While Ms. Brown's much-anticipated entry into the news aggregation business continues to be fashionably late, the site does have a new landing page. And that landing page has a logo!

As one forward-looking pundit wrote, probably around the time Ms. Brown announced the project:

Certainly, 9/11 rattled Stephen Ellis, a painter best known for sleek, process-oriented abstractions, stunningly contrived arrangements of stripes and grids. Mr. Ellis reacted by superimposing on these familiar arrays of architectural scaffolding handwritten fragments of poems by Yeats, Philip Levine, Randall Jarrell and others. The unmistakable suggestion was that paint alone was incapable of addressing history. Mr. Ellis’ faith in the visual had been shaken to the point of despondency. His aesthetic and moral confusion was genuine, yet it couldn’t save the paintings from pretentious contradictions.

Mr. Ellis’ new paintings, on display at Von Lintel Gallery, are confused as well, but their confusion has less to do with addressing history than with trying to regain equilibrium. Words are nowhere in evidence. Instead, expansive fields of sunny tones predominate, at times applied with broad slurs of washy paint. Immaculately taped grids establish a foundation but do not dictate the ultimate structure of the paintings. Mr. Ellis’ chilly embrace of illusionism—he manipulates oils to achieve cinematic effects—is offset by a newfound sense of composition. Space has become less codified and is, at times, rambunctiously open. Mr. Ellis is traveling through unknown terrain—he’s testing his own limits. In that way, the pictures are brave.

But they’re also wobbly. Mr. Ellis is far too controlling a painter to out-and-out play. The renewed awareness of pictorial investigation is stymied by a niggling uncertainty. Each of the canvases is transitional in nature. They’re at odds with themselves, but the conflicting impulses dissipate rather than elicit tension. The paintings hanker for cohesion; they never achieve it. A smallish canvas in the back gallery, a taut arrangement of fiery trails of paint, hints that color may be the key to focusing Mr. Ellis’ energies. I’ll await Mr. Ellis’ next show with keen interest, as should anyone with an abiding regard for painting and a concern for history’s impact on it.

Stephen Ellis is at Von Lintel Gallery, 555 West 25th Street, until April 29.

Collected Unconscious

Who’s responsible for inventorying the output of the American painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)? Talk about job security: The backlog of pictures must be endless. Hofmann was unapologetically prolific. Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art could probably mount shows dedicated to this or that aspect of his art from now to kingdom come and not repeat itself. Hofmann’s aesthetic, after all, devoured everything in its path.

“The unabashed unconscious” (the title of the current show) is as good a peg as any: The exhibition has less to do with Freudian theory or creaky dreams than with the irrepressible generosity of a hugely fallible painter. Hofmann didn’t have the constitution or the inclination to muck about in the deepest recesses of t­­he psyche. Life was too short—and too good!—for wasting time on such things. Cheerful recklessness, he reckoned, is preferable to brooding introspection. That’s a rule that may not be universally applicable. Hofmann’s gift is that in the short time we stand in front of the canvases, he makes the truth of that precept shine for all of us.

Hans Hofmann: The Unabashed Unconscious is at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, until April 29.

King of Comedy

William King welcomes you to Alexandre Gallery, which is exhibiting his recent terracotta sculptures, with a Bronx cheer. It’s an inauspicious greeting, but you won’t mind. Étude (2003) is a blackened, nubbly portrait bust that is equal parts Easter Island totem, Dubuffet grotesque and Zippy the Pinhead. The figure exudes an Eastern calm in its acceptance of things as they are—the heavy eyelids betoken satori like few things I’ve seen. The raspberry offered by the gargoyle-like personage is aimed less at the viewer than at the cosmos at large. We should all meet fate with such impish equanimity.

The modest sampling of Mr. King’s sculptures seen in the foyer and front gallery at Alexandre is somewhat diminished by its second-banana status. The main event is an array of works-on-paper by Loren MacIver, pieces whose charm struggles to match Mr. King’s penetrating comedy of manners. And penetrate he surely does. Even when throwing away studies of mood and type, as in a series of small wall reliefs, Mr. King probes the intricacies of the human character with wit, ease and a gentle impropriety. Alexandre promises an overview of his early sculptures this December. In the meantime, Mr. King’s homages to dental hygiene, getting old and “my bitch” will do just fine.

