Neil Young waged heavy bullshit in a memoir that spent all of a paragraph describing hanging out with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and the Manson family in favor of slinging hundreds of pages of PR copy about the new sound system Mr. Young invented. The masochist in me kind of liked this book, the same way I like the most pointless of Mr. Young’s guitar solos. Passages such as this are the prose equivalent:

A funny thing happened at Woodstock. I didn’t want cameras onstage distracting me while we were playing. I hated the showboating atmosphere that surrounded the filming and thought it distracted from our music. The music was between us and the audience, and anything that got in the way was taboo in my opinion...On the Woodstock record, Atlantic Records used a song of mine recorded months later at the Fillmore East in New York called “Sea of Madness.” That was kind of misleading.

Okay, grandpa. Thanks for lunch, but I really gotta get going now.

Pete Townshend turns out to be a better writer than ol’ shakey—he devotes quite of lot time in his book, Who I Am, to his career as an acquisitions editor at Faber & Faber, a job he took a few years after the death of Who drummer Keith Moon. It’s interesting, but not as interesting as, you know, getting into a fistfight onstage with Keith Moon or throwing televisions out of hotel windows, details that get shortchanged.

Of all the music memoirs this year, my favorite is the one by Rod Stewart, the hilariously-named Rod. Mr. Stewart positions himself as a stately, Evelyn Waugh-esque narrator. (The chapters all have headings like “In which our hero throws in his lot with the damaged remnants of the Small Faces and is reluctantly made alert to the perils of trying to run two careers at once. With sundry meditations on graffiti, Ronnie Wood’s hooter, and the wearing of velvet in hot rooms.”)

The worst book of the year—and possibly of the past several—is Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser, an insulting and entirely misguided fictional account of my dear, troubled hometown that manages to make one of the most complicated and evocative places in the world about as interesting as a conference call.

The runner-up was Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s third-person memoir of the fatwa issued on him by Ayatollah Khomeini. I took less issue with the author—who lived under the titular pseudonym Joseph Anton during those threatening years—casually placing himself in a lineage with Conrad and Chekhov, as well as comparing his novel to Ulysses and Lolita, than I did with his numerous attacks, almost in the same breath, on the “majestic narcissism” of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife, whom he might as well just refer to as “dumb slut.” Mr. Rushdie uses the third person as if it protects him from the offhanded misogyny of his assaults, not to mention his own preposterous self-aggrandizing. There is also prose in the book that makes Top Chef look like Joyce:

His biggest problem, he thought in his most bitter moments, was that he wasn’t dead. If he were dead nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of his security and whether or not he merited such special treatment for so long. He wouldn’t have to fight for the right to get on a plane … He wouldn’t have to talk to any more politicians (big advantage). His exile from India wouldn’t hurt. And the stress level would definitely be lower.

Yes, because the worst thing about having an international hit put on you is that it’s just so stressful.

A superior memoir is A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, which includes this description of Berlin: “Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another.”

Toni Morrison’s uneven novella Home, about an alcoholic veteran of the Korean War trying to rescue his sister from an evil eugenicist, felt both overwritten and unfinished; Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan’s humorless, entirely unsexy novel about Cold War-era British espionage, made Moonraker look smart; and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her was like a teaser for better things to come.

Of the year’s failures, Zadie Smith’s novel NW was at least a very interesting one. Ms. Smith can make the description of a dumpy office feel dire: “Here offices are boxy cramped Victorian damp. Five people share them, the carpet is threadbare, the hole-punch will never be found.” But the novel is less a narrative than an unwelcoming environment to move around in at random. She bogs down her writing with a disruptive and schizophrenic style.

Speaking of interruptions, Laurent Binet’s HHhH was translated into English this year, and is nominally about Reinhard Heydrich—Hitler’s “Butcher of Prague”—but is much more about the difficulty of trying to write a novel about Reinhard Heydrich, including various William Gass-like digressions from the author himself.

A (slightly) less-tortured historical novel was Hilary Mantel’s very entertaining Bring Up the Bodies, about Thomas Cromwell.

Katherine Boo’s amazing reconstruction of life in an Annawadi slum beat out another of Robert Caro’s minute-to-minute biographies of LBJ for the nonfiction National Book Award. Louise Erdrich deservedly won the NBA for fiction with The Round House, her novel about a violent rape on an Ojibwe reservation, though the award felt like it was retroactively awarding a mostly consistent 25-year career. Let’s not even talk about how there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Metafictional winks—for example, an author naming her protagonist after herself and her supporting cast after her friends—have always seemed dubious to me, so I picked up Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? with apprehension. The book stars Sheila Heti and seemingly includes transcripts of Ms. Heti’s conversations with her real-life friends, though that might be a fictional ruse. Ms. Heti is thoughtful in her exploration of the thin line between fiction and reality, especially in her examination of the ways in which the two bleed together.

Chris Kraus, an antecedent to Ms. Heti, also wrote a small masterpiece this year with a novel about the Los Angeles art world, Summer of Hate.

I can’t think of a better work of nonfiction in 2012 than Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be, an antidote to Scott Lasser’s atrocity. Nothing has come as close to realistically documenting the wackiness of contemporary Detroit. At one point, Mr. Binelli sneaks onto the set of the remake of the communists-are-coming smut movie Red Dawn, which was filmed at the author’s old high school. The city had been plastered with fictional propaganda posters that say things like YOU DESERVE TO BE HERE. Mr. Binelli overhears a crew member talking about how much he loved filming in Detroit: “We were setting off major explosions in the middle of downtown! Seriously, man, there’s nowhere else in the country they’d let you do something like this.”

It was a good year for poetry. Maureen N. McLane (full disclosure: a grad school professor of mine) wrote a brilliant poem-memoir that attempted to answer the question, “Why poetry?” (The answers range from “Poetry is connate with the origin of man” to “I have wasted my life.”) Having Louise Glück’s collected poems in a single volume is a gift. Michael Robbins published the most assured debut I’ve read in a long time. And any year John Ashbery publishes a book is A-okay with me, especially one with the lines, “No one expects life to be a single adventure,/yet conversely, one is surprised when it turns out disappointing.” Also, Frederick Seidel’s Nice Weather included some of the bleakest imagery of the year:

This is what it’s like at the end
    of the day.

But soon the day will go away.

Sunlight preoccupies the cross
    street.

It and night soon will meet.

Meanwhile, there is Central
    Park.

