Ms. Karkos has been critical of the book for a while: In September 2007, she checked out two copies of It's Perfectly Normal and refused to return them, paying the libraries for the cost of the books and including a note that read, "I have been sufficiently horrified of the illustrations and sexually graphic, amoral, abnormal contents. I will not be returning the books," according to WMTW.

Wednesday, following a trial during which Ms. Karkos represented herself, the honorable Judge Valerie Stanfill of the 8th District Court ordered her to give the book back. Then the following exchange took place, as described in The Sun Journal:

Ms. Karkos stayed and waited until finally the judge came back and told her she had two days to comply, meaning later today—at 4 p.m., to be precise—the other shoe is going to drop. We'll update you when the deadline comes—though be warned that according to The Sun Journal, Ms. Karkos told reporters outside the courtroom she has no intention of giving the book back.

Along with her husband and her daughter, Clinton had campaigned aggressively in Maine, with an eye toward blunting the impact of Barack Obama’s expected Saturday night sweep of Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington and in an effort to avoid being shut out for the entire month leading up to the Ohio and Texas primaries.

But Maine’s Democrats caucused on Sunday afternoon and decisively sided with Obama, marking his fourth consecutive victory since the Super Tuesday stalemate -- and setting the stage for what will almost certainly be three more wins this coming Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Clinton’s weekend wipeout will only made worse by the news that her Patti Solis Doyle is departing as her campaign manager, to be replaced by Maggie Williams. In reality, this may not be a seismic development within the Clinton campaign, but on the heels of such ugly election results, it will only feed into the process narrative that Obama has begun to move ahead and that Team Hillary is starting to panic.

Unquestionably, the Maine results constitute a major upset.

In addition to her family’s politicking, Hillary was boosted by support from the state’s Democratic governor, John Baldacci, and from demographics that seemed to favor her: a preponderance of lower-income white voters -- a constituency with which she has done very well to date -- in the state’s inland cities and many working-class towns. She had also previously fared well throughout the Northeast, losing only Connecticut (and narrowly at that).

But with nearly 90 percent of precincts reporting, Obama’s lead had stretched near 20 points. Record turnout was reported around the state -- the last vigorously contested Maine caucuses were in 1992 -- particularly in the more educated and higher-income coastal communities in the southern part of the state. Obama also fared well in college towns like Farmington and Waterville, and seemed to make inroads in some of the working-class strongholds that should have favored Hillary (for instance, he won Gardiner, which is just outside Augusta).

One reason Clinton campaign so badly wanted to win Maine was for a jolt of good news just before this Tuesday’s primaries. They seem resigned to defeat in D.C. and Maryland, but have made a considerable investment in Virginia. At the least, they’d like to keep the margins close enough in those states to collect a sizable number of delegates -- and to prevent Obama from taking the lead in overall (superdelegates included) national count.

But polls released Sunday show Obama leading by 16 points in Maryland and 18 in Virginia. Both are primary states, meaning they will attract more casual voters than a caucus state like Maine. And it is among these casual voters that Obama’s weekend sweep -- and the news of the Clinton campaign “shake-up” -- could have a powerful psychological effect, making the Obama bandwagon that much more inviting and, perhaps, inflating his standing in both states.

Maine was the Clinton campaign’s best hope of averting a shutout in the run-up to March 4. Now they might be happy just to avoid blowout losses between now and then.

Caucus-goers began assembling outside Portland High School well before 2:00, when registration was to begin. Two separate lines on either side of the school snaked back at least several blocks. Organizers, my sister reports, seemed unprepared for the onslaught -- especially when wet snow began falling around 2:00, which agitated the already impatient masses. Finally, organizers began ushering groups of caucus-goers into various parts of the school, where they could escape the snow while waiting to register. The actual caucuses were slated to start at 4:00, but registration is apparently progressing very slowly.

Portland, which is home to about 65,000 residents, is key to Barack Obama's hopes of pulling off an upset win in Maine; a giant victory in the city could offset Hillary Clinton's success in the lower-income, less-educated cities of Bangor, Lewiston and Auburn.

Here’s what it looks like:

Saturday

Louisiana primary:

Even after Katrina, which may have reduced the overall influence of black voters in this state, Barack Obama is in a strong position here.

In the 2004 primary, which was held a week after John Edwards bowed out and John Kerry became the presumptive nominee, blacks and whites turned out in even numbers (although statewide turnout was just 10 percent, due to the paltry stakes). If that pattern holds on Saturday, Obama—who now regularly wins more than 80 percent of the black vote in every primary—will win in a rout. And even if black turnout is substantially reduced, he should still have the advantage, since he also regularly claims at least 40 percent of the white vote.

The last two meaningful Louisiana primaries came in 1992, when it was part of Bill Clinton’s landslide sweep of the South, and 1988, when it was one of five Southern states to side with Jesse Jackson on Super Tuesday (by a 35-28 percent margin over Al Gore).

Nebraska caucuses:

Considering the overpowering victories Obama posted on Tuesday in North Dakota and Kansas, it’s hard to imagine a substantially different result in Nebraska, where Obama held a rally on Thursday. Like Kansas and North Dakota, Nebraska is also a caucus state, and with the exception of Nevada, he is undefeated in caucuses.

Nebraska’s most prominent elected Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson, endorsed Obama a while back. Bob Kerrey, the popular former governor and two-term senator who now lives in New York but who nearly returned to the state to run for the Senate this year, is with Hillary Clinton.

It’s been a long time since Nebraska has mattered at all in the nominating process. Traditionally, the state held a May primary, making it relevant from 1976 to 1984, when three straight Democratic primary fights stretched all the way to June. The state helped launch Frank Church’s last-minute (and fleetingly successful) challenge to Jimmy Carter’s inevitability in '76, sided with Carter over Ted Kennedy in '80, and favored Gary Hart over Walter Mondale in '84.

Washington caucuses:

Washington, which tends to favor candidates from the reform wing of the Democratic Party, should be fertile ground for Obama, who also picked up the endorsement of the state’s Democratic governor, Christine Gregoire, on Friday. Like Nebraska, the fact that this is a caucus state also plays to Obama’s advantage.

In 1992, Paul Tsongas won the caucuses here, a victory that he hoped would help demonstrate the national appeal of his candidacy. Four years before that, Michael Dukakis tried to same trick, making Washington part of his “four corners” Super Tuesday strategy, in which he used victories in all four regions of the country to demonstrate that he was the lone national candidate. Dukakis’ tactic worked much better than Tsongas’. The state was also targeted by Bill Bradley in 2000, but after his losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, it was too late.

There is one confusing and notable quirk about Washington: The state also holds a non-binding preference primary, for which ballots were mailed out weeks ago (Washington has some of the most lax mail-in voting procedures in the country). It is the caucuses that will award the actual convention delegates, but how many voters will skip them, believing they’ve already participated with their mail-in ballots?

Sunday

Maine: Here is where the Clintons believe they can make their stand. All three of them—Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea—have made trips to the state in the last few days or are scheduled to do so before Sunday’s caucuses. And the state’s Democratic governor, John Baldacci, is on board. In the wake of Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign has put out word to the media that they don’t think they will win a single contest before March 4, when Texas and Ohio vote. Part of the reason for that spin: So that a win in Maine will look that much more significant.

But Obama can not be counted out here. He should run well around Portland (the largest city in the state, with about 65,000 residents) and in the more affluent and educated coastal communities in the southern part of the state. He should also make a score in the Orono area (near inland Bangor), where the state university is. Hillary should run much stronger in the lower-income northern and inland areas of the state, including the cities of Bangor, Lewiston and Auburn.

The Clintons actually made a play in Maine the last time the state mattered, back in 1992, hoping to demonstrate post-New Hampshire momentum (the caucuses were held the Sunday after New Hampshire) with a win in rival Paul Tsongas’ backyard. The plan backfired and Bill Clinton finished in third place. But Tsongas didn’t benefit either because the surprise winner was Jerry Brown, who had finished in a distant fifth in New Hampshire.

Campaign-finance reform is as old as one of Herblock’s first cartoons about the subject, published in 1932, five years before Senator McCain was born. Sixty years later, in 1992, money’s grip on Congress was so secure that even Hollywood caught on. In The Distinguished Gentleman, Eddie Murphy plays a con man named Thomas Jefferson Johnson who gets himself elected to Congress. After Johnson lands a plum committee assignment, a slick trick from Gucci Gulch named Terry Corrigan (played by Kevin McCarthy) refers to the post as “the honey pot.” Money pours in from lobbyists on both sides of issues. “How can anything be done?” the Johnson character wonders. “It doesn’t,” Corrigan answers. “That’s the beauty of the system!”

Then came Tom DeLay’s K Street Project in 1995, purging Democratic lobbyists while raising lots of Republican cash. The number of lobbyists exploded from 9,000 to 34,000, with a similar increase in earmarks. By 2004, lobbyists were so ubiquitous that The Washington Post hired Jeffrey K. Birnbaum as the paper’s first lobbying reporter. More recently, the paper’s campaign-finance specialist, Thomas B. Edsall, described how 69 lobbyists have served as treasurers for the campaign committees or leadership P.A.C.’s of members of Congress.

In early January, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich unleashed a blunt jeremiad about the influence of lobbyists and money, saying that Washington was “building a wall of money to protect itself from America.” Following Mr. Gingrich’s speech, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called for reforms. Then realities prevailed. Messrs. Birnbaum and Edsall reported that members of Congress returned from a two-week break determined to pass a weak reform package because they heard little about the issue from voters.

As a result, reform meant more disclosures about contacts between Congress and K Street, more reports on gifts or contributions, but not bans on them. “That will be a little bit of a nuisance, but we’ll do it,” a lobbyist told Mr. Birnbaum.

Public financing of Presidential campaigns has helped level the playing field—three sitting Presidents, who usually have an enormous fund-raising advantage, have been defeated since 1976. The Presidential system began as a response to Watergate. Today’s lobbying scandals may yet inspire taxpayer-funded Congressional races, free from special-interest money. But it will take time. The soft-money caps in the McCain-Feingold law came seven years after then–Speaker Newt Gingrich and then–President Bill Clinton pledged reform with their “Claremont handshake” deal in New Hampshire.

House incumbents protected by partisan gerrymanders will strongly resist public financing because of the aid it would give to challengers. Even many Senators would rather debate themselves by raising money, granting “access” to K Street pleaders, even “tweaking” bills with niche breaks for backers in the name of “economic development.”

Meanwhile, three states show the way on public financing: Arizona, Maine and Vermont. These states have more competitive races and more citizens involved in them. Arizona offers up to $1 million in taxpayer funds for statewide races if they meet certain criteria. “Surprise, surprise!” said Senator McCain. “I’m spending more time talking to voters, not contributors.”

Under Maine’s Clean Election Law of 1998, candidates get modest public funds by collecting a maximum of $5 from all their backers. While this is “somewhat labor-intensive,” wrote state legislators Glenn Curtis, a Democrat, and Ed Youngblood, a Republican, “we enjoyed the fact that it caused us to spend more time in people’s living rooms, rather than on the phone, chasing down checks from lobbyists.”

One in four Maine state legislators is going clean; costs have plummeted; races have been more competitive; and incumbency has lost its juggernaut force. “Best of all,” wrote Messrs. Curtis and Youngblood, lobbyists have stopped hassling “clean” lawmakers, making it “easier to get through the Capitol’s halls in time for a vote.”

Cheaper and more-contested races, more citizens participating as $5 donors, lawmakers unmolested by lobbyists en route to doing the people’s business—how’s that for representative democracy?

By nearly universal agreement, Roger Angell is the most eloquent and elegant of baseball writers. The poet Donald Hall, a New Hampshire Luddite who nonetheless owned, at one point, a giant satellite dish just to watch the Red Sox, declared Mr. Angell the greatest in the game, adding that on this point there could be no room for dissent. To many, as one devotee recently told me, the season isn’t really over until Mr. Angell has put the period on it, just so, with his yearly wrap-up.

His baseball writing is passed around, kept for years on shelves in battered paperbacks. These books—among them The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988) and Once More Around the Park (1991)—remain fresh, though they’re only bound collections of old journalism, often reporting on players long since exited stage right. Among his most famous passages is a bravura discussion of the star Red Sox pitcher of the 70’s, Luis Tiant, and his bizarre, herky-jerky pitching motion. The several pages consist of closely observed, metaphorical descriptions that have Tiant, for example, stepping over a raised sill and simultaneously ducking his head to avoid banging it on a low doorframe, in a move dubbed “Out of the Woodshed.”

For Mr. Angell, baseball repays our close attention, several times over. “That’s what’s so great about writing about baseball,” he told me. “When you get down to the game, there’s always something happening that’s … electric.”

In his hands, baseball is less a sport governed by statistics, strategy and interchangeable talents than a game played by men who found joy in its small charms as boys and could never give it up. Mr. Angell has repeatedly remarked that fans now feel more remote than ever from the powerful and almost grotesquely shaped players, and yet he always finds a way to turn his central characters into people. In this way, he ensnares those who didn’t know they were fans.

Writing on the mythic Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Mr. Angell turned his attention from the details to the long view:

“Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.” The reliance on common words, most of them one syllable, is classic Angell. The artistry is hidden.

What many of Roger Angell’s readers don’t know, though publishing insiders do, is that he’s not only a sportswriter but also a fiction editor: New Yorker colleagues say he’s still very much involved in selecting stories and excerpts from novels, and in working with writers to prune their work into shape for the magazine.

Mr. Angell told me about one short-story writer, an Irish schoolteacher, whom the magazine began to publish in 1959. One day Mr. Angell got a letter from him, announcing that he was leaving his job to write full time. “I was horrified,” Mr. Angell said. “His agent called and had received the same letter. So we called and begged him not to quit. Well, I just went to opening night of his play Faith Healer. Brian Friel is probably the best playwright in the English language now that Arthur Miller is gone. And he is certainly the No. 1 Irish man of letters.”

Mr. Angell is uniquely positioned to comment on the history of The New Yorker, and not only because of his long tenure. His mother, Katharine White, was also an editor there, of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Mr. Angell occupied her old office for a time, when the magazine was located on West 43rd Street. Katharine left his father and “immediately after,” as Mr. Angell puts it, married the legendary E.B. White, who wrote regular columns and commentaries for the magazine.

White also wrote, of course, two of the most widely read and loved children’s books of all time, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, and was the co-author of The Elements of Style, the frequently consulted and dog-eared guide for writers often referred to simply as “Strunk and White.” Many of his magazine pieces, written from the saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Me., that he shared with Katharine, were later published in his famous collection One Man’s Meat. (Mr. Angell contributed a foreword to the 1997 edition.)

Mr. Angell says that there was much resistance at The New Yorker to his hiring, in 1956, when he was in his mid-30’s. He’d contributed stories to the magazine and had been an editor at a G.I. paper during his time in the military during World War II and then at Holiday magazine. Even now, he seems keen to defend the decision. “The staff just felt they’d had enough of the Whites …. But [William] Shawn came to me and made me an offer. And it was a natural thing, because I was a good editor by that time and I knew the magazine.”

Let Me Finish, Mr. Angell’s new book, could have been another in a long line of buzz-generating New Yorker memoirs—by Renata Adler, Brendan Gill, Ved Mehta, Lillian Ross and others. It is not. Asked about the New Yorker editors in chief he has worked for, he declined to offer comparisons, making mildly approving comments about each, though he skipped Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown’s predecessor. (He did say Tina Brown was “probably a needed change.”)

In fact, Mr. Angell said he sees the book in opposition to the prevailing trends in what The New Yorker calls “Personal History.” As in his baseball writing, restraint and careful, telling portraiture are hallmarks. When he began writing the pieces in this book a few years ago, he said, “There were a lot of get-even memoirs—people writing about their parents and the terrible things that had happened to them. And showing up their parents. There was a tell-all atmosphere, a look-at-this kind of tone.”

It never occurred to him to write about his famous family, he told me, until Tina Brown suggested it. Sounding very much of his generation, he said, “I thought, ‘This is private stuff—you don’t write about your family.’ But she’s the one who got me thinking about my father.

“I’ve suppressed some things,” he added candidly. “There are a lot of things I thought of writing and started to put in there, and then I took them out. Some private things about my mother and father that I thought would be very interesting, but then I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that, because I really felt they wouldn’t like it …. So why put that out there? I don’t feel we have to tell everything.”

How does he treat his parents and stepfather in the book, then? On the whole, warmly, with some exceptional moments. A piece about his father, Ernest Angell—not a man of letters—reflects the sort of sympathy that comes with age and perspective. Mr. Angell said, when pressed, that it wasn’t well received by his sister, who didn’t share his generosity, when it was published in The New Yorker. “She was older and had gone off to school, and she had an even graver view of the divorce than I did. She didn’t see this side of Father.”

The chapter about E.B. White (titled “Andy,” after his nickname) is a kind of centerpiece of the book, at least for Mr. Angell, because, he said, “there was so much to tell. Terrific stories. But I had to wait—with each of these pieces, I had to wait until the tone suggested itself. Sometimes a couple years.” Tone, he said, is probably the most difficult and essential aspect of writing, because it determines the reader’s experience.

In this chapter, which also appeared in a different form in The New Yorker, there’s a wonderful passage in which Mr. Angell quotes a paragraph of his stepfather’s and tries to explain what makes it great. “I realized I had to do a little lit crit in the middle of this,” said Mr. Angell, “because not everybody remembered how good a writer he was.”

Here, you’re able to see not only White’s gifts, but also Mr. Angell’s own writing mind at work. What he feels reading White’s passage, which describes a highway drive in Maine, is “a sense of trust,” he writes. “He has looked at the roadside grunge and granite with the same eyes I do, and he does not labor for reference or add a chunk of scholarship to give them meaning; he waits for the connection.” Mr. Angell pays attention to content, to style, even to sound, and he describes an effect his own writing so often achieves: the feeling that a thought or phrase has somehow been shared between the author and us, the readers—that somehow we have participated. Mr. Angell writes that White’s New Yorker editor, William Shawn, called him “the most companionable of writers.”

A number of writers are doing their own lit crit on Roger Angell right now, as his new book receives media coverage. There can be no mistaking that Mr. Angell was displeased by the James Campbell review that recently appeared in The New York Times Book Review. “I think he’s got this whole thing wrong. He says these pieces are full of bonhomie and nostalgia. I don’t think there’s either of that in these pieces …. I’m not trying to play mood music here.”

There seemed to be something about the word “bonhomie” that particularly irked Mr. Angell. And then it came out: “You know what that [review] is about? I got a call from Chip McGrath [an ex–New Yorker editor and later the editor of The Times Book Review]. He said, ‘You know, I’ve figured it out. This guy is a Brit’”—meaning Mr. Campbell.

I laughed. “No, really,” Mr. Angell said, “this is class stuff. He is offended by my sailing.” He repeated himself slowly: “He doesn’t like that I sail. And I want to tell him that I don’t have any income aside from what I earn working.” Later in the interview, when I asked him about sailing, he said he belongs to a yacht club in Maine, but he made sure to add that “it’s very informal, and inexpensive.”

I asked him about Mr. Campbell’s remark that in Let Me Finish, there’s “no ethnic friction” and “no poverty, no crime and next to no politics.” Mr. Angell pointed out that the book discusses political debates at the home of his father, who was active in the ACLU—beyond that, he didn’t answer the charge.

Mr. Angell’s mother is far less present in the pages of the new book than are the men in his life, to the point that one begins to wonder how much his portrait of her has left out. He gives her view, in brief, of her divorce and remarriage to E.B. White, and his own account is just as curt: “She always insisted that there was no connection between her divorce and their marriage …. Whatever. What can be said for sure is that each of my parents grew up with a critically missing parent … [and] it sometimes pissed you off or broke your heart (choose one) to watch them.”

I asked him about the word “whatever,” which seemed out of place in Mr. Angell’s writing. He replied quickly, “I’m being hard on her.” This may seem to our ears a very restrained way of being hard on someone, but it’s typical of his reticence.

Here he is on the currently ascendant mode of first-person writing: “We are wary of sentiment and obsessively knowing, and we feel obliged to put a spin of psychology or economic determinism or bored contempt on all clear-color memories.” I told him I found his new book free of the armor of irony and understatement. He said, “Well, thank you,” and looked genuinely pleased, casting his eyes to the side and smiling shyly, but added that he didn’t write a certain way to counter another sort of style.

I pointed out, too, that the title Let Me Finish has a morbid ring to it, and asked if it would upset him if this were his last book.

“Sure!” And then he added, with a smile so as not to sound offended, “What are you trying to say here?” He said, as he does in the book, that the title isn’t meant that way.

“When I wrote Late Innings, people thought it would be the last,” he said. “There were a lot of books after that.

“I think Let Me Finish is a nice title to catch your attention,” he continued. “Think of it this way: I’ve got these stories saved up, and let me finish. Let me tell another story.”

Evan Hughes is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.

It’s not dull any more. Eleven Madison Park has a new chef, Daniel Humm, and he’s a star.

