- Max Abelson

Three Stars

75 Washington Place

(Between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park)

212-539-1776

Dress: Casual

Lighting: Soft

Noise Level: Low

Wine List: Unusual selections from small vineyards, reasonable prices

Credit Cards: All major

Price Range: Main courses, $28 to $32

Dinner: Monday through Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.

On a recent Sunday evening, my friends arrived at Blue Hill early and fell into conversation at the bar with a professor and a high-school teacher. The small dining room is warm and intimate, with a low ceiling and bare brick walls, and chocolate-brown banquettes with raised backs act as sound buffers. It’s normally rather sedate, but tonight some young women at a nearby table were becoming increasingly boisterous. The teacher finally lost patience. “Shhhh!” she hissed. The entire restaurant fell stone silent.

Blue Hill is just around the corner from New York University, so many of its customers—and it has a loyal following of regulars—must be well used to hushing or being hushed. The restaurant is in a former speakeasy in the basement of a townhouse near Washington Square. Tables are covered with white paper over linen, and the staff wears long white bistro aprons and blue shirts. The casual style doesn’t prepare you for the high caliber of the cooking here. Perhaps that’s why Blue Hill is underrated. Chef/owner Dan Barber and chef Juan Cuevas (who was formerly at Lespinasse and Alain Ducasse), are producing a sophisticated modern cuisine that’s on a par with some of the city’s best restaurants.

When Mr. Barber first opened Blue Hill five years ago, he created an ambitious seasonal menu with produce from greenmarkets and his family farm in Massachusetts. Last year, he opened a sister restaurant at Stone Barns on the Rockefeller estate up the Hudson, just 24 miles north of the city. The farm there now supplies both restaurants with virtually all of their produce, meat, eggs, poultry and even honey.

My friends and I sat down at a corner banquette near the bar and ordered a glass of this year’s hit wine, the Basque Txakolina, pale gold and slightly fizzy, served in a thin-rimmed tumbler as an aperitif. Blue Hill’s wine list is short but interesting, with many choices from lesser-known vineyards, and the prices are reasonable. The terrific sommelier guided us to a Kuhling-Gillot Scheurebe Kabinett from Rheinhessen, a fruity wine that perfectly complemented our food. The staff is well informed, too—although sometimes you might learn more than you wish. “Our veal tonight is baby veal, brought up by its mother, who has only been fed on grass …. ”

We began with a taste of soup delivered in shot glasses—the “last of the tomatoes,” the waitress said sadly. These late-harvest tomatoes had been roasted and smoked over wood chips before being puréed into a wonderful soup. The waitress set down a small wooden board that had two rows of thin, communion-like wafers slatted into it. “They are baked with ‘fifth-generation’ garlic.” Of course. (The garlic is named, in fact, for an Italian immigrant who brought over a highly prized sweet specimen; the family would only sell it chopped or peeled so that no one else could grow it. When the last farmer retired, he gave his bulbs to Mr. Barber.)

After the soup, I had a plate of exquisite tiny fall vegetables—variously raw, marinated or flash-cooked over high heat—mingled with toasted pistachios, fresh soybeans, apples and fennel in a mushroom gelée. It was permeated with the aroma of purple basil and was unbelievably good. So was a warm wild-mushroom and chicken-liver salad with baby greens and toasted pistachios in a herbaceous pine-nut vinaigrette.

Mr. Cuevas has worked in top restaurants in Spain, and he brings subtle Spanish touches to some of the dishes. Slices of foie gras (not raised on the farm) come on a green glass plate accompanied by puntarelle (wild chicory), fennel, tapioca and apple, with a Prosecco vinaigrette and toasted Marcona almonds. It’s light and refined, with a lemony sweetness—the last thing you’d expect with foie gras. Fluke arrived in a big white bowl with honmichi mushrooms, fennel, chopped herbs and fennel fronds floating in an intense, clear broth made from tomato, zucchini and cucumber water, drained in a cheesecloth. Three smoked shrimp were plopped on a bright green lawn of puréed herbs sprinkled with “panther” soybeans. Cod, an all-white dish, was served in a creamy almond shellfish broth, laced with strips of zucchini and Marcona almonds.