Now the park is getting dark.

Oh, and speaking of bleak, Fifty Shades of Grey saved publishing.

mmiler@observer.com

Ms. Smith.

At the recent Edinburgh Literary Festival, Zadie Smith announced that her 2005 novel On Beauty would be her last to be set in America. Henceforth, she was returning in her books to her native England. A surprising thought, at least at first. Wouldn’t it seem natural that Ms. Smith, a Greenwich Village familiar over the past several years who holds tenure at NYU and has become a mainstay in the pages of The New York Review of Books, might have adopted New York as her literary home as well? Nevertheless, in her gangly, formally ambitious new novel, NW,she has opted to make her return not just to London, but to the working-class hodgepodge of Northwest London, the subject of her 2000 novel White Teeth, as well as her childhood home.

Thirteen years on, it is still relatively familiar territory. While NW evinces the author’s restlessness over how to get the tangled bustle of gritty urban life down on the page, the chunk of the city where a good bit of the novel takes place has remained buffeted from the real-estate juggernaut that has transfigured much of London and New York over the past two decades. As her character Leah Hanwell—at 35 years old a denizen of the ’hood who never moved up and out—pictures it from the window of a bus:

Ungentrified, ungentrifable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden … In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once—houses, churches, schools, cemeteries—an optimistic vision of Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the city. Fast forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their countries.

Though they share the same vintage, Willesden’s faux-Tudors are a far cry from the real-estate lottery tickets that line the street of John Lancaster’s Capital, the other much anticipated and mostly disappointing way-we-live-now novel of London to arrive on our shores this year. Nor has the precipitous bust of 2008–2009, a centerpiece of Mr. Lancaster’s book, left nearly the same mark on the main players of NW, although one of the three strivers around whom the book revolves, the desperately successful corporate lawyer Natalie, couldn’t imagine the buff prosperity of her life—a well-to-do banker husband, a modest manor on the park, dinner parties with the sorts of insufferably self-regarding friends who chatter about farm-to-table spinach and underwater birthing, two children who seem destined never to know their mother’s dismally impoverished upbringing—without the tidal surge of the decade’s slosh of wealth.

Natalie and her childhood friend Leah are the focal points of NW. The novel traces their respective varieties of disappointed city living, from their unpromising origins in council housing to their present-day unhappiness on either side of the have-and-have-not divide. A former philosophy student whose life has rutted out in a dead-end administrative job for the council, Leah is married to Michel, a French hairdresser of African descent who spends his spare time day-trading the meager savings they possess. Childless despite increasing pressure from Michel and her eager mother, Leah is resigned to indulge her affections on her dog; outside of sharing joints with an upstairs neighbor, that seems like her greatest ambition in an already-burned-out life.

At the beginning of NW, in a section called “Visitation,” Leah is lying in a hammock penciling a line she has overheard on the radio—“I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” I should probably write, “Significantly, at the beginning of NW, Leah etc.,” but it would be redundant. Part of what makes NW an exasperating read is less its formal and stylistic “difficulty” than Ms. Smith’s determination to hammer home at every turn just how significant each detail is to her story. This is a novel larded from its first page with portentous signs and dangling leitmotifs (apple trees with bitter fruits, blurry photographs, an epidemic of gravid foxes), all served up in restive, jarring sub-Woolfian prose—more on which later. At any rate, her radio silence is interrupted, sure enough, by a trickster visitor at the door, a con-artist crackhead named Shar who, it turns out, is a former schoolmate of Leah and Natalie. Their impromptu high-school reunion inaugurates the devilish presence of Shar and her pimpish cohort Nathan Bogie—a druggy street hustler who had been the apple of Leah’s eye as a kid—who literally and thematically haunt Leah’s slow descent toward breakdown.

We’re given a foreboding of Leah’s decline from the very start. Natalie’s is more surprising. She is a second-generation Caribbean who externally is a marvel of self-made success (“the girl done good from their thousand-kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from”). Natalie, who—significantly!—once went by the name Keisha, is the hard-working, single-minded go-getter whose journey through college and on to a budding career in the law is all about shedding every stitch of her penniless Pentecostal upbringing. At school, “Natalie Blake was crazy busy with self-invention. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word. She found politics and literature, music, cinema.” There is a kind of connect-the-dots trajectory to Natalie’s post-collegiate success: conscience still intact, she opts at first for a paralegal job at “a tiny legal aid firm in Harlesden with half its stenciled letters peeled off” but abandons it as easily as she did the name Keisha for the corporate position, the pair of kids, the perfect husband. But there’s a final new identity that Natalie adopts—the Casual Encounters-trolling “Wild in Wembley”—that marks the limits of her gift for reinvention and the place where self-creation and self-destruction dovetail.

This is surprising, not least because it’s seemingly unfathomable in the character Ms. Smith spent the previous 150 pages developing. I say seemingly unfathomable because the style in which Ms. Smith has chosen to tell Natalie’s story—one of three main sections in NW, each dedicated to a particular character—hacks apart her narrative into 150 numbered sections, most of them only a paragraph or two long. These have subtitles (e.g., “Vivre sa vie”; “Surplus Value, Schizophrenia, Adolescence”; “Time Slows Down”; “Capitalist Pigs”) that function like the intertitles in Godard’s Weekend, though the more apt comparison might be Two or Three Things I Know About Her. We see bits and pieces of both Natalie and Leah revealed through all sorts of raking angles—interior dialogue, fragmentary conversation, quick sketches, little asides that Ms. Smith cleverly drops into her text—but we ironically enough never really get a solid sense of just who they are or what motivates their actions. They never quite know who they are, and neither do we.

Ms. Smith’s formal experiment in NW demonstrates a certain level of trust in her readers, making her return to a novelistic terrain she first explored 13 years ago feel like a new arrival. And it is. The blueprint of NW is unlike that of any of Ms. Smith’s other novels: she employs changes in tense, unorthodox typography, wild swings in perspective, passages of free-floating dialogue. She samples a gamut of styles: subchapters written as a set of Google directions, another given in the form of stage directions. One short interlude is arranged as a Robert Herrick-ish pattern-poem shaped like an apple tree. It’s hard to think of a novel that sets as many of its scenes on subways and buses, and the unsettling motion of Ms. Smith’s shape-shifting text does at least mirror the whirl of a city whizzing by, but this stylish slew sacrifices those qualities that were the best aspects of her earlier writing—capacious urbanity, plump sentences, generosity. NW is a much darker novel than anything Ms. Smith has written previously, and the tunnel vision of its characters is clearly part of what she wants us to think about. But you never can shake the awareness that Ms. Smith is both the conductor of this peculiar trip and the engineer who rigged the tracks, which is not quite what you expect from a writer who thought hard about the tricky business of authorial authenticity in her celebrated New York Review of Books assault on lyrical realism, “Two Paths for the Novel.” For a novel that aspires to take its characters’ own forays with authenticity so seriously, the self-conscious artifice of NW is a major roadblock.