William King: New Terracottas is at Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until May 6.

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced today that Press Secretary Edward Skyler will also serve as the Administration's Communications Director....

"'I am pleased to appoint Ed Skyler as my Communications Director,' Mayor Bloomberg said. '...I know that this dedicated public servant will continue to make every effort to make sure the City is well represented during my Administration.'

"...As Communications Director, Skyler will continue to run the Mayor's daily communications operations and ensure an open dialogue between the public information offices at City agencies and the news media."

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

In the eight-year period since 1993, Philip Roth has demonstrated, by the publication of Operation Shylock , Sabbath's Theater , American Pastoral and The Human Stain , that he is quite simply the greatest novelist writing in the English language. Any work by him deserves our undivided attention. So it is with The Dying Animal , the novella that continues the puzzling Kepesh series.

Mr. Roth's readers will remember that David Kepesh made his first appearance in another novella, The Breast (1972), a brilliantly funny and elegant literary spoof attached by the author's exuberant fancy to Kafka's The Metamorphosis , Gogol's "The Nose" and Swift's Gulliver's Travels –and perhaps, on the sly, to Swift's "A Tale of a Tub," written when Swift had read every book and remembered everything he had read. At the age of 38, the narrator, a professor of literature who has had for some three years a rather airy relationship with a school teacher called Claire–they do not share an apartment, and in the last two years of their affair have not made love more often than two or three times a month–turns into a breast! An orgiastic, 155-pound breast reposing in the Lenox Hill Hospital for at least 15 months, its sexual energy concentrated in the nipple that Kepesh wants to insert, as his new phallus, into any available opening of the human body.

Astonishingly, Kepesh returned five years later in The Professor of Desire (1977), a prequel to The Breast , having been retrofitted into a personage in whom Alex Portnoy might recognize himself (except that Kepesh grew up in the Catskills, where his parents kept a borscht-belt hotel). With him returned the visitors to Kepesh-the-Breast: chief among them Claire, the voluptuous WASP with breasts "large and soft and vulnerable, each as heavy as an udder upon my face, as warm and heavy in my hand as some fat little animal fast asleep," and Kepesh's father. By the time Kepesh qualifies as the "professor of desire" (he is preparing a comparative literature course on "disquieting contemporary novels dealing with prurient and iniquitous sexuality"), Mr. Roth's sexual obsessions have all, like circus animals, been on show: subjugation of the woman through fellatio, the concomitant need to have her revel in swallowing sperm, voyeuristic practices mixed with more than a dash of sadism (getting a second woman to join in the sexual act, daydreams of pimping for the woman one lives with), and impotence as punishment for amatory misadventures. But, as this exquisitely constructed Bildungsroman , which is also a meditation on Kafka and Chekhov, nears its end, it offers moments of wistful and remarkable–by Rothian standards–tenderness. Kepesh yearns for sex that does not ask for "more." He broods about the certain loss of his desire for Claire and, with it, the peace she has almost brought him; he has a vivid premonition of the death of his father (which becomes conflated with the extinction of European Jewry). Recorded 14 years later, in Patrimony , the death of Mr. Roth's own father looms threatening and foreseen.

Now David Kepesh is back. When this new chapter of his story opens, in 1992, he is 62; for 15 years he has been a cultural critic on NPR and Channel 13, and he teaches Practical Criticism (one senior seminar per year) at an unidentified university in or near New York. But one is forced to wonder whether he is really Kepesh redux. For one thing, his curriculum vitae does not jibe with that of the professor of desire. The Kepesh of The Dying Animal has a son who is 42 either in 1992 or sometime toward the story's end in 2000, neither hypothesis being arithmetically possible for the Kepesh we knew. This prudish and conflicted offspring, whom Kepesh enjoins to "Confront at long last your father's prick," is the product, we are told, of Kepesh's 1956 marriage, a catastrophe which the reader is constrained to applaud because it provides the opening for a "sidelight"–a stupendous harangue on sex in the 1960's. However, the Kepesh of The Professor of Desire could not have contracted that union because, at the time, he was in London on a Fulbright doing sex à trois with two Swedish girls.