Mr. Barber and Mr. Cuevas like tart, citrusy tastes. The crabmeat salad, with mint and cilantro, micro greens, green-tomato marmalade and diced apple was pure heaven. The Berkshire pork was wonderful, but the bitterness of an arugula and mustard-herb pesto served with it didn’t set off the meat to the best advantage. I loved the tiny, tiny lamb chops, with tiny, tiny potatoes, cannellini beans and lettuce, along with a dollop of braised leg and shoulder. Cobia, a large white fish with meaty, firm-textured flesh, came with colorful twin sauces, a rich purple Concord grape cooked with roast lobster shells and port, and a yellow pepper sauce.

Blue Hill serves a great chocolate brioche bread pudding with roast peanuts and salted caramel in the middle. The apple cobbler is deconstructed: The apples come in a Mason jar, and the crumble is served on the side. Seckel pears poached with caramel were laced with a passion-fruit sauce that kicked the pears into action. A dark chocolate soufflé with ricotta ice cream was a little dry but had great flavors. The fromage blanc soufflé was flawless, with pink peppercorn ice cream. Tiny fresh pears at the peak of ripeness were served as petits fours alongside chocolate truffles.

As we were finishing our marvelous desserts, the women from the once-raucous table got up to leave. The schoolteacher was at the table next to us, and one of the culprits stopped in front of her and glared. “Next time you come here, take a Valium!”

Everyone laughed.

When I turned 50 last year, both Joan Rivers and Fran Lebowitz harangued me into making a date for my colon close-up. "Stop name-dropping and make the appointment!" suggested my youthful and less colon-conscious husband. A gastroenterologist friend offered to do the honors, but I declined, reasoning that if anybody was going to drive a truckload of camera equipment up my bum, it had better be a stranger. After all, I've led a fairly eventful life, and who knew what they might find-beer bottles, Barbie dolls, old copies of the National Enquirer , a vintage LeSportsac, a Victorian penny-farthing bicycle?

As I prepped for the procedure-this involves a 24-hour fast, eating only Jell-O and clear broth followed by a massive ingestion of diluted laxatives-I found myself empathizing with all those actress broads who go through similar rituals in order to prepare for red-carpet appearances. After four Dulcolax pills, 255 grams of diluted MiraLax and 24 hours without food, my stomach was as flat as Nicole's or even Demi's.

The colonoscopy procedure, though hardly glamorous, was painless and quite stylish: The Hermès-orange gown I was obliged to wear complemented my skin tone perfectly. (I'm what Carole Jackson, the author of Color Me Beautiful , would call "a low-contrast Autumn," and we Autumns look best in warm tones.) And can we talk about the buzz from the intravenous Valium? It's truly one of the squishiest, most comforting "Strawberry Fields" highs I've ever experienced.

Drugs aside, there are several critical pointers which I feel compelled to pass on to any colonoscopy contemplators:

1. Be a drama queen: I forced my husband to come with me and hold my hand. If you don't have a boyfriend, get your doorman to come. If the probing colon camera finds something nasty-as, thankfully, in my case, it did not-you will need moral support over and above that afforded by the aforementioned intravenous Valium.

2. Don't operate heavy machinery after the procedure. Especially if you weren't operating it before.

3. Don't make important decisions afterward, either. My doctor specifically cautioned me about this. He was right to be concerned: As I staggered out of the office, high as a kite, I found myself entertaining all kinds of dramatic life-changes, e.g., rewriting my will, getting a radical wedge haircut, joining a cult, gender reassignment, etc., etc.

4. Whatever you do, do not, as I did, allow yourself to be talked into an afternoon appointment. Having starved and purged and gibbered with anxiety for the entire previous day, you must insist on presenting yourself as early as possible on the following morn. I sat, dehydrated and famished, in front of the telly from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., finally getting my big close-up at 2:30.

5. Pray that there will not be a terrorist attack the day of your scheduled procedure, and spare a thought for the many folks who prepped and laxative'd on 9/10/01.

6. If everything is O.K.-i.e., you have no polyps which have gone nasty and cancerous-then celebrate! Spread the word! The easiest way to do this is to make your bowel photos in to a cheery Yuletide-or Hanukkah-greeting card.

For a first-class colonoscopy (and a nice set of snaps), call the personable, handsome, intriguingly named Ian J. Lustbader, M.D., at 212-685-5252.