Oddly, the most successful passage in NW is the one that is most tangential to the sagas of Leah and Natalie. It tells in a backward glance the story of the final day in the life of Felix, who is unknown to the protagonists and whose murder Leah just happens to catch on a newscast. A former addict trying to stay clean, he too is a product of a council upbringing and is striving for direction, having already tried out the bottom rungs of careers in film and cooking and an ill-fated T-shirt business. In three marvelously drawn set pieces—with his father, still in the “dreaded Garvey House” where Felix was raised; with his ex-girlfriend, who tempts him with coke and cynicism; and with the bloke he visits to buy a rusted-out MG—Ms. Smith gives us all of what is missing elsewhere in NW: a real character, birthed from the fabric of her novel, whom we witness as he drinks ginger beer in a pub, haggles over a car, has sex, criss-crosses the city, and declares joyously that he is in love. It all unfolds as if a camera were trailing him. We know how his story will end, yet even with death hanging over him, Ms. Smith finds a way to zap him into sweet, cocky, imperfect life. And there’s nothing lyrical about it.

editorial@observer.com

McMurtry.

Zadie Smith is going on leave for an "indefinite period" from writing the New Books column at Harper's magazine, according to the AP. The author of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry, will be writing it instead. Editor Ellen Rosenbush's declared goal of getting more women published in the magazine seems to be on track, however. She has said that she would like one woman writer per issue (ambitious!) Unless we counted wrong, in the current issue there appears to be one short story by a woman, excluding Readings, so everything's on track despite Ms. Smith's absence.

Smith.

A blow-by-blow of accusations that Turkish novelist Elif Safak has plagiarized from the Turkish translation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth is up at The Millions. We are told by The Millions' Turkish correspondent (!) that this is what Ms. Safak wrote in a Turkish newspaper in response to the allegations (The Millions' translation, since The Observer's Turkish is, um, rusty):

Enough already! Iskender, which I wrote in England, which my English publishers read line by line with great pleasure, which my English agency represents with great pleasure, will be published back-to-back in England and the U.S. in 2012 by Penguin and Viking, two of the best publishing houses in the world. Given all this, I don’t take seriously the accusations levied by a handful of people whose intention is to wear me down. As with all of my books, my hard work and imagination is evident in this novel. I’m fed up, we’re fed up with the reckless attacks against people who do different work. My reader knows me. Iskender is my eleventh book, my eighth novel. This is what I say to those dealing in slander, gossip, and delusional behavior.

The plots of the two books are apparently similar, but the passages that have received the most scrutiny involve characters looking up through a basement window at the activity happening at street level and conjuring stories from the things they see. It's the physical perspective and activity that is replicated, not the language itself, although The Millions is working from a Turkish translation of White Teeth that has been translated back into English.

With New York magazine’s charmingly casual downtown party at the Spotted Pig canceled this year, and Entertainment Weekly’s uptown celebration at Elaine’s looking like it’s never coming back, the Accompanied Literary Society’s inaugural Oscar party was possibly the only open bar in town, attracting guests like designer Camilla Stærk and club owner Lyman Carter.

“I haven’t watched the Oscars in a long time, but I’m really enjoying it—I forgot how much I love it!” Ms. Smith told the Transom. “I love to look at the dresses. I went about four years ago and I got to see the dresses up close.”

As Sarah Jessica Parker came out onstage in Dior Haute Couture, Ms. Smith, wearing an off-the-shoulder black dress and a red turban, said, “Look at that dress!”

“The boobs!” burst out Mr. Greer.

“The boobs!” Ms. Smith echoed.

“This the first time I’m wearing a tuxedo on Oscar night,” said Mr. Greer. “Usually I throw an Oscar party and dress up as one of the nominated films. I was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon one year and I did Meryl Streep from The Hours another.”

This year, Mr. Greer was rooting against The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for a personal reason. In 2004, he published the widely praised novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, about a man who curiously aged backward. After Benjamin Button was already in development, Paramount offered to purchase the rights to the novel—with no intention of making it—but Mr. Greer turned them down. (The film was based, mostly in name only except for the aging-backward plot device, on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story of the same name.)

“They didn’t steal anything, but it just would’ve been nice if in a single movie review they had mentioned that there’d already been a treatment of this,” said Mr. Greer. “But this is film, it’s not books. If they win, they’re not going to mention my book when they go up there. But of course they wouldn’t!”

Brooke Geahan, the leggy founder of the Accompanied Literary Society, who was teetering about in a dangly, low-cut gold minidress, was pleased at the amount of literature-based films nominated. 

“People need to understand that there are not great films without great books,” she said. If Ms. Geahan and her society raised enough money that evening, they were planning to give a grant to a novelist hoping to sell film rights to a book.

To raise the necessary funds, the guests were encouraged to play the blackjack tables lining the hallway. “We wanted to bring a little bit of Monte Cristo glamour to New York,” explained Ms. Geahan.

The socialite Arden Wohl was successfully betting at the blackjack tables with a stack of gold chips in front of her.

“What are the prizes again?” Ms. Wohl asked.

“Oh, there’s lots of great prizes—there’s a brunch, an Oscar de la Renta handbag, and gym or a yoga membership …” responded Ms. Geahan.

Ms. Wohl interrupted. “But is there, like, a trip somewhere?”

Oh, honey. Sometimes we want to escape New York, too.

ialeksander@observer.com

Mr. McCrum goes on to list what he sees as ten milestone moments from the past 10 years of publishing, starting with the publication of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which is cast here as a prototype of global literature, and ending with the release of the Amazon Kindle. In between we have the Harry Potter, Jonathan Franzen's spurning of Oprah Winfrey, the breakout success of Ian McEwan's Saturday, and the ascent of literary blogs. Also—curveball!—the release of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which Mr. McCrum says "spoke to an anxiety about usage and standards in an age of cultural upheaval."