To return to the story, there is a Cuban-American young woman, Consuela, a year or two older than other members of his seminar, distinguished by her beauty, old-fashioned politeness and clothes (of the Lord & Taylor sort is what I would call them) attending Kepesh's seminar. He waits to make his move until after the course is over and the grades are in–this is his standard procedure–and gets her into his bed. Her performance is mediocre when it comes to the more advanced sexual procedures Kepesh requires, but her breasts and her self-assured narcissism have him hooked. So does tormenting jealousy, of past boyfriends principally. After a year and a half, the affair comes to an end stupidly: Kepesh enrages Consuela by not showing up at her graduation party. But there is more to it: Both Kepesh and his friend O'Hearn (married and Catholic and fond, just as Kepesh, of young girls) believe in the necessary detachment of desire from love. "He who forms a tie is lost, attachment is my enemy," Kepesh says to himself, plays the piano, thinks of Consuela and masturbates until he is no longer sick with desire . He remembers where he got those words, the source also of the title of this novella. It is the apostrophe to "sages standing in God's holy fire" in Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," and he quotes from it: "Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; …"

One might suppose that was all there was to it–variations by Mr. Roth on Yeats' dichotomies of love and sex, age and desire, nature and artifice, all summed up in the poet's cry in another poem: "What shall I do with this absurdity– / O heart, O troubled heart–this caricature, / Decrepit age that has been tied to me as to a dog's tail?" But there is more. On the New Year's Eve that ushers in the year 2000, Consuela shows up at Kepesh's to tell him that she has breast cancer. He feels the hard lumps; because she wants him to have a record of her body as he knew it, he takes photographs of her in the nude; she tears off the fez she constantly wears now so that he can see, touch and kiss the baby fuzz that has replaced the hair destroyed by chemotherapy. "Consuela now knows the wound of age," Kepesh observes. "Her sense of time is now the same as mine, speeded up and more forlorn even than mine." It isn't clear to him that he could sustain an erection if she asked him to sleep with her. That is the response of the living. Kepesh, however, has seen how the dying respond. His friend O'Hearn is left partially paralyzed by a stroke and without the power of speech; Kepesh sees him on his death bed, desperately groping for the wife he has not touched in years. Attachment is the enemy, but Kepesh, desperate for Consuela–"Her tits? Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind?"–realizes another truth: "[N]ow that I'm nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free."

The inconsistencies between the Kepesh stories are, to my mind, like gashes made by the swipe of a lion's paw: They are marks of a master's impatience with story-telling conventions. The same lion's paw violently bent the form of the novel in The Human Stain .

Mr. Roth wrote more lyrically, and some will say with greater sympathy, about the struggle of the libido against age, illness and despair in Sabbath's Theater and, indeed, in The Human Stain . There is no room for gallantry or pity in the claustrophobic novella under review. Kepesh himself has become coarse. Gone are the playful self-questioning and the irony, and with them the pyrotechnics of literary allusion, except, perhaps, for the curious family resemblance (bordering on the pastiche) of the Kepesh of The Dying Animal to certain of Saul Bellow's creations: not Augie March, Henderson, Herzog and Sammler, the subjects of Mr. Roth's brilliant and generous article on Mr. Bellow's work in last October's New Yorker , but the crabbed, hectoring narrators of The Actual and Ravelstein .

The phallus is the 70-year-old Kepesh's battering ram, an engine with which to break down the limits of the human condition. That, I think, is the meaning of his defiant Liebestodt , the advice he gives his son: "[O]nly when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself. It's not the sex that's the corruption–it's the rest. Sex isn't just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death."

Louis Begley's most recent novel is Schmidt Delivered (Knopf).