Re Ms. Rivers: Starting today, Oct. 29, the dynamic colonoscopy advocate and mother of all stand-up is back in Manhattan with a fresh bag of rants at Fez, 380 Lafayette Street, most Wednesdays through the New Year. Call 212-533-2680 for tickets.

Bowels away!

I went to see Thirteen the other day, and it's tough stuff. Like most people, I was shaken up by that scene where the girls punch each other in the face for laughs, and by the sequence where Tracy slices up her arm with a razor blade. The movie has, in fact, set off an alarm. In a string of recent articles, teenage girls have been criticized for everything from their social lives to their trashy taste in clothes.

You'd think, from all the attention the topic has received, that girls have never misbehaved before. Haven't they? Twenty-five years ago, I did similar things while growing up in Manhattan. Lately, I've been catapulted back in time, to the 1970's, because reporters have been interviewing me about Alice Duncan, the 11-year-old protagonist of my novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller . Alice is cared for, and eventually corrupted, by a promiscuous teenage cokehead. Readers are under the impression that the novel is autobiographical. But the shy, timid Alice is far more polite than I. My friends and I were bold and reckless at age 11. By the time we'd reached the ripe old age of 13, we were wild, nihilistic little hellions.

Substance abuse, shoplifting, underage sex: standard operating procedure in the 70's. Even the clothing was the same. Like Evie, we favored tube tops-those tiny snippets of strapless elasticized fabric that hug your bosom. My mom wouldn't have liked that outfit, so I carried a change of clothes in my school bag, and a stolen pair of high heels. Eyes ringed with black eyeliner, lips smeared with Vaseline, I teetered down Fifth Avenue in four-inch platforms. Dressing like a hooker got me a lot of male attention. I told guys I met that I was 16, and they believed me (or pretended to). Then as now, a girl's pubescent body was a source of hidden, forbidden, half-acknowledged power. In school, I was a social reject-taller than most of the kids, freakishly voluptuous. I was happier while parading around in my hooker gear. My clothes and makeup had a transformative effect, changing me into the person that, like it or not, I was becoming-no longer a mere child, but a young woman. The mask and costume reassured me. I wanted desperately to be in control of my body, my feelings and my image.

What's the cause of girls growing up too fast? The real culprit, of course, is not consumerism or MTV, but puberty. Girls today develop secondary sex characteristics earlier than they did a century ago. I'd had breasts since I was 9, and it had taken me a few years to decide that they were attractive assets, like glittering diamond earrings, rather than a pair of unwelcome moles. When men start staring at your tits, you may think you have only two choices: You can cower, or you can vamp. Girls test the waters, weigh their options. In the 1970's, the choice-as reinforced by the sultry, libidinous culture all around us-was obvious.

When I was 13, we, too, wore our low-rider jeans so tight we had to lie down on our backs and suck in our stomachs to zip them closed. It was with a sense of pride and duty that we wore those painfully small clothes. "Beauty hurts," my best friend's mom used to sigh whenever I complained that my trendy new boots gave me blisters.

Being permissive was the height of chic parenting. She was a stunning woman with bleached-blond hair and a walk-in wardrobe. Sitting in her elegant Park Avenue home, we'd have girl-to-girl chats. She told us what to do if a guy asked us to sleep with him. We should respond with enthusiasm, while being sure to insist upon birth control. We were 12 years old. It never occurred to any of us that, if pressed for sex, we could say no. Sex was in the very air we breathed, floating in the ether of the Zeitgeist . It was hopelessly unhip to regard intimate encounters as unwelcome or-perish the thought-potentially harmful. Thus, that same year (seventh grade), another friend's dad photographed his daughter and me lying on his rumpled bed, wearing only our underwear, handcuffed together at the ankle.

Though Britney Spears hadn't been born, it was much easier to get away with dressing like a tramp in the 70's than it is now. Our parents let us wander around without monitoring our every move, or packing us off to oboe lessons or soccer practice. The entire nation was becalmed, bewitched. In our quiet, affluent neighborhood, a drug dealer roamed the streets, dressed in suede-a Pied Piper offering free samples with a friendly smile and heavy eyelids. Some local parents were shooting up; some were popping Valium. The atmosphere was decadent. Yet the city felt safe to me, then, like a giant playground.