You know it from the start. The first thing he sends out from the kitchen when you sit down (after some splendid cheese goujons) is a small martini glass full of an orange froth, accompanied by a thin pastry cigar flecked with Meyer lemon peel. The glass contains a “cappuccino” made with sea urchins flambéed with cognac and whipped to a foam with lobster stock, lime juice and cream. It’s laced with pieces of peekytoe crab, and there’s a surprise at the bottom: a dollop of cauliflower mousse. One taste of this heavenly concoction and we all sat up.

Mr. Humm grew up in Switzerland, where he worked at the Michelin three-star restaurant Le Pont de Brent, then went on to Gasthaus zum Gupf in the Swiss Alps. In 2003, he became executive chef at Campton Place in San Francisco, where he received rave reviews for his innovative contemporary French cuisine. The 29-year-old chef arrived at Eleven Madison Park two months ago and has since raised the kitchen to new heights.

“He wants you to taste the thing that it is,” said one of my friends somewhat cryptically. He dipped his spoon into a creamy velouté of white asparagus laced with crayfish and tiny crisp pieces of bacon, swirled with dark green spring-onion oil. I understood what he meant, though: There’s a purity and directness to Mr. Humm’s dishes (which are also visually stunning).

Another great soup I tasted could not have been simpler: sweet peas cooked to order with chicken stock, blended to a froth with mint and laced with morels. A ceviche of hand-diced Maine scallops was tossed in a straightforward grapefruit vinaigrette that brought out the taste of the seafood.

The menu changes weekly, directly reflecting the season. Now, everything is spring-like. Sturgeon from the Columbia River arrived two ways: The smoked cured belly was diced into a ragout of Israeli couscous with mint, carrots and buttery peas and served with a pan-seared filet. Thumb-sized dolomites of red, yellow and candy-striped beets were lined up on the plate like a miniature Stonehenge. Saffron-roasted apple pieces added crunch, and a vinaigrette lent a touch of spice. (Look for this dish in the summer made with tomatoes and watermelon.)

Mr. Humm likes to put together the same ingredient in different ways. His tuna “composition” offered six small bites—including one grilled, one in a confit and one wrapped around white asparagus—served with a centerpiece of tuna tartare made with avocado, smoked steelhead roe and osetra caviar. The sauce that brought the dish together was made with tuna confit blended with olive oil and stock.

The chef also likes to mix luxury ingredients with cheap ones. So Hawaiian prawns wrapped in strands of crisped potato came with tripe cooked in Riesling. They were served with a rich black truffle sauce and mashed potatoes to sop it up. He put black truffles under the skin of milk-fed chicken poached in broth with truffle jus, and served this miraculously tender bird with mashed parsnips.

How did he get the skin on his suckling pig so that it was like parchment—and greaseless? He cooks the whole baby pig in duck fat for 10 hours, bones it and weights it down. He bakes the skin again, cut in perfect squares on a sheet pan. The result is the best suckling pig I’ve ever tasted—you can cut the meat with a fork.

Farmed halibut often comes out like a limp rag. There’s none of that here. The halibut is wild from the Atlantic, and it’s a revelation. It’s cooked in a slow oven to bring out its juices and flavor, and it was served with a buttery jaune sauce made with Arbois wine from the Jura. Daurade arrived on a purée of artichokes with the flavors of Provence distilled on the plate: dots of sauce made from cherry tomatoes, basil and olive tapenade. So simple and so good.

The meal winds up with Nicole Kaplan’s marvelous, playful and complex desserts. They look like architects’ models. First there’s a “pre-dessert”: a frozen chocolate pyramid with coconut, topped with gold and served in a big white bowl. The feathery chocolate mille-feuille came with passion fruit, Szechwan pepper sorbet and a coconut financier. A two-tone chocolate-banana soufflé was served in a narrow cylinder of glass, with bananas, a peanut-butter ganache and roasted banana ice cream. It was great. So was the striped chocolate-caramel tart; it was accompanied by a small box of chocolate pearls, among other things. I dug in my fork and discovered a chocolate pudding underneath.

Looking around the room, which was decorated with giant blossoms the size of whole trees, I thought how lovely it was. But at 10:30 on a Saturday, it was practically empty. The crowd that had filled the restaurant earlier had gone home. “Parents!” said my companion, adding that he felt the place needed a bit of Miles Davis.

But when word gets around about Daniel Humm, the only thing needed here is going to be hard to get: a reservation.

It’s not dull any more. Eleven Madison Park has a new chef, Daniel Humm, and he’s a star.