Ms. Binoche, who surely enchanted us all in The English Patient , is making an extraordinary Broadway debut in David Leveaux's fine production for the Roundabout. She uncannily possesses the same magnetic qualities onstage that she does on film. As Emma, the solidly middle-class English woman who betrays her husband, Robert, by having a seven-year affair with his best friend, she's the beguiling gravitational center of every scene in which she appears.

Ms. Binoche is lovely, of course. But her femininity possesses depth and unpredictable qualities. You cannot be certain what she will do next–an ideal for any actor, but perfect for Mr. Pinter's mercurial heroine, who must change emotionally with every scene. Ms. Binoche plays every note with innate ease–from romantic desolation to fragile, giddy happiness to the unspoken little murders of marital lies. But if we remind ourselves that English is her second language, her achievement is the more stunning.

In a sense, she's speaking two foreign languages–English and Harold Pinter. This has never been a simple business for any actor, except, of course, the English–the traditionally understated, dryly ambiguous, "Pinteresque" English. Ms. Binoche has, firstly, mastered the language by refusing to be "Pinteresque"! She isn't tempted into the traditional traps of playing Pinter–the weighty pauses, the mysterious silences and blind alleys, the dramatic nervous tics of loudly stating the unsaid .

Harold Pinter's Betrayal famously begins at the end and stops seven years earlier at the beginning. The play came at the peak of Mr. Pinter's achievements in the 1970's, which included Old Times and No Man's Land . Some have found Betrayal a mannerist example of the bourgeois evasion masquerading as mystery, a shallow drama about affluent Londoners. (Robert's a wealthy publisher who doesn't like books; Jerry's a literary agent). The details are nice and middlebrow chic–Venice, Torcello, the Lake District, Yeats, Italian restaurants. But the play itself–the lying center of it–is much more than a gimmicky confection.

It's reveling in a game of double ambiguity. On the one hand, the reticent, ambiguous Englishness of the piece is a given. On the other, it's doubly ambiguous because everyone is lying. Who might be telling the truth in any given scene is part of Mr. Pinter's serious game, and playing it backward adds to the intrigue. The perspective is flipped out, a bit arch and very unsentimental. Mr. Pinter is less interested in the exciting, near-invulnerable highs of the illicit affair. He's after the breakdown of love, its inevitable fading. He is saying to us from the desolated outset, when the two ex-lovers meet again in a pub: It ain't going to work out.

Then again, four or five betrayals are better than one. The husband's had affairs for years; Emma has betrayed him; and her ex-lover has betrayed her husband as well as his own wife, who might be having a little fling herself. (Who would blame her?) Mr. Pinter's universe is calculated and unapologetically amoral. It's scarily easy to betray. Betrayal is normal.

"You know what I found out last night," Emma says indignantly about her husband, Robert, in that opening scene. "He's betrayed me for years."

"No," says her ex-lover, Jerry. "Good lord."

Evasions are normal, too. But the comic implications of the play are unusual. Betrayal, after all, is no laughing matter. But the production gets the deadpan delivery right. Director Leveaux–who did such sparkling work with the recent revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing –is a first-rate interpreter of Pinter's work. (He also directed the 1993 Moonlight and No Man's Land .) In Betrayal , he combines a spare, elegant expressionism with its apparent opposite–the concrete, the real. The love affair between Emma and Jerry, now lost in shadowy time, was real once. But the director understands that comedy is the unlikely source of even Mr. Pinter's most menacing dramas. His theater roots were vaudevillian. (He used to write comedy sketches.) Liev Schreiber's Jerry and John Slattery's Robert are therefore like a comedy team in dangerous denial.

"Read any good books lately?"

"I've been reading Yeats."

"Ah, Yeats. Yes."

Robert, the empty, dangerous man, has known for years that Jerry's having an affair with his wife. Yet they remain apparent friends–keeping up appearances, playing the English game. ("Ah, Yeats. Yes.") Language disguises the emotion. Words in their dry reticence might suggest a struggle for power, like the manly game of squash . Besides, they like each other. "I've always liked Jerry," Robert tells his wife. "To be honest, I've always liked him rather more than I've liked you. I should have had an affair with him myself."