One wonders how different Mr. McCrum's list would have been if he'd seen the past decade from this side of the ocean. Perhaps Marie Arana, who is currently preparing to vacate the editorship of the Washington Post's Sunday books supplement, could make one too. It'd be like a micro-meme that only departing books editors could pull off.

Not that she'd ever read either of Mr. Eggers' books. "I'm going to," she said shyly.

The worldly Zaki had read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius . "Just all the press he got, all the incredible acclaim he got, that's what attracted me to him," he said. And then the stage came alive: "Ladies and gentleman: Mr. Dave Eggers!"

There he was! Dave Eggers! In a black T-shirt and jeans, he bounced onstage at his crinkly-eyed, curly-haired orphan best. The crowd cheered. Mr. Eggers soaked in the adulation. He was the headliner in his own touring literary rock festival, entitled, winsomely, "McSweeney's vs. They Might Be Giants."

Yes, it's good to be a novelist nowadays. Especially a young novelist: Just a week earlier in Frankfurt, Germany, book-publishing executives were scratching each other's eyes out for the rights to publish the first novel and short-story collection by 29-year-old Hannah Tinti, a former agency assistant. Susan Kamil at Dial Press paid an amount that one source pegged at $500,000 for it, putting Tinti into the growing ranks of under-40 writers who have gotten big advances for as-yet-unwritten fiction, including former New Yorker assistant Nell Freudenberger, who accepted a $100,000 offer last year for a collection of stories she's still working on. The publishers who are paying out this money aren't doing it blindly. This summer's improbable buzz over Everything Is Illuminated , the pyrotechnic Holocaust novel by 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer, was not lost on Miramax Books head Jonathan Burnham: "Sitting on a jitney one afternoon this summer, that was the book that came out of everyone's Kate Spade bag," Mr. Burnham said.

Just as Frankfurt was giddily winding down, at the Puck Building, the state of mind among young aspiring filmmakers at the Independent Feature Project's annual film market was practically funereal. Jeff Lipsky, co-founder of 90's New York upstart companies October Films and Lot 47, seemed to be upbraiding the nearly 100 people who had come to hear him speak. "If 10 people in this room actually end up getting their features made, nine of them I guarantee will be terrible," he said to the anxiety-stricken crowd. Soon he referred to the Sundance Film Festival, which 10 years ago was the place that made cinematic success a realistic possibility for everyday artists, as "that festival in January in the middle of Buttfuck, Utah," or, more succinctly, "Stardance."

What happened to all the kids with a story to tell who went to sleep at night dreaming of becoming the next Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith or Ed Burns, maxing out their parents' credit cards, starting a Sundance bidding war and getting famous, just like Matt and Ben? Now they're told at every turn that the market for first features is dead. It's the young literati who seem to have a direct channel into pop culture-and financial rewards.

The mark of this new literature is that it's accessible without being dumb. Literary, but also pop. When Vibe magazine recently sent British novelist Zadie Smith to L.A. to interview Eminem, the two hit it off-the rapper reportedly told Ms. Smith that he had enjoyed her award-winning 2000 debut novel White Teeth . Ms. Smith was thrilled, declaring herself a huge Eminem fan. It's not surprising. She and Eminem are a perfect match for each other and for the moment. They share a signature style, a hopped-up blend of word-drunk verbal dexterity and manically inventive narratives. It's a combination that, when it works, works equally well on the page or on a CD, but doesn't really call out for the big screen-although, not surprisingly, Eminem is trying his hand at the movies: He's starring in this winter's buzzed-about film 8 Mile .

In the book world, David Foster Wallace may have perfected that kind of sensibility a decade ago, but the kids have taken the ball and run with it: You can find that Eminem flavor in novels as diverse as Mr. Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated , Gary Shteyngart's delirious immigrant tale The Russian Debutante's Handbook , and recent MacArthur Award winner Colson Whitehead's American-history-steeped riff on junket journalism, John Henry Days .

Far from making them seem stuffy or out of touch with the present moment, the historical ambition of these novelists are helping them gain readers. "Clichéd as it is to say, last year's events left almost everybody feeling embarrassed not just about their lack of historical knowledge, but about their near-total lack of historical curiosity," said Heather O'Donnell, a fellow in the English department at Princeton University. "These novels provide evidence that people younger than Kissinger have thought about the last hundred years of world history, and the novelists themselves acquire a kind of statesmanlike aura as a result."

Many of the writers may be younger than Kissinger, but few people who have been to authors' readings lately would deny that there's a growing sense of cultural authority emanating from novelists. In fact, the new popularity of readings as social events suggests to Norman Mailer that a significant social shift is underway. "In the 70's and 80's, Yev Tushenko and Voznesensky, who were both on the dissident edge of Soviet literature, used to give concert readings of their poetry to stadiums filled with 20,000 people," Mr. Mailer said.

Even the President appears to be paying attention. After perusing Dear Mr. President (Knopf), the first novel by Gabe Hudson, which was first excerpted in The New Yorker Debut Fiction issue in 2001, Mr. Bush was moved to take time out from planning his conquest of Iraq and pen a two-paragraph note on White House stationery, calling Mr. Hudson's work "unpatriotic," "ridiculous" and "just plain bad writing." (Mr. Hudson is taking bids from magazines to publish President Bush's letter.)

"There's a sense among young people and those who make it that fiction can be central to the culture," said Kurt Andersen, the host of the radio program Studio 360 , who is at work on his second novel for Random House. "There was a conventional wisdom among the older generations that it was a marginalized endeavor. To see it be a central cultural product for kids today, that's all to the good. The only caveat is the problems that being a rock star or any kind of celebrity sensation presents."

But even without the big screen, literary fame is now a legitimate end in itself. As one book scout put it, "I think it's the older writers who are far more interested in writing a book that is going to be optioned for the movies. Young people think that they are expressing original ideas. I don't think Nick [McDonnell, the 18-year-old author of Twelve ] was thinking, 'Oh boy, I'm going to write a book for the movies.'" Why should they fret about film options when they can get handsomely paid for writing novels, anyway?