Many American parents became distressed by the thought of good girls going bad. Their panic was symbolized, in 1973, by another film, The Exorcist . Linda Blair played Regan, the daughter who came, literally, from hell. She grunted obscene propositions to her mother, masturbated with a crucifix and urinated on the expensive carpeting. With her baby face and foul mouth, Regan was the archetypal teenage girl. Unbalanced by raging hormones, seized with longing and revulsion for everything around her, she was a pint-sized Jack Nicholson in drag, snarling in the face of niceness. Following on the heels of "flower power" and free love, The Exorcist ushered in the jaded, spitting mood of punk. It tapped into prevailing cultural anxieties. What if America's children slip beyond control, disappearing into a dark, tarnished underworld? What if no parent can preserve a child's innocence? What if, one morning, your daughter metamorphosed into someone unrecognizable?

It's a fair question. About 15 percent of Caucasian girls and almost half of African-American girls are now beginning to develop sexually at the age of 8. Parents would like to help kids navigate adolescence, but the change is unavoidable. While I grew up fast, external cues were operating. I'd watched Brooke Shields, age 15, panty-free in her Calvins. In 1978, in Pretty Baby , she'd been a 12-year-old prostitute who married a disturbingly attractive pedophile played by Keith Carradine. Bad was good, it seemed to me. The counterculture had become a seductive presence that set mainstream morality spinning on its head. Girls barely out of grade school stalked rock stars. Iggy Pop, in a published interview, spoke wistfully of the 13-year-old who became his girlfriend with her parents' blessing. Girls routinely slept with three of the most popular teachers at my high school.

What a 13-year-old girl does battle with is desire-her own, and that of the individuals around her. She's at war with her physicality, her extreme makeover, by nature and society's design, into an erotic being. Young teenagers pose on billboards in Times Square, wearing very little besides their mascara, their come-hither expressions and their handbags. It's a confusing world, full of mixed signals, and I think girls of all ages understand it.

Lisa Dierbeck's first novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller , was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

My first travel downer, a near-miss with a streetcar, occurred in an automobile in Southern California, a mode of transportation and a place never particularly congenial to my husband and myself. (I think it was the prospect of not having to own or drive a car that originally lured me to New York.) We were heading south from L.A., but a half hour of California-style speed-cruising on the San Diego Freeway (10 lanes, everyone going 95 miles per hour) had us reaching for our Valium. Trying to get to the Pacific Coast Highway from Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach, I found I'd missed the turn and was making a left over trolley tracks (I'd dimly noted the peculiarity of a streetcar running alongside us) when, in a whir of blaring horn and motion, the tram bore down on us. We escaped by a hairsbreadth, and as we crept forward, shaking, a motorcycle cop straight out of Psycho (the impenetrable dark glasses) pulled us over and demanded, "Are you from out of town?"

"New York," I murmured–hoping to cash in on the good will our blighted city was momentarily enjoying.

"We have a special patrol just for this route." Pause. "We pick up body parts here all day long."

With that grisly image seared into our brains, he let us go, no doubt figuring that what we'd been through was punishment enough.

A few weeks later, I set out with my pal Anna for a spa weekend in Miami. At LaGuardia, after a thorough inspection, we boarded a jammed-to-the-gills American Airlines flight, with me (having failed to get my seat assignment ahead of time) sitting in the middle of a row. Beverages and a tiny packet of trail mix was our breakfast.

Two and a half hours later, we were making our landing when the plane swerved upward and began circling around, to no apparent destination and with not a word of explanation. Anna and I looked at each other; the atmosphere was tense and quiet. Had the wheels failed to descend? Or were we going to Guantánamo to rescue the prisoners?

It was Valium time again. I furtively swallowed half a pill and prayed it would take effect quickly.

As Anna chatted bravely, I gripped the arm rests (or my tiny share of them) and prayed for everyone I could think of, perhaps a way of saying goodbye: for my husband and my friends on the ground, for Anna and her husband. I apologized to my brother for not having all my financial records in one place.

I prayed not to be afraid of death, and I prayed that if this were checkout time, the exit would be instantaneous. The fear and the praying go together. It's a way of seeking hope for something, for whatever Fate will grant–a diminishment of terror, a quick resolution, life everlasting, or a cocktail party with the risen souls of family members.

Eventually we landed. As we filed out, there were no stewards or pilots standing at the exit to wish us godspeed, so I stuck my head in the cockpit and asked the pilot what had happened. He cheerfully explained that as we were landing another plane was slow in taking off, so we had to abort.