Would that Liev Schreiber as Emma's married lover truly understood that the secret of playing Mr. Pinter resides in utterly relaxed naturalness. Accomplished actor though Mr. Schreiber is, he tends to play the subtext too much. He acts the ambiguous language of silence a little too loudly. I didn't sense demons in him, nor the charmer in romantic turmoil. John Slattery's Jerry, on the other hand, could be more coiled, more suggestively reptilian perhaps. He rushes his drunk scene, suggesting hollow desperation powerfully, less so the killer within the killer.

This is a rewarding night at the theater just the same. I must note that the refined design and lighting are by Rob Howell and David Weiner. If you find that you miss the more blatant, messy dirt and lunatic rush of betrayers in love–remember, this is England. Apparent control is the name of Mr. Pinter's understated game. When Juliette Binoche is playing it, it's something to see, and fall for. As I think I may possibly have suggested, she's got it all.

A rigorous thinker intent on melting rigor, Toni Morrison writes with precision and discipline so as to subvert discipline and precision. She floats an ark of opposites just to show how sterile dichotomy can be. I had a professor once who wondered whether Sula (it remains for me Ms. Morrison's most perfect novel) isn't an inside-out and backward way of saying "us all." I doubt it, but I think "us all" is a bull's-eye summary of her distinction-dissolving art.

Her new novel begins: "They shoot the white girl first." The sentence bristles with implied opposites, race and gender the obvious elements, but also the many ranged against a lone individual, a victim and her aggressors, life and its possible extinction. Thanks to the last word, the present tense of the sentence's blunt verb is balanced between past and future: "They shoot the white girl first."

By the end of Paradise, when you know everything you need to know about who "they" are, who the white girl is and why shooting is involved, black and white, boy and girl, shooter and target, are no longer paired neatly in antithesis. Blended and blurred, dichotomous terms gain in significance what they lose in fine definition, especially community and exile, the alpha and omega of Ms. Morrison's theme, which goes something like this: No haven can be heavenly, no home smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or lives by the rules of triage: some in, some out, some damned, some saved. The author is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

That's a tall order for a novel of no great length, and the ambition of the enterprise can be a burden to the reader. Several sermons are preached in these pages, a war of words waged over slippery concepts like love and tradition. It's never Ms. Morrison pounding the pulpit. But one senses, looming behind the altar, the majesty of her moral purpose. The weight would be crushing if her talent were not equal to her purpose and her ambition.

Paradise is the story of a town and a house. The house is 17 miles outside of town and seems at first to be everything the town is not. The time is early- to mid-70's, with many flashbacks to the 50's and 60's. The climax, foretold with a glimpse of carnage in the first chapter, comes in July 1976, when a group of townspeople sets out to massacre the inhabitants of the house.

Ruby, Okla., is an all-black settlement founded in 1950 by nine families descended from the settlers of another black town called Haven, which had withered during the Depression. Ruby is a fortress of righteousness. A patriarchy dominated by twin brothers called Deacon and Steward Morgan, it is a prosperous, peaceable community. The town's amateur historian is troubled by Ruby's "blood rules"; she thinks of the "intact" nine families as "eight-rock, a deep, deep level in the coal mines. Blue-black people, tall and graceful, whose clear wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren't eight-rock like them." Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have isolated themselves from the white world and embraced reverse racism. They will not tolerate "racial tampering," they scorn the "impure." They were excluded; now they exclude.

Men from Ruby (nine of them) carry out a bloody raid on a house they call the Convent. A mansion shaped "like a live cartridge," it was plunked down in the buffalo grass by an embezzler who went to prison before he could enjoy his ill-gotten gains. In the mid-20's, the building was transformed by Catholic nuns into a school for Indian girls. In the mid-50's, the school closed, but a couple nuns stayed on, selling baked goods and produce from their garden: "They made rhubarb pie so delicious it made customers babble, and the barbecue sauce got a heavenly reputation based on the hellfire peppers."

The last of the nuns dies just as Ms. Morrison's story gets going. The Convent then becomes a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, "traveling resolutely nowhere," drawn perhaps by the mysterious powers of Consolata, Connie, who was a servant to the nuns and now lives on in the house that has been her home for more than 40 years. The Convent is not a coven; Connie is not a witch, but she does have access to a "gift" she thinks of as "in sight"-as in "seeing in."

There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. Women in distress go there, but so do men. One of the men of Ruby, driven to drink by the town's racist "blood rules" (he had foolishly hoped to marry a "pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia"), spends weeks at the Convent drying out. Years later he returns with the posse, gun in hand.

The attack on the Convent is scapegoating, pure and simple. Ruby no longer coheres the way it did in the lean years after it was founded. The young are restless; they lack respect-as a member of the older generation puts it, they have "too many reasons for wearing thin shoes." In time of crisis, it's always tempting to pick on "other folks," especially if rumors of witchcraft are in the air: "Nothing like other folks' sins for distraction."

Ms. Morrison doesn't like to point the finger. Blame paves the way for banishment. Like Yeats' Crazy Jane, she cries, "Fair and foul are near of kin." A chapter midway through Paradise opens with a sermon that sounds mighty convincing: "Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy, you are a fool. If you think it is natural, you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God." Tough, bracing, blessedly unsentimental. But also divisive. Those words are uttered in the service of retrenchment and self-righteousness; they feed attitudes that lead to murderous rampage.

The tough-love preacher has a hipper counterpart who preaches kinder, gentler, freer love, vintage 1970, who wants the youth of Ruby to broaden their horizons, to engage with whites, to embrace Africa. Where's the middle ground?

Paradise is full of sentences that run from one pole to another. This, for example, about Ruby's founding fathers: "What began as overheated determination became coldblooded obsession." We meet a bride and groom "desperate for … public bonding to dilute their private shame"; we've already tasted the Convent's "hellfire" peppers that make "heavenly" relish. These sentences push you to look for conciliation, the kind Consolata offers in her sermon, which is about spiritual love and love in the flesh, or "bones," as she puts it. Here's her wisdom: "Never break them in two. Never put one over the other."

Ms. Morrison's genius shines brightest when she zeroes in on the individual. She conjures Mavis, the white girl they shoot first, from a squalid domestic quandary: "Mavis sat in the corner of the sofa, not sure whether to scrape the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic cover or tuck them further in." In 1954, Soane, Deacon Morgan's wife, went out to the Convent looking for an abortion. She was refused, and then the baby miscarried. Later, while pinning laundry on the line, she saw a stranger carrying a peck basket. "Soane noticed two things: the basket was empty but the lady carried it with two hands as though it were full, which … was a sign of things to come-an emptiness that would weigh her down, an absence too heavy to carry."

The narrative is parceled out among at least a dozen major characters and another 30 or so bit players. Which scatters the attention. Very few scenes last more than a page or two; it's rare for any character to hold center stage for long. One could argue that this is a bold jigsaw puzzle design, but I think all the quick cuts sap the power of the story. The parade of new faces begins to seem a tease, the piling up of incident an accretion of anecdote. All this busyness might work fine if the raid on the Convent were at last described with uninterrupted intensity, something like the barrage at the end of a fireworks show, but Ms. Morrison chops it up. We get coy winks when what we want is a prolonged stare.

There are a handful of weak sentences in Paradise, more than one expects from a writer of Ms. Morrison's stature. The worst clinker sounds like a pulp fiction parody: "Anger shot through him like a .32."

Some of the best sentences, dizzying, delightful, pan the Oklahoma sky; others caress simple domestic chores. My favorite, which shifts from indoors out, begins with Mavis shelling pecans by the Convent's kitchen door-"the crack of shells, the tick of nutmeat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal arrangement, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks."

Ms. Morrison writes the best descriptions of food preparation I've ever read. She could probably write a killer cookbook-eclectic cuisine from the kitchen of a self-styled "Nobelette." A generous stew would be her signature dish, a pungent concoction served from a giant cauldron. Inside, a steamy, blissful mélange.