Film fame may be losing some of its mystique-it's not such an exotic, tabooed dream for writers in an era in which the other branches of cultural production no longer seem so glamorously set apart from the literary world. The bond between the Cambridge-educated Ms. Smith and Eminem, the high-school dropout from Michigan, is a case in point. It's more than just the kind of cutesy-intellectual high-low alliance that gave birth to a thousand Brown semiotics majors' term papers. Writers like Ms. Smith don't feel they have to give up on a mass audience in order to say serious things. We're reaching the end of an era in which obscurity plays as intelligence; date its demise from the publication of Jonathan Franzen's takedown of super-convoluted postmodern novelist William Gaddis last month in The New Yorker . And yet it's not that the new literary stars are rejecting the ethos of high-toned literary deconstruction they learned in their college English classes-they've already assimilated it, along with their MTV and their hip-hop, and along with an easy acceptance of fame and money as marks of their literary prowess. As Geoff Shandler, an editor at Little, Brown, put it, young authors today "all went through, in one form or another, the postmodernist academic wringer, so they were used to peeking under the surfaces of things as well as fostering collisions and (sometimes too obviously) pumping irony."

Young writers with an intellectual bent are disassociated from the academic world now-some are M.F.A. graduates, but none, so far, are teaching in M.F.A. programs, like their elders have traditionally done to make ends meet. But if they're not university-supported, they're not hostile to the academy, either. Zadie Smith, in fact, recently started a Radcliffe Ph.D. program. Michel Faber, the author of the unlikely historical-fiction megahit The Crimson Petal and the White , spent years on Victoriana list-serves getting answers to his research questions from academics.

"There's no reason that the cultural environment surrounding literature has to be as stuffy and academic as it's been for the past 20 years," said Neal Pollack, whose Neal Pollack's Anthology of American Literature was McSweeney's first title as a publishing house. "The indie-rock literary circuit will really help writers who have just started-get them on the bill with a bigger-name writer. That's how you discover bands a lot of times." Why not bring on the band itself, while the publishers are at it? "If publishers are going to send writers around the country to do tours anyway, why not mix in some beer, and why not put a band on the bill, too?" Mr. Pollack said.

"In my dream," Mr. Pollack added, "this is like 1981 or 1982 for indie rock, and 10 years from now, some Kurt Cobain figure is going to blast into the public consciousness and die tragically."

Funny he should mention Cobain. Remembering an interview she did with the Nirvana singer in 1993, Darcey Steinke, a novelist who teaches in the New School's graduate writing program, remembered telling him how difficult it was to get people to come to readings. "He was so sweet and naïve," Ms. Steinke said. "He didn't have any idea about readings; he assumed it was the same, that you had your mosh pit." Mr. Cobain told her: "You got to get people in that place where they have a few drinks and are looking at each other like there's a lot of possibility, a lot of hope for love."

Let's not leave out the role of the Internet in creating the new breed of writers: They were "forged in a cultural melange of indie rock, the Macintosh computer and the entrepreneurial ethos of the Clinton era," as Mr. Shandler of Little, Brown, put it. But what the Internet lacked was narrative. And so thirsty minds began to lap up the stories-which were often as fractured and hyperactive as the Internet itself, but still stories. "Our ability to concentrate is continually channeled into sprints," said Ms. O'Donnell of Princeton. "These novels are like marathons: They stretch people. We look at these novelists like personal trainers, with a combination of gratitude and resentment."

In this atmosphere, literary outsiderness is becoming more and more difficult to pull off. Even McSweeney's is already outgrowing its fringe roots: The next issue will be edited by Pulitzer-prize winning author Michael Chabon, who called Mr. Eggers a "genius" and an "impresario" who has mastered the art of literary carnival-barking. "A long time ago," he said, "you would have to be like Norman Mailer, who ran for Mayor, to accomplish the same thing." When Mr. Eggers offered Mr. Chabon the chance to guest-edit Mc-Sweeney's -overseeing an issue dedicated to genre fiction that will include Stephen King-Mr. Chabon said he was thrilled. "It's like when Orson Welles was given the chance to direct Citizen Kane . He said, 'I felt like I was given the greatest train set ever.'"

But not everyone in the literary world is ready to get on what looks, at times, like a runaway train. Is accessibility always a good destination for literature? What will it mean for fiction if the rising generation no longer sees a clear stylistic distinction, for example, between novels and screenplays? Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is often used as a case in point. "I don't think it's fair to say his motives were cynical," said the New Republic literary critic James Wood, "but it's clear that what he wanted to do was take what he liked about [Don] De Lillo and make it accessible. The result was to take the strength of a certain intellectual and literary tradition and mix it with a broader, more popular form, and so The Corrections does have about it the feel of a miniseries or saga."

What's more, who knows whether the money being lavished on unestablished novelists is going to hinder their development? After all, a lack of money-and a lack of endless free time to write-have always been powerful literary muses. Mr. Wood sounded another note of caution: Not every worthy writer will strike it rich. "The extraordinary sales of Jonathan Franzen or Alice Sebold [whose novel The Lovely Bones has sold 1.6 million copies so far] suggests that we may be in a new place that's a difficult one for most writers. I think there's an increasing pressure that novelists will feel: to have a book with prestige, it must also sell well."

The sold-out event drew a crowd so large that it circled around the Quaker school building in the hot rain. Facial hair and shrunken T-shirts were much in evidence, and-a pleasant surprise for a Manhattan literary event these days-the crowd was decidedly multi-culti, with young Indian men, trendy African-American couples and several Asians.

Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, who'd read at the Meeting House earlier in the evening, stuck around to support the kids. Mr. Franzen, wearing a white shirt and big hairdo, eagerly directed people to their pews at the front. He later joined Mr. Wallace, who was wearing his signature white bandanna around his head like a bandage.

Mr. Eggers kicked off with a short story about a boy named Hollis. "It's got a surprise ending," he promised. Five minutes later, something had happened to Hollis, but all you could hear at the back was the indistinct cadence of Mr. Eggers' sing-song voice, which lulled more than one listener to sleep in the sweltering hall. "It was so hot in there, it was a two-bandanna reading," Mr. Wallace said later.

Next up was Ms. Smith, a head or two taller than her American friend. She bellowed like a schoolmistress in assembly. Her 20-minute reading consisted of a passage from her new novel about Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their passion for the arts and sciences. She seemed to intend it as a kind of moral fable. By the time she was through, the audience was restless. There was a lot of watch-checking.

Then Mr. Eggers came back on, and everyone sat up straighter. He read a long passage from his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity , swaying and reverting to the sing-song voice. Fewer people nodded off this time. Ms. Smith returned next, promising to read only nine more pages. However, hopes of relief were dashed when they turned out be about an old man dying of kidney failure.

