Those days are gone. Mr. McCarthy’s new novel, a bleak and mesmerizing tour of a radically depleted world, calls to mind Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: existence pared down to a road and a dead tree and two anguished creatures who can’t go on but must. The Road is post-apocalyptic; no other word will do to describe a novel in which a man and his young son trudge along for months and the only living flora or fauna they encounter are “the bad guys”—roving bands of cannibals sprung from a Mad Max nightmare. And yet that word—post-apocalyptic—seems too long, too abundantly syllabled to fit the exhausted landscape Mr. McCarthy has imagined.

These, by dint of relentless repetition, are the words you’ll remember from The Road: “cold,” “dark,” “ash,” “gray” and “dead.” The two inescapable lines of dialogue are the panicked imperative, “Come on. We have to go” (that’s the father), and the heartbreaking response, “Okay” (that’s the son). Again, by dint of repetition, you’ll remember them stumbling wearily along the road, running when they have to, hiding, always watching, always scared.

Where are they going? South, to the coast. They’ve survived—barely—by scavenging what earlier scavengers have missed. The father is coughing up blood. The boy is pitifully thin. It they don’t starve and if they don’t die of the cold and if they aren’t killed and eaten by the bad guys, it seems obvious that the man will die anyway and the boy, left on his own, will die too.

How does Cormac McCarthy manage to fascinate us with such a barren prospect? Part of it, I suppose, is the thrill of the worst-case scenario, the unthinkable thought that we are going to destroy the planet, kill off Mother Nature with a doomsday device that leaves behind only cold, dark and ash. There’s also the Swiss Family Robinson fun of scavenging (late in the novel, the man plunders a dismasted yacht that’s run aground 100 yards off the “vast salt sepulcher” of a desolate beach)—but anyone who reads The Road for fun should have his head examined.

The best hook is the little boy, who’s instinctively, incorruptibly good, even in the midst of excruciating hardship and incessant menace. The boy is tender and admiring with his “Papa,” and the father, in turn, worships his son: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” Filial love, paternal love—if these can endure, there’s surely a tiny ray of hope for the few pathetic survivors of whatever holocaust has decimated the globe. The boy asks, “Are we still the good guys?” His father, who’s been telling him all along that they’re “carrying the fire,” assures him that they are indeed the good guys—even if they sometimes have to kill bad guys to survive. The boy, bless him, is the man’s moral compass, and he lays down the essential, unbreakable taboo: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?”

What kept me reading was neither the boy’s precious goodness nor the dark allure of total annihilation—it was Mr. McCarthy’s writing, the sheer beauty of the language. He’s put himself on a strict diet, which means many, many paragraphs of dingy misery like this:

“They went on …. The only thing that moved in the streets was the blowing ash. They crossed the high concrete bridge over the river. A dock below. Small pleasureboats half sunken in the gray water. Tall stacks downriver dim in the soot.”

No commas, few verbs, more ash, more gray: “The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion.” Against this monochrome monotony, ghoulish sights stand out with an intensity that shocks the eye:

“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”

If a writer is bold enough to describe “ligaments dried to tug,” he’s earned the right to flourishes like “discalced to a man.” (Other words that had me rifling through the dictionary: “gryke,” “rachitic,” “siwash,” “loess.”)

In moments of drama, the cold and the gray of the background are promoted to the foreground and do their job along with the more rarefied vocabulary. Here the father recalls coming face to face with a bad guy:

“This was the first human being other than the boy he’d spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh.”

When the pre-apocalyptic world is evoked, the contrast is stunning:

“In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the blue wall of a mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.”

The beauty of the writing is nearly spoiled for me by the broad hints of religious allegory. God has vanished from this ruined world: The “temporal winds” blow, as do the “secular winds”—and when it snows, the man catches a single flake in his hand and watches it “expire like the last host of christendom.” He’s sure that there are “no godspoke men” on the road. But what about his boy? Isn’t the boy “the word of God” incarnate?

When the father washes the son’s hair, it’s “like some ancient anointing.” The hair is pale and tangled: “Golden chalice, good to house a god.” There’s more of this winking and nudging, and it all leads to the hokiest line of the book, which comes at a moment of fraught moral significance, when the boy is once again pushing his father to do the less prudent, more virtuous thing. “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” says the father, to which the son replies, “Yes I am.” And then, for emphasis, this loaded declaration: “I am the one.” We already know that he’s “carrying the fire”; now we understand that it’s the divine spark.

Why do I object when I find that God and the possibility of redemption have been smuggled into this blasted landscape? Because it seems to me perfectly plausible that if we do destroy the planet, it will be because of religious faith and not in spite of it.

Adam Begley is books editor of The Observer.

My general policy is, Let readers have the last word. I might quibble with a couple of characterizations by Weber and Laurel Snyder , but I've had my say, they've had theirs. Years ago when I read Melville's comment to his editor after Mardi was savaged in the press—"I shall no more stab at a book (in print, I mean) than I would stab at a man"—I had great sympathy; it's hard for writers to criticize other authors, especially if you've felt the lance. Now I begin to think Melville's comment entitled (as so much of his experience was) and wonder if a little mutual criticism isn't just part of the territory...

Also: Weber will be reading at Rocky Sullivan's in New York on Wed. night, July 12, at 8 p.m.

12:06 p.m.

5 pounds, 11 ounces

New York Presbyterian Hospital

Ten cashmere onesies, please! Jodi Blum, 32, an account executive at Ralph Lauren, didn’t find out the sex of her first baby before birth, but “I thought it was a girl the entire time,” she said, so she made sure to stock up on her company’s most feminine little designs (hello, company discount). Sure enough: 17 hours after a Mother’s Day induction, this petite, pouty-lipped Polo princess pranced out, much to the delight of her proud new papa, Darrin Blum, 33, a sales specialist at Reuters and Ms. Blum’s husband of two years. “As soon as he gets home, he plays with her for the whole night,” Mom said proudly. “Home” is a three-story townhouse in Melville, N.Y. (named for Herman, home of Newsday, halfway to the Hamptons).

Melville himself shared in this skepticism. In a 1971 interview with Rui Nogueira, he asked rhetorically, “Do you know how many Resistants there were in France at the end of 1940? Six hundred. It was only in February or March 1943 that the situation changed, because the first maquis date from April 1943. And it was the proclamation by Sauckel about sending young people to Germany that made a lot of people prefer to go underground. It was not a matter of patriotism.”

Seen today, Army of Shadows is revealed as a sublime tribute to the mostly doomed precious few who responded to the call of conscience in resisting the Nazi occupiers and the French traitors who collaborated with them. Lino Ventura as Philippe Gerbier is one of seven composite characters drawn from real-life models of martyrdom in the early years of the occupation. The others are the resourceful Mathilde, played by Simone Signoret; Luc Jardie, the chief, played by Paul Meurisse; the extraordinarily self-sacrificing François, played by Jean-Pierre Cassel; Claude La Masque, played by Claude Mann; Felix, played by Paul Crauchet; Le Bison, played by Christian Barbier; the Baron de Ferte-Talloire, played by Jean-Marie Robain; and Sere Reggiani making a cameo appearance as a resistant barber helping Gerbier escape from a Gestapo jail.

There are no spectacular triumphs for these shadow combatants, only the constant, fear-drenched danger of being caught, tortured and executed by the relentless forces arrayed against them. Of necessity, they became ruthless themselves with comrades who betrayed them. Where Melville is most masterly is in his placidly matter-of-fact pacing of these life-and-death existences. For a comparable cinematic achievement, I can think only of Roberto Rossellini’s equally sublime evocation of wartime heroism under existential pressure in General della Rovere (1959). Army of Shadows is a film to be seen and savored for its moral magnitude.

Melville made a memorable cameo appearance in Jean Luc-Godard’s Breathless (1960), portraying a pompous best-selling novelist being interviewed by Jean Seberg:

SEBERG: What is your greatest ambition in life?

MELVILLE: To become immortal … and then die.

Immortality’s a hard thing to calculate, but in his 13-film career (mostly in the genre of film noir), Melville has cast a haunting shadow of his own in film history.

No Idols Here

Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, from his own screenplay, turns out to be satirically unbalanced in its attempted fusion of such varied targets as George Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Muslim suicide bombers, and the hosts and contestants on American Idol. The only mild hit that Mr. Weitz scores is in his demonstration of the globalization of vulgarity, as the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” is supplanted by a universally watched, updated Major Bowes Amateur Hour that is much nastier and more showbiz-savvy than the original.

In this respect, Hugh Grant takes top acting honors as the toothsomely smiling Martin Tweed, a take-off on Simon Cowell. Dennis Quaid, as President Staton, is saddled with so many of the established and alleged foibles of George W. Bush that it renders him too broad a target in too narrow a context. Even such accomplished farceurs as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are beginning to sound a little strained from chortling over the accumulating gaffes of the Bush administration. The movie’s suggestion that the President didn’t know about the uneasy cohabitation of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq is a gruesome joke that has been played on the spouses and parents of the dead and wounded men and women. But it isn’t funny. Nor is the idea of a potential suicide bomber as an American Idol contestant at all funny after 9/11.

That leaves the bulk of the movie, and the satire, resting on the shoulders of a television show with a larger voter turnout than our Presidential campaigns. And here, too, Mandy Moore’s squealing star wannabe, Sally Kendoo, is much too broad and transparent in her insincerity, as if to wink to her pop audience that she’s only kidding for the sake of the part. She’s clearly no Reese Witherspoon, either in subtle sweetness or accomplished bitchery. A more admirably nuanced performance is provided by Marcia Gay Harden as the First Lady, who never loses her wifely cool and warmth no matter how wild and woolly the President becomes. Indeed, Ms. Harden’s performance serves as a reassuring sign of the directorial modulation of Mr. Weitz’s runaway script.

The two most consistently funny performers in the film are Sam Golzari as Omer, the reluctant suicide bomber turned song stylist, and Tony Yalda’s Iqbal Riza, Omer’s cousin, coach and jealous rival all wrapped into one deliciously hammy package. Indeed, Omer and Riza add to the concert-film ambience of American Dreamz, taking much of the sting out of the failed satiric swipes. For his part, Willem Dafoe makes a valiant effort as the power behind the President and the voice piping into his earpiece, but his extremely balding make-up is something of a distraction; one can’t decide whether he’s supposed to be Mr. Rove or Mr. Cheney with the telltale snarl. In the end, needless to say, he gets a kind of comeuppance.

At the very least, Mr. Weitz can be credited with observing Anton Chekhov’s dramatic axiom stipulating that if a gun is displayed in the first act, it must be used by the last act. In this case, the gun is a bomb meant to kill the President. By the final fade-out, the bomb does go off and causes two fatalities. But fear not: The President is unharmed. Not exactly a happy ending, but a satirically convenient one just the same. After all, not only is there no business like show business, there is nothing else in the world but show business. And that’s sort of funny, when you think about it.

Only the French

Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie … , from a screenplay by Ms. Fontaine, Jacques Fieschi and Francoise-Olivier Rousseau (in French with English subtitles), turns out to be one of the most ingeniously erotic entertainments of the year, though the sex involved is more talk than action. An odd situation is set up when a wife learns that her husband has been unfaithful, and decides to determine what kind of forbidden pleasures he’s been seeking by hiring a prostitute to seduce him and report back on his behavior.

This tantalizing intrigue begins when Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) misses his surprise birthday party, and Catherine (Fanny Ardant), his gynecologist wife of 25 years, discovers from a cell-phone message that Bernard had missed the party because he was being unfaithful. When confronted by Catherine, Bernard makes no effort to dissemble: He nonchalantly philosophizes that all marriages run cold after a time. That’s just the way it is, he shrugs; it has happened before with him, and it will happen again. Right now he is between affairs, none of which mean anything anyway. As it turns out, Catherine is too sophisticated to react immediately to Bernard’s brazenly licentious attitude.

Her next move is to find a new girlfriend for him—but one who will serve as her spy. She crashes a private club for men and offers to buy a drink for a luscious bar girl named Marlène (Emmanuelle Béart). Marlène, looking at Catherine queerly, confides that she is amenable to having sex with another woman. Catherine calmly declines the invitation, though without any intimation of finality in her refusal, and explains her proposition to Marlène; she then suggests that Marlène change her name to “Nathalie” for the affair and pretend that she works as an interpreter. We then see “Nathalie” make her first contact with Bernard in a café by asking him for a cigarette. After that first eye-to-eye contact, everything that follows off-screen is reported on-screen to Catherine, who demands detailed descriptions. Marlène seems to enjoy the process, while Catherine is sometimes a little shocked by her husband’s behavior but always intrigued.

One cannot imagine this situation ever occurring in any American movie in any period, pre-code, post-code or current post-deluge. Indeed, I cannot even imagine such an erotically effective substitution in English of narrated sexual encounters for visual ones. The only two comparable cinematic examples I can think of also required subtitles: Bibi Andersson recounting a beach-group seduction to Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), and Mireille Darc’s similar story to a male listener in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). Even today, American filmmakers would consider such a conceit either too creepy for the audience or too literary for the medium.

All I know is that the conceit works beautifully with the right personalities, talented and uninhibited, engaged in its execution. Nathalie … is quintessentially French, and yet curiously universal in its unexpected twists and turns as it demystifies human sexuality even in the course of describing it in great detail. Ms. Fontaine reportedly cast her two actresses for their voices: Ms. Ardant’s dryly amused but still emotionally vulnerable, Ms. Béart’s slowly and quietly seductive, but ultimately wistful and yearning. The cast alone is worth the price of admission.

Melville himself shared in this skepticism. In a 1971 interview with Rui Nogueira, he asked rhetorically, “Do you know how many Resistants there were in France at the end of 1940? Six hundred. It was only in February or March 1943 that the situation changed, because the first maquis date from April 1943. And it was the proclamation by Sauckel about sending young people to Germany that made a lot of people prefer to go underground. It was not a matter of patriotism.”

Seen today, Army of Shadows is revealed as a sublime tribute to the mostly doomed precious few who responded to the call of conscience in resisting the Nazi occupiers and the French traitors who collaborated with them. Lino Ventura as Philippe Gerbier is one of seven composite characters drawn from real-life models of martyrdom in the early years of the occupation. The others are the resourceful Mathilde, played by Simone Signoret; Luc Jardie, the chief, played by Paul Meurisse; the extraordinarily self-sacrificing François, played by Jean-Pierre Cassel; Claude La Masque, played by Claude Mann; Felix, played by Paul Crauchet; Le Bison, played by Christian Barbier; the Baron de Ferte-Talloire, played by Jean-Marie Robain; and Sere Reggiani making a cameo appearance as a resistant barber helping Gerbier escape from a Gestapo jail.

There are no spectacular triumphs for these shadow combatants, only the constant, fear-drenched danger of being caught, tortured and executed by the relentless forces arrayed against them. Of necessity, they became ruthless themselves with comrades who betrayed them. Where Melville is most masterly is in his placidly matter-of-fact pacing of these life-and-death existences. For a comparable cinematic achievement, I can think only of Roberto Rossellini’s equally sublime evocation of wartime heroism under existential pressure in General della Rovere (1959). Army of Shadows is a film to be seen and savored for its moral magnitude.

Melville made a memorable cameo appearance in Jean Luc-Godard’s Breathless (1960), portraying a pompous best-selling novelist being interviewed by Jean Seberg:

SEBERG: What is your greatest ambition in life?

MELVILLE: To become immortal … and then die.

Immortality’s a hard thing to calculate, but in his 13-film career (mostly in the genre of film noir), Melville has cast a haunting shadow of his own in film history.

No Idols Here

Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, from his own screenplay, turns out to be satirically unbalanced in its attempted fusion of such varied targets as George Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Muslim suicide bombers, and the hosts and contestants on American Idol. The only mild hit that Mr. Weitz scores is in his demonstration of the globalization of vulgarity, as the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” is supplanted by a universally watched, updated Major Bowes Amateur Hour that is much nastier and more showbiz-savvy than the original.

In this respect, Hugh Grant takes top acting honors as the toothsomely smiling Martin Tweed, a take-off on Simon Cowell. Dennis Quaid, as President Staton, is saddled with so many of the established and alleged foibles of George W. Bush that it renders him too broad a target in too narrow a context. Even such accomplished farceurs as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are beginning to sound a little strained from chortling over the accumulating gaffes of the Bush administration. The movie’s suggestion that the President didn’t know about the uneasy cohabitation of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq is a gruesome joke that has been played on the spouses and parents of the dead and wounded men and women. But it isn’t funny. Nor is the idea of a potential suicide bomber as an American Idol contestant at all funny after 9/11.

That leaves the bulk of the movie, and the satire, resting on the shoulders of a television show with a larger voter turnout than our Presidential campaigns. And here, too, Mandy Moore’s squealing star wannabe, Sally Kendoo, is much too broad and transparent in her insincerity, as if to wink to her pop audience that she’s only kidding for the sake of the part. She’s clearly no Reese Witherspoon, either in subtle sweetness or accomplished bitchery. A more admirably nuanced performance is provided by Marcia Gay Harden as the First Lady, who never loses her wifely cool and warmth no matter how wild and woolly the President becomes. Indeed, Ms. Harden’s performance serves as a reassuring sign of the directorial modulation of Mr. Weitz’s runaway script.

The two most consistently funny performers in the film are Sam Golzari as Omer, the reluctant suicide bomber turned song stylist, and Tony Yalda’s Iqbal Riza, Omer’s cousin, coach and jealous rival all wrapped into one deliciously hammy package. Indeed, Omer and Riza add to the concert-film ambience of American Dreamz, taking much of the sting out of the failed satiric swipes. For his part, Willem Dafoe makes a valiant effort as the power behind the President and the voice piping into his earpiece, but his extremely balding make-up is something of a distraction; one can’t decide whether he’s supposed to be Mr. Rove or Mr. Cheney with the telltale snarl. In the end, needless to say, he gets a kind of comeuppance.

At the very least, Mr. Weitz can be credited with observing Anton Chekhov’s dramatic axiom stipulating that if a gun is displayed in the first act, it must be used by the last act. In this case, the gun is a bomb meant to kill the President. By the final fade-out, the bomb does go off and causes two fatalities. But fear not: The President is unharmed. Not exactly a happy ending, but a satirically convenient one just the same. After all, not only is there no business like show business, there is nothing else in the world but show business. And that’s sort of funny, when you think about it.

Only the French

Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie … , from a screenplay by Ms. Fontaine, Jacques Fieschi and Francoise-Olivier Rousseau (in French with English subtitles), turns out to be one of the most ingeniously erotic entertainments of the year, though the sex involved is more talk than action. An odd situation is set up when a wife learns that her husband has been unfaithful, and decides to determine what kind of forbidden pleasures he’s been seeking by hiring a prostitute to seduce him and report back on his behavior.

This tantalizing intrigue begins when Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) misses his surprise birthday party, and Catherine (Fanny Ardant), his gynecologist wife of 25 years, discovers from a cell-phone message that Bernard had missed the party because he was being unfaithful. When confronted by Catherine, Bernard makes no effort to dissemble: He nonchalantly philosophizes that all marriages run cold after a time. That’s just the way it is, he shrugs; it has happened before with him, and it will happen again. Right now he is between affairs, none of which mean anything anyway. As it turns out, Catherine is too sophisticated to react immediately to Bernard’s brazenly licentious attitude.

Her next move is to find a new girlfriend for him—but one who will serve as her spy. She crashes a private club for men and offers to buy a drink for a luscious bar girl named Marlène (Emmanuelle Béart). Marlène, looking at Catherine queerly, confides that she is amenable to having sex with another woman. Catherine calmly declines the invitation, though without any intimation of finality in her refusal, and explains her proposition to Marlène; she then suggests that Marlène change her name to “Nathalie” for the affair and pretend that she works as an interpreter. We then see “Nathalie” make her first contact with Bernard in a café by asking him for a cigarette. After that first eye-to-eye contact, everything that follows off-screen is reported on-screen to Catherine, who demands detailed descriptions. Marlène seems to enjoy the process, while Catherine is sometimes a little shocked by her husband’s behavior but always intrigued.

One cannot imagine this situation ever occurring in any American movie in any period, pre-code, post-code or current post-deluge. Indeed, I cannot even imagine such an erotically effective substitution in English of narrated sexual encounters for visual ones. The only two comparable cinematic examples I can think of also required subtitles: Bibi Andersson recounting a beach-group seduction to Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), and Mireille Darc’s similar story to a male listener in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). Even today, American filmmakers would consider such a conceit either too creepy for the audience or too literary for the medium.

All I know is that the conceit works beautifully with the right personalities, talented and uninhibited, engaged in its execution. Nathalie … is quintessentially French, and yet curiously universal in its unexpected twists and turns as it demystifies human sexuality even in the course of describing it in great detail. Ms. Fontaine reportedly cast her two actresses for their voices: Ms. Ardant’s dryly amused but still emotionally vulnerable, Ms. Béart’s slowly and quietly seductive, but ultimately wistful and yearning. The cast alone is worth the price of admission.

Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick has been interpreted by everyone from John Huston to Led Zeppelin to Laurie Anderson. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is familiar to anyone who’s ever written a high-school essay on alienation—or, more likely, preferred not to.

Yet the full contours of Melville’s life remain only dimly understood to all but a fanatical band of Melville admirers. He’s famous, yet difficult to know, lacking Whitman’s easy camaraderie, or Poe’s cult appeal, or the smoothness of his more successful friend, the 19th century’s blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Now, perhaps, that will change. At long last, Melville is poised to emerge as a flesh-and-blood figure, and a New Yorker to boot, thanks to Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, the finest biography ever written of this essential American.

To be sure, there are already plenty of biographies out there. They came chockablock in the 1920’s, after Melville’s rediscovery by writers seeking a more potent American tradition than Longfellow’s lachrymose verse about the shores of Gitchee Gumee. There have also been ultra-biographical reference books chronicling Melville’s every appearance on the page of history—books that resemble Melville’s own parodies of the knowledge business. Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log is still indispensable; and Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, finally finished in 2002 his two-volume doorstop that, while awesome in its way, also led one to wonder at what point a fact becomes too small to merit inclusion.

The glut of information seems remarkable when you think of the complete anonymity into which Melville faded during his own lifetime. But even with this welcome new material, most biographies over the last generation—particularly those coming from academic precincts—have failed to capture the spirit of his magnificent struggle. There’s a nice line in Moby-Dick about the futility of information overload: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” That is precisely what Mr. Delbanco has achieved, building the most real—and thrilling—Melville we have seen to date.

Andrew Delbanco has been chasing Melville for a long time. Like this reviewer, he studied under an extraordinary Harvard teacher, Alan Heimert, who filled a generation of students with such excitement and dread that they never got over it (one student, Peter Benchley, created Jaws in the image of Moby-Dick, and a gruff protagonist, Quint, in the image of Heimert). Since moving to Columbia two decades ago, Mr. Delbanco has kept alive that university’s tradition of nurturing public intellectuals who move easily between centuries and disciplines—Trilling and Hofstadter spring to mind. Like a photographer, he enjoys the interplay between light and dark. His book on evil, The Death of Satan (1995), offered a useful primer well before the word “evil” began turning up routinely in Presidential speeches. His essay on hope, The Real American Dream (1999), was shorter—perhaps appropriately. Anyone interested in both extremes usually ends up reading Melville, who voiced the most soaring ambition for America’s greatness and the bitterest disappointment when things fell apart, as they were when he was writing his masterpiece.

True to its subject, this is an unorthodox book. Melville has always drawn the iconoclasts. Orson Welles directed a stage version of Moby-Dick, revived this summer in East Hampton. Peter Ustinov directed a brilliant film version of Billy Budd in 1962, filled with ambivalent reflections on Cold War tensions. Camus, Kubrick, Robert Lowell and Maurice Sendak are all in the club. Mr. Delbanco fits comfortably inside this not-very-academic tradition. From the beginning, he strikes an in-your-face posture: The opening montage lists quotes about Melville from his own father (“He is very backward in speech”) to The Sopranos to former counterterror czar Richard Clarke (“Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale”). Melville would enjoy this mischief, which is much like his own.

Mr. Delbanco tells the life, straight. There’s no writer’s story quite like it in our annals. It’s a long life, connecting the aftermath of the Revolution (one of Melville’s grandfathers still had bits of tea that he had found on his clothes after the Boston Tea Party) to the lifetimes of Einstein, Picasso and Chaplin. And more than most, it shows the extraordinary capriciousness of fame and oblivion in American letters. With the possible exception of Zora Neale Hurston—buried in a pauper’s grave until Alice Walker repatriated her—no writer had to sink lower before coming back to his proper place in the firmament.

Melville burst onto the scene in 1846 with Typee, his sexy account of living with naked cannibals. Handsome, voluble, bearded, the Johnny Damon of his day, there seemed no limit to where he could go. He might have carved out a long career as a diverting conversationalist, entertaining New York’s merchants and their wives in the pretentious salons of the not-yet-Upper East Side. But it was precisely his ambition that did him in. Like Orson Welles, he harbored a desire for brilliance that was fatal to his commercial prospects, and to most of his friendships. Even among a circle of headstrong windbags, he distinguished himself by an immense New Yorkish impatience to succeed. More than to succeed—to astonish.

After a few mixed efforts, his ambition found an appropriately huge topic with the whale story he pursued, nearly as driven as his protagonist, in 1850 and 1851, as the Union was entering its death agonies. The book that resulted was so explosive that one can still find its flotsam and jetsam strewn around the world, from a brothel called Moby Dick Fun Pub in Belgium to a kebab restaurant in Tehran named after the novel.

Yet the public was utterly indifferent to Melville’s titanic effort, which marked the apogee of his career and left him stalled at the top of his climb, like a roller coaster just before a steep drop. The descent was swift. Pierre: or, The Ambiguities still delights readers as the model for how not to write a successful book.

He continued to pen short stories (including very brilliant ones) and then poems, and then bits of language that weren’t even really poetry at all, but simple thoughts in a word or two. And then nothing at all. For years, he eked out a humdrum existence as a Customs inspector on West Street, forced to take handwriting classes in hopes of getting a better performance rating. When he finally did expire in 1891, many were stunned that he had in fact been alive until then. But most paid no mind at all. An obituary in The New York Times identified him as “Henry Melville.”

Yes, it’s sad. But Mr. Delbanco resists the temptation to feel too sorry for him. There was always something Promethean about Melville’s thrust at greatness. He knew the odds were stacked against him. He knew the penalty for failure. But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After his death, a manuscript was discovered in a tin breadbox—the immortal Billy Budd—and his rediscovery began. It’s never stopped—and, as this book proves, we’ll always have more to learn about Melville.

Mr. Delbanco is very gifted at drawing links between Melville’s works and the larger paroxysms that his country was going through. It wouldn’t work for all writers, but it does work here—for Melville was undeniably paying attention. This book brings out the unbearable tension Americans felt over race in the decade before the Civil War. Mr. Delbanco’s treatment of “Benito Cereno” is particularly arresting. He also reasserts Melville’s closeness to the ground zero of the slavery argument—his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was a Massachusetts judge who wrote the decision that served as the precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation.

Another great gift of this book is that it returns Melville to his native city. New York has been slow to claim him, perhaps because of some uncertainty over whether he, in fact, claimed it. But he did, over and over again. He was born here, became an author here, published here and died here. He was a true isolato—to use his word for people who are islands unto themselves. But that word could also be used in a happier sense, to describe both this island and the fellow Manhattanites that Melville liked to walk among, anonymously.

Mr. Delbanco restores a sense of Melville the reporter, noticing (as so many did not) the problems of New York’s rapid growth as well as the joys of living here. He notes especially how much Melville and his friends borrowed from the fast language of the city’s streets. With great enthusiasm, one of them recorded into his journal what is probably the earliest known use of the expression “eat shit.” (Translated into Latin, it would serve nicely as a motto on the city seal.) Even after his writing slowed, Melville was in the thick of it, watching boats unload their cargoes, showing up day after day at a hard job. Whitman never did that.

It’s tempting to say that Melville was depressed: He lived through unspeakable tragedies—including the suicide of his son Malcolm—and there are whispers that he struggled with mental illness of his own. But this biography, with its relentless humanity (the final word of “Bartleby”), also draws aside the curtain of gloom and shows us a Melville who never quite gives up, who still haunts used bookstores, goes for endless walks around the city, and continues to write, secretly, brilliantly, right up to the end. Thank God for Billy Budd, which proves a critical fact: Billy may have died, but Melville did not succumb.

In his great essay on Hawthorne, Melville praised a writer who can “work on more than one level, not alternately but simultaneously, so as to reach not only the ‘superficial skimmer of pages,’ but also the ‘eagle-eyed reader.’” For its wealth of information, its lyrical writing and its unsparing judgment, Mr. Delbanco’s book will define Melville for both specialists and general readers well into the next generation. It goes unstintingly into his tragedy, and yet—true to form—it makes precious room for hope and laughter.

Not all ambitious quests into the heart of darkness end in failure. Herman Melville proved it with Moby-Dick. Andrew Delbanco has proved it with Melville.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick has been interpreted by everyone from John Huston to Led Zeppelin to Laurie Anderson. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is familiar to anyone who’s ever written a high-school essay on alienation—or, more likely, preferred not to.

Yet the full contours of Melville’s life remain only dimly understood to all but a fanatical band of Melville admirers. He’s famous, yet difficult to know, lacking Whitman’s easy camaraderie, or Poe’s cult appeal, or the smoothness of his more successful friend, the 19th century’s blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Now, perhaps, that will change. At long last, Melville is poised to emerge as a flesh-and-blood figure, and a New Yorker to boot, thanks to Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, the finest biography ever written of this essential American.

To be sure, there are already plenty of biographies out there. They came chockablock in the 1920’s, after Melville’s rediscovery by writers seeking a more potent American tradition than Longfellow’s lachrymose verse about the shores of Gitchee Gumee. There have also been ultra-biographical reference books chronicling Melville’s every appearance on the page of history—books that resemble Melville’s own parodies of the knowledge business. Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log is still indispensable; and Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, finally finished in 2002 his two-volume doorstop that, while awesome in its way, also led one to wonder at what point a fact becomes too small to merit inclusion.

The glut of information seems remarkable when you think of the complete anonymity into which Melville faded during his own lifetime. But even with this welcome new material, most biographies over the last generation—particularly those coming from academic precincts—have failed to capture the spirit of his magnificent struggle. There’s a nice line in Moby-Dick about the futility of information overload: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” That is precisely what Mr. Delbanco has achieved, building the most real—and thrilling—Melville we have seen to date.

Andrew Delbanco has been chasing Melville for a long time. Like this reviewer, he studied under an extraordinary Harvard teacher, Alan Heimert, who filled a generation of students with such excitement and dread that they never got over it (one student, Peter Benchley, created Jaws in the image of Moby-Dick, and a gruff protagonist, Quint, in the image of Heimert). Since moving to Columbia two decades ago, Mr. Delbanco has kept alive that university’s tradition of nurturing public intellectuals who move easily between centuries and disciplines—Trilling and Hofstadter spring to mind. Like a photographer, he enjoys the interplay between light and dark. His book on evil, The Death of Satan (1995), offered a useful primer well before the word “evil” began turning up routinely in Presidential speeches. His essay on hope, The Real American Dream (1999), was shorter—perhaps appropriately. Anyone interested in both extremes usually ends up reading Melville, who voiced the most soaring ambition for America’s greatness and the bitterest disappointment when things fell apart, as they were when he was writing his masterpiece.

True to its subject, this is an unorthodox book. Melville has always drawn the iconoclasts. Orson Welles directed a stage version of Moby-Dick, revived this summer in East Hampton. Peter Ustinov directed a brilliant film version of Billy Budd in 1962, filled with ambivalent reflections on Cold War tensions. Camus, Kubrick, Robert Lowell and Maurice Sendak are all in the club. Mr. Delbanco fits comfortably inside this not-very-academic tradition. From the beginning, he strikes an in-your-face posture: The opening montage lists quotes about Melville from his own father (“He is very backward in speech”) to The Sopranos to former counterterror czar Richard Clarke (“Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale”). Melville would enjoy this mischief, which is much like his own.

Mr. Delbanco tells the life, straight. There’s no writer’s story quite like it in our annals. It’s a long life, connecting the aftermath of the Revolution (one of Melville’s grandfathers still had bits of tea that he had found on his clothes after the Boston Tea Party) to the lifetimes of Einstein, Picasso and Chaplin. And more than most, it shows the extraordinary capriciousness of fame and oblivion in American letters. With the possible exception of Zora Neale Hurston—buried in a pauper’s grave until Alice Walker repatriated her—no writer had to sink lower before coming back to his proper place in the firmament.

Melville burst onto the scene in 1846 with Typee, his sexy account of living with naked cannibals. Handsome, voluble, bearded, the Johnny Damon of his day, there seemed no limit to where he could go. He might have carved out a long career as a diverting conversationalist, entertaining New York’s merchants and their wives in the pretentious salons of the not-yet-Upper East Side. But it was precisely his ambition that did him in. Like Orson Welles, he harbored a desire for brilliance that was fatal to his commercial prospects, and to most of his friendships. Even among a circle of headstrong windbags, he distinguished himself by an immense New Yorkish impatience to succeed. More than to succeed—to astonish.

After a few mixed efforts, his ambition found an appropriately huge topic with the whale story he pursued, nearly as driven as his protagonist, in 1850 and 1851, as the Union was entering its death agonies. The book that resulted was so explosive that one can still find its flotsam and jetsam strewn around the world, from a brothel called Moby Dick Fun Pub in Belgium to a kebab restaurant in Tehran named after the novel.

Yet the public was utterly indifferent to Melville’s titanic effort, which marked the apogee of his career and left him stalled at the top of his climb, like a roller coaster just before a steep drop. The descent was swift. Pierre: or, The Ambiguities still delights readers as the model for how not to write a successful book.

He continued to pen short stories (including very brilliant ones) and then poems, and then bits of language that weren’t even really poetry at all, but simple thoughts in a word or two. And then nothing at all. For years, he eked out a humdrum existence as a Customs inspector on West Street, forced to take handwriting classes in hopes of getting a better performance rating. When he finally did expire in 1891, many were stunned that he had in fact been alive until then. But most paid no mind at all. An obituary in The New York Times identified him as “Henry Melville.”

Yes, it’s sad. But Mr. Delbanco resists the temptation to feel too sorry for him. There was always something Promethean about Melville’s thrust at greatness. He knew the odds were stacked against him. He knew the penalty for failure. But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After his death, a manuscript was discovered in a tin breadbox—the immortal Billy Budd—and his rediscovery began. It’s never stopped—and, as this book proves, we’ll always have more to learn about Melville.

Mr. Delbanco is very gifted at drawing links between Melville’s works and the larger paroxysms that his country was going through. It wouldn’t work for all writers, but it does work here—for Melville was undeniably paying attention. This book brings out the unbearable tension Americans felt over race in the decade before the Civil War. Mr. Delbanco’s treatment of “Benito Cereno” is particularly arresting. He also reasserts Melville’s closeness to the ground zero of the slavery argument—his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was a Massachusetts judge who wrote the decision that served as the precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation.

Another great gift of this book is that it returns Melville to his native city. New York has been slow to claim him, perhaps because of some uncertainty over whether he, in fact, claimed it. But he did, over and over again. He was born here, became an author here, published here and died here. He was a true isolato—to use his word for people who are islands unto themselves. But that word could also be used in a happier sense, to describe both this island and the fellow Manhattanites that Melville liked to walk among, anonymously.

Mr. Delbanco restores a sense of Melville the reporter, noticing (as so many did not) the problems of New York’s rapid growth as well as the joys of living here. He notes especially how much Melville and his friends borrowed from the fast language of the city’s streets. With great enthusiasm, one of them recorded into his journal what is probably the earliest known use of the expression “eat shit.” (Translated into Latin, it would serve nicely as a motto on the city seal.) Even after his writing slowed, Melville was in the thick of it, watching boats unload their cargoes, showing up day after day at a hard job. Whitman never did that.

It’s tempting to say that Melville was depressed: He lived through unspeakable tragedies—including the suicide of his son Malcolm—and there are whispers that he struggled with mental illness of his own. But this biography, with its relentless humanity (the final word of “Bartleby”), also draws aside the curtain of gloom and shows us a Melville who never quite gives up, who still haunts used bookstores, goes for endless walks around the city, and continues to write, secretly, brilliantly, right up to the end. Thank God for Billy Budd, which proves a critical fact: Billy may have died, but Melville did not succumb.

In his great essay on Hawthorne, Melville praised a writer who can “work on more than one level, not alternately but simultaneously, so as to reach not only the ‘superficial skimmer of pages,’ but also the ‘eagle-eyed reader.’” For its wealth of information, its lyrical writing and its unsparing judgment, Mr. Delbanco’s book will define Melville for both specialists and general readers well into the next generation. It goes unstintingly into his tragedy, and yet—true to form—it makes precious room for hope and laughter.

Not all ambitious quests into the heart of darkness end in failure. Herman Melville proved it with Moby-Dick. Andrew Delbanco has proved it with Melville.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

McDougall. HarperCollins, 638 pages, $29.95.

Every chronicle of European settlement of the New World must

include a boat. The boat you choose will shape the story you tell. Start with

the Niña , the Pinta and the Santa Maria ,

and you wind up with explorers, adventurers and Spain's Catholic empire. Start

with the Mayflower , and you wind with

pilgrims, pioneers and New England's religious dissenters. Start with a slave

ship, and you wind up among laborers stolen from Africa. Start among the

European passengers crammed into steerage on an immigrant steamer, and you wind

up-sometimes-with a version of the American dream fulfilled.

In Freedom Just Around the

Corner , the first of a planned three-volume narrative history of the United

States, Walter A. McDougall makes a surprising boat choice. This American

history begins on a Mississippi steamboat, Fidèle ,

the ship of knaves, fools and schemers on which Herman Melville set The Confidence-Man , his dark satire on

mid-19th-century America. Mr. McDougall's America, like Melville's, is a

country of confidence men, rogues, hucksters, impostors, sharks and pretenders.

But the rogues who depressed Melville inspire Mr. McDougall, a

professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the

Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and

the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985). According to Mr.

McDougall, the great genius of America has been to harness the human tendency

to hustle and turn it to the ends of nation-building and continental conquest.

"To suggest Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers," he

writes, "is not to accord them a nature different or worse than other human

beings. It is simply to acknowledge Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to

pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in

history."

We know we haven't been equal-opportunity schemers, but in Mr.

McDougall's America, white women and enslaved Africans trick the system too.

That's what makes us Americans. To the nation's founders, other things mattered

too-faith in progress, religious liberty, imperialism, racial hierarchy-but the

country was really born with a hustler's soul. Hustling is what we do best. We

move forward, creating new ideas by corrupting the old. According to Mr.

McDougall, the net result of our "creative corruption" is the country and

culture of the United States, whose creation Mr. McDougall confidently labels

"the central event of the past four hundred years."

Did we need another narrative history of the United States? For

generations we produced them regularly, finding the imp of American success in

geography, technology, demography, mythology, the frontier, good government,

God and good luck. Even with its hard-boiled embrace of the American hustler as

the American type and its title borrowed from Bob Dylan, there's something

old-fashioned about Freedom Just Around

the Corner . Is there really such a thing as "the American character"?

Mr. McDougall thinks so. And with confidence in his confidence

men, he leads us back through the making of America. He retraces the patterns

of settlement, the schemes of European patrons and the imperial aspirations of

European courts. He finds smart Freemasons everywhere. His narrative moves

remarkably from battles on the frontier to battles within Puritan souls, from

diplomatic intrigues in courts and capitals to the complex political

compromises behind the American Constitution. Once the nation is up and

running, Mr. McDougall breaks the flow of his history to present each of the

states admitted after the first 13. In this volume, he offers capsule histories

of Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi,

Illinois, Alabama, Maine and Missouri; in each case, he tests out on a smaller

scale the play of greed, ambition, aspiration and hard work that made the

nation as a whole.

Mr. McDougall also spotlights a cast of favorite American

hustlers whose portraits he sketches with wonderful economy. He likes a

particular kind of hard-working, clever, self-inventing character: the

itinerant preacher George Whitefield; the ubiquitous Ben Franklin; or, perhaps

nearest his heart, the "thinking, drinking, laughing, slovenly country lawyer,"

Chief Justice John Marshall, and the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, who knew to

"fashion government so as to encourage

individual greed for money, power, and prestige under sturdy legal procedures

that do not dictate what people

should strive for, but only how they

must play the game." A few women make it into this group: the clever and

seductive Caty Greene, wife of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene and

first patron of Eli Whitney; and the outspoken traveler Anne Newport Royall.

But he's no friend to Thomas Jefferson, a man who appears in

these pages as a lazy, selfish, cowardly hypocrite-a

quartet of vices which combine to exclude him from Mr. McDougall's pantheon of

"creative corruption." Jefferson's creativity was never sufficient, in Mr.

McDougall's mind, to redeem his corruption: He ducked service in the

Revolutionary War, never faced the truth about slavery, and exaggerated his own

cleverness. Mr. McDougall won't even allow him the Declaration of Independence:

"the original passages in Jefferson's draft declaration were not good, while

the good ones were not very original."

Mr. McDougall is a witty writer and a brilliant and opinionated

historian. He has devoured several decades' worth of scholarship and digested

the articles and monographs into compact arguments and telling anecdotes. His

footnotes sometimes are as interesting as his text, although the dramas staged

at the back of the book are about writing history, not the making of nations.

Freedom Just Around the

Corner is an impressive accomplishment. But I believe it's worth quarreling

with Mr. McDougall's neo-Federalist version of American history. He warns

against a naïve reading that holds the past to present standards, dismissing

those who fault the Founding Fathers for ignoring the needs of Native

Americans, women and slaves. Indeed, as he puts it, "the roles scripted for

women and imposed on Indians and blacks during the founding were necessary

supports for the advances in civil liberty Americans did achieve. Once that

subtle, ironic insight sinks in, much of nineteenth-century American history

begins to make sense as well." I'm not sure this insight is so subtle, but

perhaps it's Mr. McDougall's way of acknowledging that although freedom is

always "just around the corner" for everyone, that corner promises to be far

easier to turn for some than for others. If that promise of freedom is just

another of the con man's come-ons, then Mr. McDougall has taken his ironic

realism too far.

But it's not the lack of idealism that disturbs me most about

this volume. It's that Mr. McDougall sees so little downside to his hustler's

schemes and plots. Perhaps these plots worked well for the first 250 years of

conquest, when Europeans and Euro-Americans worked their way across the

continent, killing off Indians, making Africans work, building towns and

factories, and fashioning a system of government that turned individual greed

into common good.

But what happens when the great creative work is done, when the

magic that turns vice into virtue no longer functions? Perhaps we should

consider some alternatives to Mr. McDougall's heroic hustlers: other, better

sides to the American character and a different, more varied cast. Some of us

may be as Mr. McDougall imagines us to be-ironic, hard-headed capitalists whose

vices have become virtues in the marketplace. But I like to think there are

Americans who have tried to hold to ideas and to fashion institutions outside

the voracious, all-consuming market. Mr. McDougall may need these other

Americans if he wants a moral compass for the next volumes of his history, when

his "free people" begin to feel the consequences of choosing always the

short-term prospects, when his good country faces the truths about slavery and

goes to war, when his creative capitalists begin to see environmental waste,

and when arrogance dismisses the subtle arts of diplomacy.

Ann Fabian teaches American studies and history

at Rutgers University.

Mind you, I have always argued that there is no such thing as a "remake," no matter how slavishly the plot of the first version has been copied for the second. This is to say that, unlike in the theater, there are no genuine "revivals" in the cinema. Every piece of film is stamped with its own unique identity by the mercilessly relentless time machine. And after almost half a century, Melville's more rigorous fatalism is virtually an eternity removed from Mr. Jordan's comic whimsicality.

Melville's Bob le Flambeur opens with a nocturnal hymn to the Montmarte milieu of Paris, a realm that begins in the heavens of the Cathedral of Le Sacré Coeur and descends to the hell of Pigalle. Melville's Bob (Roger Duchesne) is first seen in the gray gloom of dawn as a busted gambler retreating to his flat after a fruitless night at the gambling table. But even as his luck runs out, he hasn't abandoned his sartorial splendor and spiritual elegance. He will try for one last big score, but only in his own impeccable style.

Mr. Jordan's Bob is played by his film's co-auteur, Nick Nolte, whose perpetual self-destruction provided Oscar-night host Steve Martin with one of his biggest laughs, with a throwaway line about Mr. Nolte's recent brush with the gendarmes over his alleged drunk driving. Indeed, The Good Thief is as much about the strikingly visible wreckage of Mr. Nolte's real life as it is about anything else, and to his credit he plays his mirror image on the screen with great gallantry, panache, charm and humor. But though the Bob of Mr. Jordan's film is thoroughly busted when we first encounter him on-screen, he is not confined, as Melville's Bob is, to the noirish hours between dusk and dawn. Mr. Jordan has shifted the locale from Paris-Pigalle and nighttime Deauville to the sunnier and more sybaritic surroundings of Monte Carlo. Indeed, The Good Thief spends so much time in the daylight that it doesn't really play like film noir at all, despite its few spasms of homicidal violence. In any event, Mr. Jordan and Mr. Nolte go through the motions of setting up Bob's one last big score, but their hearts aren't really in it.

Red alert! Readers who get homicidal about critics who give away plot twists, read no further until after you have seen this fascinating movie, which I strongly urge you to do as promptly as possible, because it may not be around much longer.

What is the plot twist, in both the Melville and the Jordan films? Simply this: In the midst of the caper, both Bobs are to divert attention from the actual robbery by pretending to be settling down for a night of serious gambling. In the Melville, Bob starts winning big as he has never won before in his life. He completely forgets about what he's supposed to be doing as part of the robbery team in his exultation over seeing a life of bad luck turn with a vengeance. As a result, he escapes a double-cross that results in the thwarting of the planned robbery, and the death of his young protégé. Melville's recurrent theme of male amity is the emotional payoff. Mr. Nolte's Bob is more woman-oriented, and he ends up with the apparently redeemed nubile young Russian prostitute Anna (Nutsa Kukhianidze).

I have broken the critics' code of secrecy when it comes to divulging trick plots because I wish to explain why the same plot gambit works in the Melville and doesn't in the Jordan. It has to do with one Bob being genuinely surprised by his good fortune, while the other seems to take it in stride. Both films establish a close tie between Bob and the police inspector who is pursuing him, but somehow there are extra layers of con games in The Good Thief , some involving the paintings of old and modern masters as temptations for larceny, and some involving Bob's cynical awareness of his inevitable betrayal by his young male companion, who hopes to avoid being deported to a certain death in his native Algeria. Mr. Nolte projects such a surpassing intelligence and cunning that he becomes almost effortlessly superior to all the intrigues swirling around him. Strangely, I didn't mind this big-star omniscience coming from a gnarled, grizzled, non-bankable "natural" like Mr. Nolte, who grew out of pretty-boy, all-muscles television celebrity to achieve the steely grandeur of another natural, the late Sterling Hayden (1916-1986).

The point is that The Good Thief is great fun despite its deficiency as a presumed thriller. Mr. Jordan, a published novelist and short-story writer, stays in my mind for the storytelling charms of his best movies in an up-and-down film career that's spanned two decades, and these include, in my opinion (if not in the harsher judgment of the contentiously encyclopedic and eminently readable David Thomson), Mona Lisa (1986), The Miracle (1991), The Crying Game (1992), The Butcher Boy (1997) and The End of the Affair (1999). Among the incidental pleasures of The Good Thief are the scenery-chewing, villainous, virtual cameo performance by Ralph Fiennes as a thuggish art dealer on whom Bob has foisted a fake Picasso, and bit parts for fellow directors Emir Kusturica as a high-tech Russian Mafia type, and identical-twin auteurs Mark and Mike as Polish look-alike scam artists with a built-in-alibi modus operandi that would give the detectives on Law & Order conniptions. The girl in the movie seems to be in her teens, though she already seems to have done a lot of living in her short amoral life. I don't agree with a colleague's implied criticism of Mr. Nolte's Bob for even reluctantly accepting the attentions of a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Bob keeps pushing her off and pushing her off until his final gambling spree. He's only human, even nearing 70. Needless to say, this old geezer was charmed.

Teenage Wasteland

Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow , from a screenplay by Ernesto Foronda, Justin Lin and Fabian Marquez, has aroused considerable controversy despite its less-than-shoestring budget. One thing is certain: Mr. Lin had the right of final cut, since he supervised the editing, and he took the editing credit for himself to prove it.

The film is constructed around the rites of passage of a group of teenagers full of suburban angst that leads them down the path of drug trafficking and petty criminality, with fatal consequences. Sound familiar, even overfamiliar? It would be if the kids were African-American or Latino or even Native American. But overachieving A-student Asian-Americans bound for the best Ivy League colleges behaving like hoodlums? Who ever heard of such a thing?

That Better Luck Tomorrow got made at all is something of a miracle in itself. As production notes describe the early industry reactions to the project: "Though the script was deemed insightful and provocative by its readers, financiers were not exactly knocking down Lin's door. Investors responded to the material, but cowered at the idea of backing a potentially controversial film about a group of nihilistic Asian-American teenagers. Suggestions ranged from writing in a white lead to adjusting the screenplay for Latino actors. Lin set out to fund the film on his own. As Mr. Lin recalls, 'I started out with ten credit cards, and I took out my savings. A low budget film has a budget of about five million dollars. We didn't have close to that amount. We had such a minuscule fraction of that amount, we had people working for free along with donated equipment.'"

Somehow, additional financing for the film materialized, and Better Luck Tomorrow was lucky enough to be selected for the Sundance Film Festival, where following the film's third Sundance screening, a heated Q&A ensued. One enraged audience member asked Mr. Lin how he could make such a bleak, negative, amoral film. The questioner reportedly went on to ask, "What kind of portrait is this of Asian-Americans? Don't you have a responsibility to paint a more positive and helpful portrait of your community?"

After Mr. Lin and his cast reportedly defended the film, the ubiquitous Roger Ebert stepped up for the clincher: "What I find offensive and condescending about your statement is nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, 'How could you do this to your people?' This film has a right to be about these people, and Asian-American characters have the right to be whatever they want to be." Bravo, Roger! I agree completely. The enemy for critics should not be political incorrectness, but artistic incompetence and sluggish banality.

As for the film itself, Mr. Lin can be credited with assembling a behavorially cohesive cast of lesser-known or completely unknown Asian-American performers, some of whom have a startling number of credits for popular television shows and familiar movies without ever having escaped from the background of the mise en scène .

Parry Shen as Ben, the protagonist in this group of bored Asian-American overachievers in suburban Orange County, Calif., is not the leader of the pack, but he is its one restraining, rational presence in their restless and ultimately ruinous search for an exciting new identity. We sense that Ben and his buddies, the hot-tempered Virgil (Jason Tobin) and the more venturesome and eventually more dangerous Han (Sung Kang) and Daric (Roger Fan), are bound together by their collective insecurities. Somewhat apart from this group, but seeking to dominate it, is spoiled-rotten rich boy Steve (John Cho), who arouses resentment in the group-with fatal consequences. Indeed, Steve is so spoiled and supercilious that he passes on his hopelessly infatuated girlfriend Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung) for frustratingly platonic dates with Ben.

Ben's story becomes more desperately drug-ridden and hallucinatory as the movie progresses. I suspect that Mr. Lin has been influenced in his expressionistically frenetic editing maneuvers by such recent exercises in zonked-out perceptions under the influence of hard drugs as Darren Aronofsky's truly haunting Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Jonas Åberlund's Spun (2003). Mr. Lin's film falls somewhere in between as an experiment in decadence and despair.

Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest wealth or power, but of their first maturity. Rome remains the aristocratic, rivalrous city of Catullus and Horace; London is still the Augustan clubland of Pope and Swift. In both cases, what makes them metropolitan is a sense of centrality: The poets declare that civilization exists here , in this small society of writers and readers who probably know each other by name.

New York's great age of poetry was, roughly speaking, from 1870 to 1970. Of course, as Elizabeth Schmidt's excellent new anthology shows, good poems are still being written here. But the classical, mythical New York was created by the line of poets running from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane to Frank O'Hara. And just as America, even in its imperial phase, is unlike the empires Rome and London ruled, so New York has called forth a very different poetry. It's urban but not urbane, if urbanity means polish, sophistication, elegance. Instead, it's all movement, potential, indefiniteness, longing-isolated, but yearning for ultimate connection. This explains why the best New York poems are about sex, and even, perhaps, why New York's three greatest bards were gay: Erotic attraction, especially to strangers, is an enduringly apt symbol of the city's democratic promise.

Poems of New York , a new entry in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, succeeds extraordinarily well in capturing the major strands of New York poetry. Part of the charm of the book is simply in the details, the familiar things transformed by metaphor. In Charles Reznikoff's "Walk About the Subway Station," we recognize the "flat black fungus / that was chewing gum"; in Howard Moss' "The Roof Garden," we see the water towers, like "an African village suspended above / The needle hardness of New York." Even vanished facts come back to life, as in Karl Shapiro's "Future-Present": "Remember the old days when the luxury liners in narrow Manhattan / appeared piecemeal in segments at the end of east-west streets … ?"

When it comes to the city as a whole, however, the anthology offers two dueling visions. In "Whitman in Black," Ted Berrigan writes of "Whitman's city lived in in Melville's senses." Melville and Whitman represent two ways of seeing, and writing about, the city: threat or seduction, loss of nature or gain of culture, nightmare or paradise. Ms. Schmidt takes care to represent both. Melville's New York appears in "The House-Top," a poem describing the Civil War draft riots: "The Town is taken by its rats-ship-rats / And rats of the wharves." This vision resurfaces in Berrigan's "urban inferno," where he lives "for my sins."

Many of the writers in Poems of New York see the city this way. There's Federico García Lorca: "Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth / because morning and hope are impossible there." There's Muriel Rukeyser's "Seventh Avenue": "This is the cripples' hour on Seventh Avenue / when they emerge, the two o'clock night-walkers, / the cane, the crutch, and the black suit." More recently, there's Cornelius Eady's "Dread": "If you're a young man in East New York, / Here's a simple fact of life: / If they don't shoot with a gun, / They'll cut you with a knife."

No one could deny that these poets see a crucial aspect of New York. Yet in these poems they somehow fail to define the anthology, or the city. Partly this is because they are inferior as poetry, with more sincerity than art, and a strong flavor of the sermon and newspaper editorial. Partly it's because New York's victims struggle to leave, while true believers keep on coming. But more important, it's because urban suffering can be just as bad in Chicago or San Diego, while the delights of New York are unique.

That uniqueness comes across clearly in Poems of New York : It's the city's intoxicating liberation, its combination of anonymity and potential. This is much better reflected in New York's poetry than its fiction, which tends to focus on "society," as in Wharton and James. The poets, on the other hand, are arrivistes, and they adore what they have found. For the women poets of the early 20th century, New York's sexual freedom called forth a melodramatic and rather self-conscious braggadocio. Sara Teasdale daringly envies "the girls who can ask for love / In the lights of Union Square," and Amy Lowell boasts, "I am like to be very drunk / with your coming." The poetess laureate of these is Edna St. Vincent Millay, with the famous "Recuerdo" ("We were very tired, we were very merry").

For the best expression of this freedom, however, we must turn to Whitman, Crane and O'Hara. They each offer a different version of the city's delighted energy. O'Hara's is eminently sociable and comic: He gives us the sense (also found in Catullus) that the poet has a really attractive group of friends. Many of O'Hara's poems would belong in this anthology; Ms. Schmidt has chosen "Gamin" and "Steps," where even a traffic jam is eroticized as "a way / for people to rub up against each other."

Whitman, of course, is the poet of "Mannahatta" and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," both of which are included. Whitman shows how simply walking down a New York street is an erotic experience:

Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word ….

But Hart Crane is the essential poet of New York, because he best combines both strains: He fears the city almost as much as he loves it. He takes note of the revolving doors "Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright," and of the subway bathroom, where love is "A burnt match skating in a urinal"-a perfect image of disgusted satiety. But he was also, from his Brooklyn Heights apartment, the visionary singer of the Brooklyn Bridge, a massive emblem of potential: "Some motion ever unspent in thy stride- / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!"

Poems of New York , then, is not just a delightful book to read; it reminds us, in difficult times, of what New York really means. This is not accomplished by the poems relating to Sept. 11, which still feel too raw and testimonial. It succeeds, rather, by showing us that the city, which so often seems to belong merely to its owners, really belongs to the poets, and to anyone who shares Marianne Moore's credo: "it is not the plunder, / but 'accessibility to experience.'"

Adam Kirsch's first book of poems, The Thousand Wells (Ivan R. Dee), will be published this fall.