"I was going to tell you, but the intercom wasn't working," he added.

Still shaking, Anna and I retrieved our luggage, whereupon I discovered that my retractable handle had been completely mangled. I stood in line only to be told that the airline is "not responsible for external protrusions." I had one other errand: to get a better seat assignment on the return flight. At the counter I was informed that there were no more seat assignments being made, that each flight had a block of 40 seats still unassigned that would be released only on the day of the flight.

After a not-so-relaxing weekend, I arrived at the airport a full two hours ahead of flight time, but was told that those 40 seats had all already been taken. How can this be? Sorry, came the answer, the flight's full–overbooked, in fact. I screamed, and eventually was rewarded with the last seat: in the middle of a row by the toilet.

At the gate, I discovered where the seats had gone: to those who'd been bounced off the preceding flight to LaGuardia.

The real trial of flying post-9/11 is not getting through security, or even getting over a fear of terrorist hijackers–it's getting the airlines to honor a paid-in-full ticket purchased months in advance. Their old tricks have become common practice–which, if not illegal, are highly unethical. Airlines overbook flights and substitute smaller planes for unfilled 747's, and then, just before boarding, request volunteers to take a later flight in return for money or flight miles. A regular auction ensues: $200 anyone? No, then $300? $1,000? Those who accept are guaranteed a seat on the next flight: my seat! And so on.

I guess I was lucky: A friend going to Europe had his half-full flight canceled and was flown out the next day on another airline!

Such outrages are not on the same order as the fear of imminent demise, but they are almost as wearing on the nerves. For a week afterward, I had what I can only describe as a case of rage, intense and free-floating, that seemed to come out of nowhere, like the flu. It finally passed–and with it any desire to leave home for any reason at all.

So how to travel without becoming hooked on tranquilizers? As the Maoists used to "re-educate" intellectuals by sending them to the farms, perhaps I could be reprogrammed to a locomotive languor. If every New Yorker would relinquish an airplane ticket for a seat on the train, Amtrak might become solvent again.

July and August is a corner of paradise. It's my aural environment, my sensurround: I listen day and night to its restless,

constantly changing song, from even-tempered purr to the angry thrashing of a

storm. And when I say day and night, I mean night. Hammacher Schlemmer sells

gadgets that lull people to sleep with the ocean's roar, while here I am, 200

feet away from the real thing, wide awake.

It seems I'm not the

only one with insomnia this summer. A friend in East Hampton tells me that she and her gal pals have been

talking of nothing else, pooling their resources and drug expertise as they

battle the heebie-jeebies of what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "dark

night of the soul."

The first line of defense is the non-medical solutions:

reading, deep breathing, hot milk, reruns of Law & Order . Then the pharmacopoeia: Ambien, Valium, Excedrin

P.M., Tylenol P.M., Benadryl, Xanax, Halcion, Klonopin. It's not just the meds,

but calibrating how and when you take them: a relaxant at 9 p.m. or, at 11 p.m.,

a white (10 mg) Ambien or two Excedrins; at 2

a.m., a pink (5 mg) Ambien; at 4 a.m.,

half a pink Ambien.

The trouble is that the anxiety about sleeping becomes the

anxiety that prevents sleep. You awaken at 3 or 4

a.m. and try to stay in the slumberous state. You tell yourself,

"O.K., stay relaxed-who cares if you don't go back to sleep? You'll sleep

tomorrow night." Only you won't, and you don't, fool anybody, least of all your

body's serotonin-production system. Women, according to my Internet research

and an informal sampling of friends, are more prone to insomnia than men. Why? Hormones, anxiety over new and old desires and expectations, a

greater incidence of depression and a greater sensitivity than men, in good and

bad ways. After all, it was the Princess

and the Pea, not the Prince.

The one consolation is that we're in pretty good company,

and comfort-however modest-can be gleaned from passages in literary works that

make you weep with sympathy and recognition. An awful lot of great male writers

have had trouble sleeping, perhaps because, as artists, they had more

female-like sensibilities. Fitzgerald, in an alcoholic decline after his

dazzling early years, wrote in "Sleeping and Waking" (one of the essays

collected in The Crack-Up ) of his

first bout of insomnia. After a battle royal with a mosquito, he suffered

restless nights and employed various remedies: Luminol, fantasizing (about

filling in for the injured quarterback and winning Princeton

the game; about similar heroic feats performed on the battlefield; about Minnesota).

But when these wore thin, what he encountered was a blurry sense of self in the

dead of night: "Horror and waste-waste and horror-what I might have been and

done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable."

And as memories of all the cruelties and missteps and humiliations surge

forward, he wonders if this is what after-death might be, a vision of Hell as

insomnia everlasting.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway-neither one of whom seemed to be an

active Christian-nevertheless used a religious vocabulary without

self-consciousness when writing about insomnia, indicating that they lived in a

world of much stronger beliefs than ours. When they talked about the soul, it

was their own. In Hemingway's short story on insomnia, "Now I Lay Me" (cited by

Fitzgerald as a classic on the subject), the narrator-a recently wounded

officer-is lying on a bunk somewhere in Italy and listening to the silkworms

feeding, all night, on mulberry leaves. "I myself did not want to sleep," he

says, "because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I

ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my

soul would go out of my body." He goes on to enumerate his mental

preoccupations, especially fishing-a precise location, bends in the river,

number of worms. And then, when the fishing fantasy runs dry, he prays for

everyone he knows.

Cyril Connolly, in The

Unquiet Grave , writes, "I wake up in anxiety; like a fog it overlays all my

action, and my days are muffled with anguish." Later: "Sometimes at night I get

a feeling of claustrophobia; of being smothered by my own personality, of

choking through being in the world …. " In his "pincer

movement" against "Angst, Melancholia and Memory's ever-festering wound," he

tries various sleeping pills at night and Benzedrine and vitamin B by day. But

he finds that Benzedrine gives him "a kind of gluttonous mental anger through

which the sadness persists-O how sad-but very much farther off." And when he

takes vitamin B, Metatone and other tonics, he finds he changes personality

into someone coarser and more robust, "a toned-up film version, an escape from

the serious ego, and soon I return to my true diffident and dyspeptic self.

Confidence does not become me."

Fitzgerald describes the bliss of finally dropping off as a

deep, warm lullaby, a flight into dreams of golden girls: "my spirit soars in

the moment of its oblivion …. " But, alas, my own

experience is not like that-no triumph, no awareness of relief. More like

Hemingway's: "And I am sure many times too that I slept without knowing it-but

I never slept knowing it."

It may be that the writer's life is peculiarly prone to

uneasy-lying heads. V.S. Pritchett talks about the "depression and sense of

nothingness that comes when a piece of work is done. The satisfaction is in the

act itself; when it is over there is relief, but the satisfaction is gone.

After fifty years I still find this to be so and that

with every new piece of writing I have to make that terrifying break with my

real life and learn to write again, from the beginning."

We are all Lady Macbeths: Doubts trouble our sleep, and

unlike her lord and husband, we can't translate "the very firstlings of [the]

heart" into action. Macbeth doesn't understand why the doctor can't cure his

sleepwalking wife: "Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain / And

with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous

stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?"

For those of us who

dream of the ultimate sleeping pill, the doctor's reply is not reassuring:

"Therein the patient / Must minister to himself."

All of us have times when we feel the need of sage advice, of that steadying hand gently guiding us toward the light at the end of the tunnel. My own dark several years of the soul spanned my early 20's, when I'd lived long enough to make all the wrong major decisions but not quite long enough to imagine alternatives, or escape routes. There was no one I could turn to, for-thanks to another giant mistake-I was living in Cambridge, Mass., a community which, with rare exceptions, seemed notably lacking in that sexy, inspirational joie de vivre you want in a personal consiglière, therapist or guru.

So I did what any rational person would: I consulted the I Ching. Forget all that time-consuming hoodoo with the yarrow stalks! My case was an emergency! I tossed the coins so obsessively that I could usually buy lunch with divinatory pennies retrieved from the crevices of my couch. And what did I get, exactly? Metaphors, poetry, a soothing dose of Confucian philosophy. How unsatisfactory: The last thing in the world I needed to hear was that perseverance furthers!