You know it from the start. The first thing he sends out from the kitchen when you sit down (after some splendid cheese goujons) is a small martini glass full of an orange froth, accompanied by a thin pastry cigar flecked with Meyer lemon peel. The glass contains a “cappuccino” made with sea urchins flambéed with cognac and whipped to a foam with lobster stock, lime juice and cream. It’s laced with pieces of peekytoe crab, and there’s a surprise at the bottom: a dollop of cauliflower mousse. One taste of this heavenly concoction and we all sat up.

Mr. Humm grew up in Switzerland, where he worked at the Michelin three-star restaurant Le Pont de Brent, then went on to Gasthaus zum Gupf in the Swiss Alps. In 2003, he became executive chef at Campton Place in San Francisco, where he received rave reviews for his innovative contemporary French cuisine. The 29-year-old chef arrived at Eleven Madison Park two months ago and has since raised the kitchen to new heights.

“He wants you to taste the thing that it is,” said one of my friends somewhat cryptically. He dipped his spoon into a creamy velouté of white asparagus laced with crayfish and tiny crisp pieces of bacon, swirled with dark green spring-onion oil. I understood what he meant, though: There’s a purity and directness to Mr. Humm’s dishes (which are also visually stunning).

Another great soup I tasted could not have been simpler: sweet peas cooked to order with chicken stock, blended to a froth with mint and laced with morels. A ceviche of hand-diced Maine scallops was tossed in a straightforward grapefruit vinaigrette that brought out the taste of the seafood.

The menu changes weekly, directly reflecting the season. Now, everything is spring-like. Sturgeon from the Columbia River arrived two ways: The smoked cured belly was diced into a ragout of Israeli couscous with mint, carrots and buttery peas and served with a pan-seared filet. Thumb-sized dolomites of red, yellow and candy-striped beets were lined up on the plate like a miniature Stonehenge. Saffron-roasted apple pieces added crunch, and a vinaigrette lent a touch of spice. (Look for this dish in the summer made with tomatoes and watermelon.)

Mr. Humm likes to put together the same ingredient in different ways. His tuna “composition” offered six small bites—including one grilled, one in a confit and one wrapped around white asparagus—served with a centerpiece of tuna tartare made with avocado, smoked steelhead roe and osetra caviar. The sauce that brought the dish together was made with tuna confit blended with olive oil and stock.

The chef also likes to mix luxury ingredients with cheap ones. So Hawaiian prawns wrapped in strands of crisped potato came with tripe cooked in Riesling. They were served with a rich black truffle sauce and mashed potatoes to sop it up. He put black truffles under the skin of milk-fed chicken poached in broth with truffle jus, and served this miraculously tender bird with mashed parsnips.

How did he get the skin on his suckling pig so that it was like parchment—and greaseless? He cooks the whole baby pig in duck fat for 10 hours, bones it and weights it down. He bakes the skin again, cut in perfect squares on a sheet pan. The result is the best suckling pig I’ve ever tasted—you can cut the meat with a fork.

Farmed halibut often comes out like a limp rag. There’s none of that here. The halibut is wild from the Atlantic, and it’s a revelation. It’s cooked in a slow oven to bring out its juices and flavor, and it was served with a buttery jaune sauce made with Arbois wine from the Jura. Daurade arrived on a purée of artichokes with the flavors of Provence distilled on the plate: dots of sauce made from cherry tomatoes, basil and olive tapenade. So simple and so good.

The meal winds up with Nicole Kaplan’s marvelous, playful and complex desserts. They look like architects’ models. First there’s a “pre-dessert”: a frozen chocolate pyramid with coconut, topped with gold and served in a big white bowl. The feathery chocolate mille-feuille came with passion fruit, Szechwan pepper sorbet and a coconut financier. A two-tone chocolate-banana soufflé was served in a narrow cylinder of glass, with bananas, a peanut-butter ganache and roasted banana ice cream. It was great. So was the striped chocolate-caramel tart; it was accompanied by a small box of chocolate pearls, among other things. I dug in my fork and discovered a chocolate pudding underneath.

Looking around the room, which was decorated with giant blossoms the size of whole trees, I thought how lovely it was. But at 10:30 on a Saturday, it was practically empty. The crowd that had filled the restaurant earlier had gone home. “Parents!” said my companion, adding that he felt the place needed a bit of Miles Davis.