Asked by an audience member what the most surprising aspect of her success had been, Ms. Smith said, "I expected it to be this Ivy League world, but they just care about my hair and shoes."

At the book signing after the reading, Ms. Smith was asked what she and Mr. Eggers have in common. "We both have difficult hair," she answered as she grimly signed copies of White Teeth and her brand-new novel, The Autograph Man . According to her publicist, now that Ms. Smith is a graduate fellow at Radcliffe, "she's not doing any additional media." The publicist turned to a colleague and added in a low voice, "She should just talk to them; they're going to write about her anyway."

-Shazia Ahmad

Hannibal and the Hams

Sir Anthony Hopkins had a knee-slapping good time at the premiere of his new movie, Red Dragon , on Monday, Sept. 30. Seated 20 rows from the front of the Ziegfeld Theater with a brunette date, Mr. Hopkins' face cracked in self-appreciative glee every time his once-horrifying, now drag-queeny character, Hannibal Lecter, appeared on screen.

Mr. Hopkins' role is small in Red Dragon , Brett Ratner's remake of the Silence of the Lambs predecessor, Manhunter . But Dr. Lecter's well-worn schtick-snapping his teeth in people's faces, sipping Chianti, talking in a hissy Southern accent-provides campy relief from the bloody broken mirrors and burning bodies that populate the rest of the film.

Alas, no one provided relief from Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, who witnesses said roared up to the Ziegfeld in a "bangin' Ferrari" and jumped out with a swish, leaving the car to be removed by someone else. Once inside, Mr. Combs cut the press line to pose for pictures and then stole the seats of Red Dragon director Brett Ratner's family.

Mr. Combs was mercifully a no-show at the relaxed after-party at Grand Central Terminal, where there was no V.I.P. section, stars mingled with their fans, and the air smelled like the parking lot at a Dead show.

Guests included Mr. Hopkins and his co-stars Edward Norton (with his girlfriend, Frida star Salma Hayek), Harvey Keitel (with his wife, Daphna Kastner) and Ralph Fiennes (with his girlfriend, actress Francesca Annis), as well as Universal executives Stacy Snider, Ron Meyer and Barry Diller.

Chelsea Clinton, with boyfriend Ian Klaus, eschewed the private cars which ferried V.I.P.'s from the Ziegfeld to Grand Central, opting instead to ride the chartered buses with the riffraff.

Actress Rebecca Gayheart made an impression on the masses as well. Dressed in a shimmery peach dress with gaps in unfortunate places, Ms. Gayheart was essentially topless from many angles. At the after-party, Ms. Gayheart and a gaggle of her girlfriends took over the handicapped stall in the ladies' room for nearly half an hour, laughing and throwing their wraps over the door. Ms. Gayheart emerged once to wash what she called her "slimy" hands and to flash the rest of the bathroom line before returning to the stall.

-Rebecca Traister

Feet and Ass

"I've got 200 fuckin' cousins here," said Sopranos actor Joe ("Joey Pants") Pantoliano on Saturday night, in the middle of the GQ Lounge fête thrown for him by co-stars Edie Falco and James Gandolfini in honor of his new memoir from Dutton, Who's Sorry Now: The Story of a Stand-Up Guy .

Mr. Pantoliano, in a cream cashmere hat, cream tie and glasses, had his hands full. Neither of his hosts were at the party-Ms. Falco had guests in town and a performance of Frankie and Johnny on Broadway, while Mr. Gandolfini was not expected to put in an appearance until the wee hours.

Even without Tony and Carmela, Mr. Pantoliano had lots of admirers thronging the Lounge . Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler kicked back on plush pillows, while the director (and former Observer columnist) Peter Bogdanovich chatted with actors Jennifer Tilly and Matt Dillon, former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Riverkeeper Robert Kennedy Jr. Actor Robert Wuhl was also there.

But the GQ Lounge was mostly overrun with hundreds of Pantoliano relatives, who had driven in for the night from the great state of New Jersey.

Bespectacled cousin Peter was talking about the time Mr. Pantoliano's mother took him with her to the bookies and slapped him across the face. But cousin Roseanne cut in to recall the time that she and "Joseph" were baby-sitting his little sister and called the police on an imaginary burglar. She also recounted the story about the time her mother interrupted Mr. Pantoliano's stage debut-as a streaking patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -by standing up in the middle of the theater and yelling, "You son of a bitch! Put your goddamn clothes back on!"

Aunt Annette-Mr. Pantoliano's mother's cousin-leaned over and allowed as how "Joey was a real mama's boy."

A few feet away, Mark Abba, another of Mr. Pantoliano's cousins, said "You know what I just told Matt Dillon? I told him he smelled like feet and ass. Because he did!"

-R.T.

Eat, Drink and Be Merry

Just three weeks away from her incarceration at the Suffolk County Jail for hitting 16 people outside the Conscience Point nightclub last summer, publicist Lizzie Grubman is living it up.

"It was such a late night last night," Ms. Grubman said to a male friend inside the Terra Mare café on 65th Street and Madison Avenue, where she was nursing her wounds at 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 27.

As a girlfriend yapped on a cell phone, Ms. Grubman offered her male companion a cookie, explaining that she'd "already had two ... and a double espresso." For good measure, Ms. Grubman ordered a second double espresso.

When Ms. Grubman's friend finally got off her cell phone, she ordered herself some more java and moaned, "We were at Lotus forever and then went to Bungalow 8 after that."

Whatever the ravages of the previous night, the slim Ms. Grubman looked tan and chipper in dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

"Hey, do you want to go to Armani?" asked her friend. "I have to pick up a dress."

Ms. Grubman said she had to wait for another pal before accompanying her friend down Madison. As for what was on tap for later, Ms. Grubman's male friend suggested "Chow"-before deciding that he didn't want to pay "like $800."

But Ms. Grubman, apparently untroubled by the bevy of multimillion-dollar lawsuits filed against her, insisted, "I'll pay. Come on. I got it."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Achtung, Nader!

On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 30, at Michael Jordan's The Steakhouse high above Grand Central Terminal, guests including former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and novelist Kurt Vonnegut gnawed on rare steak and listened to "Health Report: American Business and the Economy," a testy panel discussion on the American economy hosted by the newsmagazine The Week .

Harold Evans, The Week 's consulting editor, moderated the panel, which consisted of former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman, UBS America chairman Donald Marron and Peter Peterson, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

U2 front man Bono and 2000 Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader phoned in to address questions to the panel. Their voices were piped in above the din of the train station on four loudspeakers.

"Who is Bone- no?" whispered Heather Cohane, founder of Quest magazine, to The Transom, before sending her steak back to be cooked some more.

A Trebek-ian Mr. Evans pleaded with Mr. Nader to phrase his comments in the form of a question, and directed the loquacious former Presidential candidate to "be quick" when he began to hold forth on the "corporate crime wave."

At a table near the podium, Mr. Evans' wife, Tina Brown, assumed her trademark slouchy position-legs crossed, nose up, brow furrowed-as Bono bantered with Mr. Peterson about America's responsibilities toward poorer countries.

"Bono really knows his stuff," marveled Caroline Graham, Ms. Brown's former West Coast editor at The New Yorker and Talk .

" Bone- no is the U2 man?" asked a befuddled Ms. Cohane.

Then Mr. Nader jumped in again, without introducing himself. Mr. Evans snapped, "How am I supposed to know who this is? You're a disembodied voice!"

"[Harry] is a very good moderator, because he has a low boredom threshold," Ms. Brown told The Transom. "He always cuts me off."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Sir *Hic*

At the Sunday, Sept. 29, premiere for The Man from Elysian Fields , gregarious director George Hickenlooper was joined by the film's stars, Rolling Stone Mick Jagger and former ER actress Julianna Margulies.

At the after-party at Metronome, Mr. Hickenlooper told the story of how Mr. Jagger wound up in his movie after Dustin Hoffman and Jeremy Irons turned down the role of the sexually fading pimp. Mr. Hickenlooper said that both actors felt they were "getting older and are a little insecure about it."

"From the very beginning, I wanted to go to Mick Jagger," said Mr. Hickenlooper. But Mr. Jagger took his time in getting back to him about the gig. "Ten days from shooting, I get a call from Mick at around 4 a.m. London [time]."

Mr. Hickenlooper imitated Mr. Jagger's British accent as he recalled him saying, "Roight, roight, really like the script. I've had a few too many Heinekens, so I have to get to bed." Mr. Hickenlooper said that Mr. Jagger asked him to fly to Venice to discuss the film.

"I land at this beautiful 14th-century villa with Renaissance paintings everywhere. I climb this grand staircase, and the door opens. Mick Jagger is standing there and asks, 'Would you like a Heineken?'"

And the drinking didn't stop there. According to Mr. Hickenlooper, "after we'd settled things, we went over to Harry's Bar. Let me tell you, walking somewhere with Mick is a Biblical experience. It's like walking with Moses."

If Moses were a big Heineken guy.

-Noelle Hancock

Two Wild and Crazy Guys

"Everybody seems to be here," British pop artist Peter Blake said, surveying the scene at Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea on Sept. 24. Mr. Blake, in a dark green corduroy suit and long white goatee, was sandwiched near the entrance of the gallery, which was showing works by French painter Claude Viallat.

The party, which celebrated the 15th anniversary of the British magazine Modern Painters and the publication of its fall issue, was hosted by novelist Paul Auster and his wife, Siri Hustvedt; artist Peter Beard and his wife, Najmaj; and Modern Painters editor Karen Wright . The rest of the eclectic crowd included Harper's Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey, film director Paul Morrissey, poet John Ashbery, and actor and modern-art lover Steve Martin, who was blurbed as saying that Modern Painters gave him "a warm feeling in an unlikely place."

"It's a bit like being a voyeur at a cast call for a certain L.A. director's view of what an opening might be like," mused artist Caio Fonseca.

A grumpy Mr. Auster declined to talk to The Transom, but the amiable Mr. Ashbery volunteered that he'd be setting off the next morning on the Queen Elizabeth 2 , because he was afraid to fly.

Mr. Blake was back in New York to prepare his first show in decades, which will open Nov. 16 at Paul Morris. "For 40 years I declined to show here, and suddenly I decided it was time," Mr. Blake said. "I was in a couple of shows here in the early 60's and was reviewed very unpleasantly."

The sidewalk outside the gallery was a party all its own. Mr. Beard, dressed in snappy black, was leaning against a wall and talking to two attractive women. Mr. Morrissey, plopped against a nearby parked car, surveyed the scene and dispensed wry remarks.

"I didn't understand the art," he said about the Viallats. He then cracked, "He doesn't do bedspreads? There was a company named Marimekko-it reminds me of that."

Soon, Messrs. Beard and Morrissey were surrounded by women, including Mr. Beard's curvy makeup artist, Brigitta. They discussed going to Downtown Cipriani-"Cip's," as Mr. Beard called it. Mr. Morrissey weighed the plan with Mr. Beard. They looked like artsy Rat Packers.

"Oh, we're partners in crime," Mr. Beard said. "We have to stick together."

-Elisabeth Franck

Blahnik Panic

"They're having a ball ," said Nell's owner and Rocky Horror Picture Show star Nell Campbell, nursing a pink cocktail. A calm Ms. Campbell was standing near the escalators at Bergdorf Goodman, describing the frenzied scene in the department store's brand-new second-floor shoe salon.

On the evening of Sept. 25, the store was mobbed by throngs of New York women and their generous husbands, all shopping to benefit the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The evening, co-chaired by Ms. Campbell, Anne McNally and Carlos Mota, was dubbed "Art + Sole" and billed as a night where "innovative art meets the serious shoe fetish."

The event showcased limited-edition shoes created by designers and artists. Manolo Blahnik collaborated with Damien Hirst to create a short stiletto boot, specked with Mr. Hirst's trademark spots, for $1,200, while Adelle Lutz and Walter Steiger dreamed up a $995 brown suede boot with its own ponytail.

"I knew it would be competitive to get shoes, but I didn't think it would be competitive to get a salesperson ," sighed socialite Helen Lee Shifter. Ms. Shifter, who was wearing her favorite shoes-baby-blue crocodile Manolo sandals-spotted the Hirst stiletto. "Jane Holzer should buy these; she has that painting," she said, before asking to try them on.

Social powerhouse Marjorie Gubelmann, dressed in black and diamonds, stomped by and asked a friend if the shoes were "like a kajillion dollars?" Nearby, Style.com editor Candy Pratts Price charged right into the crowd while Studio Museum curator Thelma Golden escaped the mob.

"I bought something for a friend, Eileen Norton. She's one of my trustees," said Ms. Golden, who was carrying a shopping bag.

