the richness of the fish. Braised lamb shank was falling off the bone, served with white bean and fennel purée, grilled vegetables and a sprightly juniper berry sauce. I also like the grilled rib eye steak which came with a mound of crisp, salted fries and béarnaise sauce. It's a fine deal on the pretheater menu, which includes many of Mr. McKenty's best dishes.

Service was swifter on this visit, so for dessert there was time for what one of the waiters described jocularly as "mille phooey," adding, "That's the extent of the French I speak." Its layers of puff pastry were filled with ice cream. They also serve a chocolate soufflé with dark and white Valhrona chocolate, but I didn't get to taste it because they brought the chocolate pot de crème by mistake and it was too late to wait.

A few minutes later, we sank into our seats at the theater, which was packed. As the curtain went up, a voice with a strong Brooklyn accent said: "My son should see this. Do you know he's still got the first dollar he ever made?"

The play is three hours long, but I balked at the idea of spending the entire intermission in line for the bathroom. So I pass along this little tip to you, dear reader. Just nip next door to the Garrick, where you can not only use the bathroom immediately, you will also have time for a drink at the bar. I think Kingsley Amis would have approved.

The Garrick

* 1/2

242 West 49th Street

489-8600

Dress: Casual

Noise level: Moderate

Wine list: Small selection, quite high prices

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Three-course, prix-fixe pretheater and Sunday-night dinner $25, dinner main courses $12 to $21

Breakfast: Tuesday to Saturday 7 A.M. to 10:30 A.M.

Lunch: Tuesday to Saturday noon to 3 P.M.

Dinner: Daily 5:30 P.M. to 11 P.M.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor