The following, said to be from Mr. Calvo's brother, was forwarded to The Observer from someone with the pseudonym "Anticlimacus Cus" who says he (or she) is a former Princeton graduate student. It has also been posted in the comments section of The Daily Princetonian's web site, where a thread attached to one April 25 article is now 50 pages long.

Statement from Antonio Calvo's family
(Issued by his brother Santiago Calvo, and translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux)

The family of Antonio Calvo wishes to thank Antonio's students, colleagues, and friends for all the displays of affection and support that they have received. We are particularly grateful to his students for the events they have organized to honor Antonio, both as a professor and as a person.

The family of Antonio Calvo, like many, is left with doubts about the way Princeton University has acted. They have received no information from Princeton about the reasons for any action with regard to Antonio's employment. The family would like to express its disappointment with the April 25th statement issued by the president of Princeton.

The President's primary concern has been to defend the university's contract-renewal process, without taking into account the human consequences that such a process can have.

Or at least those were the official words used about the events of April 8, when Antonio Calvo, a senior lecturer at Princeton's Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, beloved among the students, who called him St. Antonio, was suddenly exiled from the campus where he had worked for the previous 10 years.

"It's a euphemism I don't think you'll find on Wikipedia," said one lecturer, ahem, "preceptor" at Princeton.

Calvo's case garnered international attention when the maligned Spanish lecturer killed himself four days after he was told abruptly to leave Princeton. In the controversy that has surrounded his death, rumors have been floated as to the reasons for his dismissal, but the true circumstances of his suspension--and why he apparently was not given a chance to argue his case before he was told to leave--have not been made clear.

Princeton University's president, Shirley Tilghman, who has refused to divulge even the most general details of Mr. Calvo's particular leave-taking, has said only that it "came out of a review whose contents cannot be disclosed without an unprecedented breach of confidentiality." This statement, a Princeton University spokesperson told The Observer, "really is the extent of the information."

But it is very easy to discover that it is not. The narrative that has cohered amid the administration's cavernous silence, in the hundreds of comments on the school newspaper's Web site, in the pages of major newspapers in the United States and Spain and in what Dr. Tilghman quaintly calls "the blogosphere" is this: On April 8, Calvo received a letter from the chairwoman of his department, Gabriela Nouzeilles. According to The New York Times, which was leaked a copy, the letter stated, "We have received information from multiple sources that you have been engaging in extremely troubling and inappropriate behavior in the workplace."

The letter did not give specifics about the inappropriate behavior and, reached by phone at Princeton, Dr. Nouzeilles declined to provide any. According to Calvo's friends, the complaints that Calvo was aware of before his dismissal consisted of an email where he was said to have reprimanded a graduate student, in Spanish, with an order to "stop touching your balls" (a Spanish expression roughly akin to "stop sitting on your ass"). In the second incident, Calvo is said to have told a graduate student on an office visit that she deserved a slap for failing to do her job well. These exhortations, his friends said, were not meant to be taken literally.

According to The Times, the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles informed Calvo that he was suspended with pay and relieved of his teaching duties, and had to surrender his office key and university identification. On April 12, Calvo stabbed himself in his left arm and neck.

THE story of Calvo's dismissal has exemplified an uncomfortable conflict at elite universities, where procedures of hiring and promotion are determined by a strict caste system that gives rights to tenured professors that it does not afford to those who staff its lower ranks. Even supposing Calvo committed actions that would mandate immediate suspension--something his friends and former students vehemently deny--the very process of his dismissal is striking some as unfair.

"The issue of protecting the confidentiality is a convenient dodge," said William Potter, an alumnus who also works as a lecturer at Princeton and wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian asking for greater transparency in the Calvo case. "Any fear the university had of a defamation suit died with Professor Calvo. It's hard to see whose interests they're protecting."

Calvo started working at Princeton a decade ago, when he was still a graduate student in Spanish literature at CUNY. For graduate students at CUNY, teaching Spanish at Princeton was a good way to make some money, get teaching experience with crack students and gain access to Princeton's well-stocked libraries. By all accounts, Calvo also happened to love it.

In 2007, after he finished his Ph.D. on Langston Hughes and Federico Garcia Lorca, he applied for and earned the position of senior lecturer in Spanish at Princeton. In this job, Calvo not only taught classes but also coordinated all the Spanish teaching at Princeton. Because of Princeton's mandatory language requirement for undergraduates, he therefore managed a lot of sections. He was also tasked with managing complex relationships between outside lecturers, graduate students and the tenured faculty.

It was a job fraught with politics. At Princeton, the tenured faculty has minimal involvement in the nitty-gritty of teaching students the basics of Spanish grammar, reserving their energies for more lofty pursuits. Spanish is instead taught by two kinds of lecturers: graduate students from inside the university, who have to fulfill a teaching requirement, and those, such as Calvo, who are from outside the university. In the hierarchy of academia, people in Calvo's position are at the bottom of the academic totem pole, despite their Ph.D.'s and teaching duties, something some of Calvo's professors said they warned him about when he first became senior lecturer.

"He decided to accept a job that I consider very, very dangerous, particularly for a foreign person who needs a visa that's always attached to the institution that hires you," said Isaías Lerner, a professor who served on Calvo's dissertation committee when Calvo was a student at CUNY. "That creates a sense of power in the institution that is very unpleasant."

Dr. Lerner acknowledged, however, that it's hard to turn down a brand name like Princeton, Harvard or Yale. "Those are very seductive places," he said. "You have unbelievably intelligent and very selective students who you teach." And, he added, "they loved him."

But lecturers in Calvo's position tend to have trouble with graduate students. Unlike the outside lecturers, whose primary job at the university is to teach, the graduate students often view their research as more important. Teaching is seen as a grind, and an irritating distraction.

"They cancel classes, they don't want to teach at 9 a.m., it's usually a problem," said Marco Aponte-Moreno, a friend of Calvo's who used to work as a lecturer with him at Princeton and now teaches at the University of Surrey, in England. "That's the kind of context in which Antonio was working."

In November 2010, as his first three years as senior lecturer were coming to a close, Calvo's contract came up for review, a standard procedure outlined in the university's official employment policy.

Flor Gragera de Leon, a former Princeton lecturer and a friend of Calvo's, called him in the middle of March, when she began to worry that his review process had become so prolonged. Dr. Gragera de Leon said she began hearing rumors that some people in the department were organizing a campaign against his reappointment as early as last November.

"Antonio seemed to be informed of the accusations being raised against him," she wrote in an email to The Observer. "I do not know whether he was aware of his words being 'interpreted' as sexual harassment. He certainly knew he was accused of having used that Spanish expression (vulgar language and that's all)."

As has been pointed out in the comment board of The Princetonian and in the Spanish newspapers, the likelihood that an Ivy League academic would interpret the words literally rather than in their colloquial context was slim.

"In my opinion," she continued, "if there existed such 'interpretation' of the Spanish expression in order to accuse Antonio, we can just think of absolutely malicious intentions (otherwise, complete, inconceivable ignorance)."  

On April 8, Calvo received the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles that resulted in his "abrupt leave-taking."

Ms. Gragera de Leon said the timing of his suspension was unfortunate--academic appointments in languages revolve around interviews held at the annual MLA convention in January. Having failed to interview at the 2011 convention, Calvo would have to wait at least a year if he ended up being fired from Princeton. Furthermore, Calvo would have to leave the country, as his visa was tied to his job.

"By losing his job at Princeton, he also lost the opportunity to renew his visa," said Dr. Lerner.

Immediate suspension without the opportunity to argue one's case is typically reserved for what the university calls "rare cases." Among other questions asked by Calvo's friends, former colleagues and students are why the university took months to arrive at the emergency that mandated Calvo's immediate suspension with two weeks left in the semester.

And then there's the university's commitment to silence.

When asked about what happened, Dr. Nouzeilles told The Observer only that "it's very disturbing for the people in the department," and that "there are a lot of distressed students, and that is our priority for the time being."

The students, meanwhile, are annoyed with this treatment.

"It seems that [university president] Shirley [Tilghman] is trying to paint the students asking questions as nothing but bereaved and perhaps misguided youth, but we are not," wrote a student who responded to The Observer's inquiry via email under the pseudonym "Sancho Panza."

"It's very easy for a President who has been less than forthcoming in the past week to frame a policy in a positive light without providing any documentation or pointing students in the direction of clearly set policy, if it indeed exists," the student wrote.

Other students have commented on the unequal treatment of lecturers and tenured professors.

"I think it is unfortunate that there is no official, or available, University policy regarding the dismissal of lecturers, since they have been at least as important to my personal academic career as full faculty members have been," wrote Phyllis Heitjan, a senior majoring in Spanish who had taken two classes with Mr. Calvo and traveled with him on the Princeton in Spain program.

"I am a student of foreign languages and have often had language classes with graduate students or lecturers rather than professors," Heitjan continued. "They are a very important demographic at this University, especially in language and cultural studies, and often are more engaged with undergraduate students than busy, important professors can be."

ewitt@observer.com

If you were out to assemble the Platonic ideal, the parodic prototype, of the Great American bildungsroman—wherein a middle-class, top-of-his-class lad from the Middle West is saved, then savaged by the North Atlantic and, specifically, the Ivy League—how might you proceed?

You’ll first need, of course, an epigraph from the genre’s patron saint, F. Scott Fitzgerald. No nuance must undermine the theme of geography as destiny. Before his coastal migration, your hero, the self-improving provincial, must chafe against the simplicity, the orthodoxy, the complacency and cultural myopia of his putative peers. These peers will, say, offer him a bottle of cherry Schnapps on a bus ride to a sitting of the SATs, and your hero will refuse, and this refusal to imbibe the novelty liqueur of local convention will be understood as both a willful catalyst of fate and an ordained enactment of the cosmic order.

“My friends seem wounded by this,” you might write. “We talk as though we’ll be together forever, but I’ve always known better: someday we’ll be ranked. We’ll be screened and scored and separated. I’ve known this, it seems, since, my first few years in grade school … when I raised my hand slightly faster than the other kids—and waved it around to make sure the teachers saw me.”

Since Fitzgerald’s years in central New Jersey, and Nick Carraway’s in coastal Connecticut, the environs of Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton and the rest have undergone radical transformation, by any demographic measure. The one thing shared by all the hostile tribes now occupying our elite old colleges is the alien aspect they present Middle-American, small-town virtue.

In the age of Palin, it’s not hard to convince a reader that elitists and radicals, effete fops and militant intellectuals, constitute a single power bloc, assembled and scheming in some smoke-filled dorm room. “My first semester at Princeton,” Walter Kirn’s memoir offers, “I had four roommates who resembled no one I’d ever known.” Who’d dare deny him his caricatures, fashioned as living beings? “Peter, a foppish piano prodigy … fine-bristled mustached … robe and slippers … Benson and Hedges Menthol 100s … plinking out show tunes.” “Jennifer, the composer’s plump heiress girlfriend … limousine on weekends … party with celebrities … Bee Gees.” “Tim, the son of a New York journalist … Oil of Olay … tuck[ed] in at night … complete with fairy tales.” “And Joshua, an earnest Long Island Quaker kid … red beard … played guitar and protested apartheid.”

The moral arc of Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever was already fully formed in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly article of the same name (sans subtitle) from which it’s been expanded. In both versions, Mr. Kirn’s origin story begins, with bathos worthy of Marvel, at the rejection of that Schnapps in the back of the school bus. “And so I go on to college, and they don’t.” The board scores ratify the vague sense of unbelonging he’s harbored all along as a child in Minnesota farm country, and allow him to forgo his final year of high school for early entrance to nearby Macalester College.

Still restless, he transfers to Princeton the next year and is, of course, immediately alienated from the cosmopolitans he sought. (Further comic-book drama: Without consultation, Peter, Jennifer, Tim and Joshua buy several thousand dollars’ worth of common-room furnishings, then ban young Kirn from the room when he tells them he can’t pay. Months later, he trashes their belongings in a fit of rage, and is quietly expelled from the dorm.)

In time, Mr. Kirn falls in with a group of ironical English majors and, instead of reading Great Books, learns how to game professors with strategically aped jargon. “We toted around books by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Walter Benjamin. We spoke of ‘playfulness’ and ‘textuality’ and concluded before we’d even read a hundredth of it that the Western canon was ‘illegitimate.’ …” Myriad chemicals, and young women, are experimented with. (“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.”) At the end of his junior year, Mr. Kirn experienced some sort of psychological break, possibly the first case of Derrida-induced aphasia in the literature. For some reason, deliverance from traumatic undereducation at Princeton takes the form of an expected scholarship for graduate study at Oxford.

BOTH THE Atlantic piece and the book close on Mr. Kirn back in Minnesota, in the novel act of reading a novel, in its entirety—from his mother’s shelf of “classics for the masses,” he passes over The Great Gatsby for Huckleberry Finn. But where the cautionary personal essay marched to this maudlin end with a jackboot alacrity that was, if not persuasive, at least mechanically compelling, the cautionary 211-page memoir can’t help but meander.

Mr. Kirn now reveals that his father, implied an uncomplicated native of petit bourgeois Minnesota, in fact attended Princeton himself. A single paragraph assures us that the elder Kirn was a public-school kid on a football scholarship, never spoke of his college years “or showed much interest in my college plans generally,” and that’s it. But it’s enough to make Walter N. Kirn III what the folk anthropology of his chosen genre terms a “legacy”—a type whose supposed hereditary privilege and underqualification any other writing of Lost in the Meritocracy would surely condemn alongside the show-tune dandies and plump heiresses.

The reader of the full-length volume comes away with the suspicion that Mr. Kirn’s youth was a good deal more interesting—and less reducible to Fitzgeraldian passion play—than he gives it credit for. Most notable is the recurrent history of odd intimacies with adult men—his “first teacher and first love” Uncle Admiral, who gave the 4-year-old Kirn a private course in military geography, history and manliness; Mr. Hulbertson, the sixth-grade teacher fond of staging kissing contests and sneaking furtive touches; the various high-school teachers for whom he was always pet or cannabis companion or both; Professor R., the junior-paper adviser who smoked and listened at office hours (“there was a fair chance I loved the man”); Herr Blick, the American expatriate who gave him a summer job at a Munich bar and propositioned him, pants down, in its kitchen; Dr. Fritsch, the proud German patent lawyer who extorted retribution from the former. A memoirist of sterner will might have excavated from these events a lesson, say, on the uncomfortable closeness of pedagogy and pederasty; Mr. Kirn relates everything to the striated terrain of Ivy League academic fashion.

And so Uncle Admiral becomes nothing more than glib rebuke to the learned hysteria over “patriarchy”; 1980s West Germany, nothing more than a cracked mirror of the divisions at Princeton.

That Lost in the Meritocracy remembers nothing the father ever said about his college years is strange considering the total dialogic recall the book claims elsewhere. It’s difficult not to wince at the violence of putting, in the mouths of purportedly real classmates, small talk like “Don’t get stuck on authorship” and “‘Irreducible’ is foolproof.”

Mr. Kirn is not exactly wrong in describing the rise of French theory in American English departments as a “lucky convergence of academic fashion and my illiteracy.” But to conflate this development with East Coast elitism writ large and long is, I suspect, backward. As advanced apparatuses of higher education, the tools of theory level the field for the pure intellects who arrive on campus without the wide-ranging mastery, or private tutors in Greek and Latin, of their prep school peers. And critical sophistication in no way prevents literal mastery; Barthes and Gadamer may abet the frauds of Minnesota farm boys spewing “liminal” and “praxis” in place of knowledge, but this seems no more or less criminal than earlier generations of Andover swells earning points with empty recitals of Dante in the Italian.

Every age has its frauds, it seems, and every fraud blames his age.

Jonathan Liu can be reached at books@observer.com.

The Associated Press reports that Mr. Colbert was presented with “The Great Princeton Class of 2008 Understandable Vanity Award,” which was mounted on a mirror, during the university’s annual Class Day festivities yesterday in front of an area of the school where George Washington defeated the British in the Battle of Princeton.

“I have to say, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful,” the zany faux-news host told 2,611 soon-to-be grads.

Of course Mr. Colbert, who lives in Montclair, N.J., never quite steps out of character. He told the students: “You can change the world. Please don't do that, OK? Some of us like the way things are going now.”

Aren't people like Maya Angelou supposed to speak at these things?

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
By David Samuels
The New Press, 370 pages, $26.95

“The fact,” writes David Samuels, “that we lie like crazy while pretending to always tell the truth is such a common narrative strategy in American literature and American lives that we frequently confuse our wishful imaginings with reality.” A truth-teller, Mr. Samuels has just published two appreciations of the Great American Lie: The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of his essayistic journalism.

The Runner chronicles the brief success of fabulist James Hogue, a low-class, high-intellect con man who decided at age 29 to go to college. Again. In 1997, Mr. Hogue reinvented himself as the 17-year-old Alexi Indris-Santana, a Rorschach of elite liberal pieties: The self-reliant, multicultural child of a European sculptor, Santana spent his days in Little Purgatory, his canyon home, herding cattle by day, reading Plato by night—tailor-made for the Princeton admission committee’s self-serving mythology of Ivy league diversity, inclusion and merit. Before the discovery of his con, he excelled at his studies, earning all A’s and B’s. This, of course, had little bearing on the response of the Princeton administration once they realized that their unique student was an absolute fiction.

Despite the promise of this story, The Runner, an expanded version of a remarkable essay originally published in The New Yorker in 2001, feels slack and structurally ill-conceived. If it’s not quite true that there are no second acts in American history, James Hogue is a good example of how many second acts get booked in cheap clubs out by the interstate. The Runner starts where the Princeton caper ends, so the book spend more than half of its pages detailing the lies and deceptions of a gas-siphoning, electricity-pirating bike thief. By the time Mr. Samuels circles back to Princeton, interest has faltered.

More importantly, James Hogue is merely the faintest specter in the pages of The Runner. Mr. Samuels’ has little insight into Mr. Hogue’s motivation, and never really allows him to speak. It’s difficult to know a chameleon, yes. And yes, Mr. Samuels does mention a lawsuit that precludes discussion or reproduction of his communications with Mr. Hogue. To compensate for these shortcomings, Mr. Samuels often turns himself into a sympathetic intellectual proxy for Mr. Hogue, thinking through the similarities of their lives and the instability of identity. Still, the book’s near absolute estrangement from its central character makes The Runner frustratingly vacant.

I say all this reluctantly, because David Samuels is a wonderful writer, possessed of a subtle, compassionate understanding of how most of us somnambulists bungle through our American dream. It’s difficult to separate one’s response to The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart because they are so closely akin, and not merely in theme and in content. Together they read as an improbable dialectic of problem and solution—for every false note, every lapse in The Runner, Only Love Can Break Your Heart responds with a solution, boldly stated.

The best of his collected essays are stylish, cerebral meditations on the ubiquity of self-deception. As Mr. Samuels writes, “Every writer I know shelters a truth somewhere deep inside that informs the stories they write. … My story has something to do with our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch, which is much the same thing as believing in the future.” These delusions are rarely ones of grandeur: self-styled anarchists who don Nikes to throw stones at Starbucks and still don’t realize that their renunciation of market values has little to do with the market’s logic; a 77-year-old man who attributes his longevity to the years he spent driving around a Nevada nuclear test site “during atmospheric tests without the benefit of protective clothing”; salesmen deep in the ecstasy of a pyramid scheme.

The collection’s high point is the title essay, a masterly synthesis of reportage and cultural criticism that uses a Florida greyhound track as a lens through which to view one of our most persistent national fantasies: that you make your own luck. “What is most cruel about dog racing,” Mr. Samuels writes, “has less to do with how the dogs are treated … than with the belief system that is inculcated in bettors, which revolves around the demonstrably mistaken and often quite dangerous idea that if you try hard and believe in yourself, the laws of chance will be suspended.”

With an intelligence and unsparing lucidity reminiscent of Joan Didion’s work circa Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Mr. Samuels has written some of the best long-form literary journalism of the past decade. The thrilling series of counternarratives to our prevailing national fantasies about luck, justice and honesty collected in Only Love Can Break Your Heart sadly makes The Runner seem more obviously flawed.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

The difference between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery is as plain as the nose on your face.

Unless, of course, you don't like your nose.

Or your chin. Or your eyes, ears, breasts or penis. Or any other number of body parts you deem undesirable and which make you miserable under your skin. Then the line between the medical necessity of reconstructive procedures (the rebuilding, say, of a soldier's face blown off by war) and the elective quality of cosmetic or "beauty'' surgery (a tummy tuck here, a lip pump there) starts to blur. Both reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, after all, have the same aim: to make someone happy.

Happiness, writes University of Chicago professor Sander L. Gilman in Making the Body Beautiful , is the main goal of plastic surgery, whether it is rebuilding a harelip (a procedure now considered reconstructive but which in the 19th century was labeled as esthetic) or building up (or paring down) that nose on your face. Happiness is, in fact, the only way to measure the success of plastic surgery.

According to E. Bingo Wyer in The Unofficial Guide to Cosmetic Surgery , "In New York City, high-powered baby boomers, including both men and women, represent nearly 70 percent of all cosmetic surgery patients–about 137,000 patients annually." These are not people in pain, at least not physical pain. Most often their surgery is not covered by health insurance. They are not really sick. "Indeed, many of them keep their treatment a secret and thus forfeit all of the sympathy one gains from being ill,'' Mr. Gilman observes. The only way they can determine if their surgery has been a success is if they deem themselves happier than before they went under the knife. "It is the patient, not the physician, who is supposed to judge the success of the procedure,'' Mr. Gilman writes.

But how is that judgment made?

That is the uncomfortable question at the heart of Making the Body Beautiful . Mr. Gilman wades into the murky waters of racial identity, pop culture fantasies and the politics of acculturation. He calls his heavily footnoted study "a cyber-jigsaw puzzle,'' into which he throws a number of interlocking sets of stories. He considers Amy's obsession with her flat nose in Little Women and reports on Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own "too Jewish'' nose. He describes the man who is transformed into a female breast in Philip Roth's novella The Breast and ponders Mark Rees' transformation, thanks to a bilateral mastectomy, from a masculine-looking woman into a scarred but happier male transsexual. And from this hodgepodge of case studies and cultural references, he comes up with a disturbing answer to the question of how esthetic surgery patients decide on the success or failure of their procedures.

According to Mr. Gilman, the ones who are "happy'' after their operations are those who see themselves as able to "pass'' from the undesirable group to which they belonged before the surgery into the group about which they had been fantasizing.

In other words, the pursuit of happiness through plastic surgery presupposes that there are desirable and undesirable categories. In-groups and out-groups. Hairy, bald. Fat, thin. Large-breasted, small-breasted. Large nose, small nose. Male, female. White, nonwhite. Never mind that our perceptions of these categories are constantly in flux, that even the categories themselves are not fixed. The patient (or more accurately, the client) and the surgeon pretend otherwise.

"Happiness in this instance exists in crossing the boundary separating one category from another,'' Mr. Gilman writes. "It is rooted in the necessary creation of arbitrary demarcations between the perceived reality of the self and the ideal category into which one desires to move.''

Take that nose on your face, for example, and our society's wildly fluctuating views of just how protruding a protuberance it should be. For centuries, people wanted to rid themselves of their too-small noses. With the syphilis epidemic of the 16th century that ravaged people's olfactory organs, a small, flat nose had come to be seen as a sign of immorality. By the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th, that negative connotation was given a racial twist: Jews' and blacks' small, flat noses were declared signs of their "primitive" natures. The Irish pug nose was also pronounced undesirable. "The Irish nose is the African nose is the Jewish nose,'' Mr. Gilman concludes, underscoring in Gertrude Stein mode the absurdity of such universal racial markings. No matter: They all represented difference and danger.

In response to these racial prejudices, esthetic surgery developed procedures to "correct'' such "ugliness.'' In the 1880's John Orlando Roe, a Rochester, N.Y., surgeon, perfected a procedure that would "cure'' the "pug nose,'' transforming his patients from "Irish'' into "Americans.'' "Whether black, Irish, or Asian, the nose that is too small or too flat has been altered by the esthetic surgeon because of its 'otherness' in relation to Western ideals,'' Mr. Gilman writes. "These ideals are not just concerned with beauty and attractiveness, but with markers of who is and is not acceptably human, who can and cannot be trusted.''

But again–those markers are maddeningly arbitrary. How else to explain that the same groups that are characterized as having small, flat noses are also racially marked as having big schnozzes? And add this irony to the racial confusion: In the house of mirrors that is the world of esthetic surgery, the perfect proboscis now turns out to be the "upturned'' one, the very Irish "pug nose'' that Roe and others sought to correct a century ago. Mr. Gilman quotes a 1989 New York magazine article: "By the mid-60's, an upturned nose had practically become a middle-class status symbol, and hundreds of teenage girls in New York (read: Jewish girls) seemed to be wearing the same design. The bone was narrowed, the tip pinched into a triangle, and there were two distinct bumps above the nostril.'' Jewish girls, convinced their noses are "too Jewish,'' that is too big, want to look like typical American. That is, Irish.

Mr. Gilman's previous books include Jewish Self-Hatred and The Jew's Body , but in this case he's an equal-opportunity debunker. Bravely navigating the ethnic maze with admirable aplomb, he considers nearly every hyphenated group's American dream of "becoming something else." He gets away with such brazenness, and also rescues his dense and rambling prose style, by constantly offering entertaining literary and pop culture references upon which we can all hang our hats.

The novels cited by Mr. Gilman seem to reinforce a pessimistic view of esthetic surgery. "Literature remains surprisingly 'moral' when it sees individuals believing they can cross boundaries from the unerotic to the erotic, from the unhappy to the happy," he reports. From Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil to Mary Higgins Clark's Let Me Call You Sweetheart , from Carl Hiaasen's Skin Tight to Philip Roth's American Pastoral , the world of esthetic surgery in fiction is a dark dystopia that leads at best to unhappiness, at worst to madness and death.

And yet for the professional descendants of John Orlando Roe, business is booming: In 1996, the total number of all esthetic surgical procedures in the United States exceeded 1.9 million, or about one procedure for every 150 people per year. The fantasy that a nose job or a tummy tuck can change your life is tenacious. The professor isn't opposed to such fantasies. They can (and do) make people happy, he points out. But only for a while. "The symbolic body, our fantasy of fitting into the world, of being unseen, unrecognized, unstereotyped, needs constant reinforcement,'' he warns.

It's as plain as the noses on your face.