But when word gets around about Daniel Humm, the only thing needed here is going to be hard to get: a reservation.

— Thursday Styles, March 23, 2006

— Thursday Styles, April 28, 2005

Note the crisp, almost clinical lucidity with which Welliver delineated the dense forest, seeming to capture every wiry twist and turn of the leafless branches. Marvel at how he retained the bracing blue of the sprawling Maine sky, seen through the thicket in the distance. Realize that though the palette is limited, it’s effect is nevertheless expansive, an illusion aided by three green trees placed precisely and unexpectedly in the foreground. Finally, scratch your head at how a picture so true to life—to the light, sweep and untamed logic of nature—could simultaneously have so little to do with representation.

Welliver didn’t care about representation. You don’t have to get up close to the canvas—with its confounding network of drawling and, at times, impatient slurs of buttery oil paint—to sense Welliver’s remove from observed phenomenon or his not altogether unskeptical debt to Abstract Expressionism. You can read his motivations in the insistent, all-but-manic attention paid to every last inch of the composition and in the way clarity of definition keeps the image resolutely on the surface of the canvas. Welliver was an impudent painter: He set up certain expectations (ah, the grandeur of nature!) only to thumb his nose at them (it’s just colored mud on a piece of rag).

That paradox is inherent to the art of painting, of course, but rarely has it been brought to such a relentlessly inflexible conclusion. The accompanying prints are merely fetching in comparison, and the smaller canvases are muddled. Oil paint and a massive scale were integral to Welliver’s coolly intractable vision. Luckily for us, five other big pictures tag alongside Back of Hatchet, offering plenty to take pleasure in.

Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition is at Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until Oct. 22.

Drawings by Diller

The Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has organized a lovely show of small, unprepossessing drawings done in graphite, crayon and, here and there, tempera by the American painter Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965). A follower of Mondrian, Diller put his own individual stamp on the Dutch master’s brand of geometric abstraction, yet how that individuality was wrested from such seemingly finite means can be baffling. Diller’s pictorial rudiments—the black scaffolding, the forceful but by no means empty white spaces, the punchy arrangements of primary colors—are inconceivable without Mondrian’s example. A casual observer, told that two or three (or 10) of the drawings were Mondrians, would likely accept it as fact.

A closer inspection, though, reveals that Diller was less of an absolutist—and not just because the drawings are loose-limbed and impromptu. Whether drawing or painting (though not in making sculpture), Diller explored uncertainty, continuity and flux. The open-ended planes and shifting architecture evince a restless and questioning spirit. The pictures hold tight, but not at the expense of flexibility or doubt. Mondrian, God bless him, wanted the last word; for Diller, the conversation wasn’t over by a long shot. That doesn’t make him a better artist than Mondrian. It does make Diller an artist more deserving of your attention than you might at first grant.

Burgoyne Diller: Twenty-Five on Paper is at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until Nov. 5.

Buddhist Boogie-Woogie

The California artist John McLaughlin (1898-1976), whose paintings are the subject of an exhibition at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, followed in Mondrian’s wake as well—or at least partially in his wake. As an artist who sought within geometric form a material equivalent for otherworldly longings, McLaughlin perhaps owed more to the Russian Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich.

An aficionado of Japanese art and culture, McLaughlin intuited a philosophical connection between Malevich’s drive to free art from “vulgar subject matter” and the Zen mysticism of Sesshu, a 15th-century monk who specialized in painting landscapes. In the end, the bump-and-grind of Mondrian’s paintings may have proven too earthy for McLaughlin; he preferred something more cerebral.

In other words, there’s no boogie-woogie in McLaughlin’s art. Instead, there are broad, barely inflected planes of color—usually black and white along with spare, idiosyncratic variations of tan and blue—that pull at one another in an attempt to establish some sense of compositional hierarchy. That the paintings pull at all is a testament to McLaughlin’s Spartan gift for composition; the pictures, despite the stark and simple means, generate enough tension to keep the eye engaged. This is how McLaughlin distinguished himself from a pretentious blowhard like Barnett Newman, a tepid miniaturist like Agnes Martin and, for that matter, Malevich: with the ability to state his spiritual yearnings through the judicious modulation of contrast and juxtaposition. What do you know? McLaughlin was Mondrian’s boy after all.

John McLaughlin: Paintings is at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, until Oct. 1.