But that was another era: Before Elizabeth Wurtzel. Alas, I was born too early to avail myself (either in hard copy or in e-book form) of the breezy counsel Ms. Wurtzel dispenses in Radical Sanity. This slim volume of "commonsense advice for uncommon women" is divided into brief sections, each titled with a crisp directive: "Have Pets" and "Think Productively." Topics range from the practical ("Travel Light") to the metaphysical ("When All Else Fails, Talk to God"), from the sensible ("Enjoy Your Single Years") to the suspect ("The Only Way to Get One Person Off Your Mind Is To Get Another One On Your Body"). And each chapter is headed with an inspirational quote culled from a list of sources sufficiently ecumenical to embrace Ecclesiastes and Alanis Morissette.

As most established religions, televangelists and self-help swamis know, telling people how to live is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel: Offer enough advice, and sooner or later you're bound to come up with something useful. A few of Ms. Wurtzel's suggestions and warnings will brighten her readers' moods-and keep them out of trouble. I second her opinion about braving the open seas with strangers: "Don't get on a sailboat with people you don't know all that well, lest you find yourself stuck in someone else's nautical fantasy." And some of her instructions for attitude adjustment will hearten the anxious and lovelorn: "Every time you find yourself wondering how he feels about you, if he likes you, if he loves you, if he wants you desperately, try instead to start asking yourself how you feel about him."

But a good deal of what she says seems, well, not completely thought through. The quasi-Buddhist ruminations in the "Do Nothing" chapter ("Doing nothing is the opposite of, say, shagging some guy so that you can stop thinking about some other guy") will hardly serve as a substitute for that private audience with the Dalai Lama. As a small, symbolic offensive in the gender war, refusing to clear the table unless the male guests help may sound like a good idea. ("Do you want to know how you can change the world, one dinner table at a time? … Stay in your chair, savor a few more sips of your Merlot … and simply refuse to participate in a process that maintains the status quo of women serving men.") But the probable result of the dinner-party "sit-in" is that your hostess will wind up bussing all the dishes after the guests have gone home.

In any case, this surge of feminist feistiness seems faintly disingenuous when so much of Radical Sanity seems aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of snagging male approval. I want to believe that Ms. Wurtzel is correct in claiming that guys prefer women who tuck into hefty slices of banana cream pie. ("Men, by the way, find this trait very attractive, in contrast to vomitatious eating disorders, which no one finds appealing.") But I'm pretty sure she's wrong in mapping the way to a man's heart via a detour through the Balkans: "If, at a dinner party, you can very quietly explain to some vulgar, outspoken man exactly why he has not a clue about what is going on in the Balkan states … all the men at the table will be completely besotted with you." And it's simply depressing to be urged to get a pet because "men in particular, but people in general, think a woman who can handle a dog is pretty damn cool."

You start to sense where all this is heading, despite the wacky mini-disquisition on the history of feminism: "Here is how feminism got its start: There were many bright and bored women living in suburbs, playing mah jongg to pass the time … many of them went crazy and got addicted to Valium and Librium, and some of them joined up with the nascent women's movement …. Feminism saved these women's lives." Follow Ms. Wurtzel's essentially conservative program and-after a few years of enjoying the single life and outgrowing "your little-girl days of being a whiny, needy pain in the ass"-you'll pretty quickly find yourself back at the mah-jongg table. "There are exceptions to this rule, but I have never met any of them. Most of us need the conventions of coupledom, family, and stability to be happy." But don't despair: "Coupledom" need not confine us to the prison of suburbia. A different sort of middle-class life can be ours if we are brave enough to demand it: "We can stay in the city, and raise kids who are urban and urbane, who think chewing gum is bovine and disgusting, who enjoy Saturday afternoons at Cubism exhibits and evenings at art-house cinemas."

In one of the book's more chilling moments, Ms. Wurtzel reminds her hapless readers: "If you are doing something worthy with your life, like helping to end hunger in the Sudan or trying to resettle ethnic Albanians, you are probably not reading this book."

This sounds like the voice of her unruly id, drowning out all that big-sisterly advice, telling us what she really and truly thinks of the "uncommon women" desperate enough to buy what she's purveying. In fact, your heart goes out to young women so in need of assurance and direction that they're willing to seek spiritual guidance from the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch-from a writer who pays lip service to feminist ideals while promoting the sorts of "conventions" designed to produce the perfect woman, the new-model Stepford wife, for the Dubya years.

Francine Prose is the author of Blue Angel (HarperCollins).