Ms. Golden said that she was willing to do personal shopping for her trustees if that's what it took. Actually, Ms. Golden seemed to enjoy shopping. A lot.

" Hellooo ! There are like four million pairs of fabulous shoes that we all need, right here, right now," she said. "Totally. Totally. I'm trying not to go back over there-there's a beautiful Helmut Lang black suede shoe with a rubber-band slingback. Have to have it. Have to."

Ms. Golden turned to talk to another guest, but The Transom could have sworn that her next move was toward the Lang showcase.

-E.F.

Silverstein's Flexible

Larry Silverstein, the real-estate mogul who controlled the 99-year lease on the World Trade Center when the towers fell Sept. 11, doesn't mind if his landlord, the Port Authority, compensates him with space off the site, a spokesman has told The Transom.

The city has been looking for ways to reduce the amount of office space built on the site so there will be room for a memorial, as well as open space, a partially restored street grid, a massive transit hub, and even cultural and residential development.

But the Port Authority has said it's hemmed in by its requirement to rebuild all or most of the 11.5 million square feet of office space that used to occupy the six World Trade Center buildings it owned before Sept. 11.

Shortly after the attacks, Mr. Silverstein proclaimed his "responsibility" to rebuild the Twin Towers. Since then, he has engaged the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to work up designs for office buildings on the site that would make room for the memorial and other public amenities.

Recent talks between the state agency chartered to rebuild the site and the Port Authority have centered on ways the city can compensate the Port Authority for handing over all or part of the 16-acre site.

One possible plan had the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation purchasing the Deutsche Bank building directly south of the World Trade Center site. The building has been infested with a dangerous mold since being abandoned on Sept. 11.

"The bank is a question mark-obviously a big question mark," said LMDC spokeswoman Nancy Poderycki. "The building is uninhabitable right now." But Mr. Silverstein seems undaunted.

"If the Port [Authority] and the LMDC decide that it is in the best interests of the city to move some of the space off the site, then that's fine with us," Silverstein spokesman Gerald McKelvey told The Transom.

Sources close to the talks said that other possibilities were also being considered to further reduce the burden, but that this was the most promising option. Experts told The Transom that if the Deutsche Bank building is torn down, future buildings on its site could provide as much as two million square feet of office space.

But Deutsche Bank spokeswoman Rohini Pragasam said that Deutsche Bank had still not made any decision about what to do with its building-one of the last places where human remains from the fallout of the World Trade Center implosion were found by recovery workers.

Ms. Pragasam explained that structural engineers were still looking at the building to determine whether the mold problem was so extreme that it would be more cost-effective to tear the building down or to clean it up and renovate.

-Tom McGeveran

The literary novelists from Britain best known in the United States can be classified by decibel level: the noisy (Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson), the somewhat less noisy (A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes) and the blessedly quiet (Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro). On this same scale, Jim Crace–who lives in Birmingham, light years from the London scene–has been sub-audible: zero ego clamor, zero media buzz. And yet I'm willing to bet that the cool, crisp sound of his voice will begin to be heard very soon, and that the sound will carry far and linger a long time.

Being Dead , Mr. Crace's sixth novel, was just nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. Will winning bring him the attention he richly deserves? He's won plenty of prizes in England and a ton of critical praise (in America, the reviews have been scattered but almost unanimously ecstatic)–and still he hasn't broken out. (The NBCC award will probably go to the crowd-pleasing American favorite, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , or to White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which is the sexy choice: The author is young, talented and photogenic, and the book, raucously multiculti, was thought to be a serious contender for England's Booker Prize but was left off the short list. Ms. Smith is owed.) An American award for Mr. Crace would be nice, but hardly necessary. He's a captivating storyteller and alarmingly intelligent; more importantly, his novels seem blessed with wisdom. In short, there's no hurry: Mr. Crace will sooner or later be crowned with honors.

His debut was Continent (1986), linked stories about an invented land mass and the socio-economic growing pains of its population. Next came The Gift of Stones (1988), a love story set in a Stone Age village in the split second before bronze made stone weaponry obsolete. Arcadia (1992) was set sometime right around now in a city called Gotham; it should be on the bookshelf of every urban planner. Mr. Crace went nautical in Signals of Distress (1994), and for the first time fixed his action in a specific time and place: a seaport on the English coast in 1836. Three years ago he published Quarantine , a shockingly vivid and convincing re-imagining of Jesus' 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. And last but nowhere near least: Being Dead , to my taste easily the best novel of the year 2000.

Can you imagine a funny novel about two corpses lying in the dunes for six days–a comedy of bodily decomposition? Or, stranger still, a rotting-corpse comedy that egins with a brutal double murder, encompasses a 30-year love story and addresses, with utmost seriousness, what we know of the hereafter? Being Dead is at once macabre and lighthearted, violent and tender, witty and profound, irreverent and moving–and perfectly calibrated, so that all these crosscurrents seem to ebb and flow in harmony.

Two middle-aged zoologists, Joseph and Celice, decide to picnic in the dunes at Baritone Bay, the place where they had met 30 years earlier when they were students doing field research. The picnic is Joseph's idea, a bit of romantic nostalgia peppered with lust. His erotic hopes are nearly fulfilled, then fatally interrupted: He is naked, Celice half-undressed when they are attacked by a robber who batters them to death with a hunk of granite and steals their wedding bands, their watches, her bracelet, some cash, the keys to the car.

The rest of the novel is a playful narrative exploration of time, mortality's smoldering fuse. Three clocks are ticking. One is a kind of necrometer: It runs forward from the instant of death to the discovery of the bodies by police dogs six days later; it charts decay and the necrophagous activity of beetles, birds, crabs and rodents; and it monitors, also, the half-hearted search conducted by the dead couple's disaffected daughter. A second clock measures the day of the murder: Mr. Crace sets it back earlier and earlier, until at last it reads 6:10 a.m. and the couple is still safe in bed, still asleep as the morning breaks–"A dawning death." The third clock is antique by contrast: It takes us back 30 years, to the clumsy courtship that led to the marriage of Joseph and Celice. As these three clocks tick, we become uncomfortably aware of time's terminal consequence for each of us. Though every clock can seem like a spinning roulette wheel, bringing us absurd coincidence and unlikely accident (two people meeting at the seashore and falling in love, the same two people planning a picnic at the same seashore and dying violently)–in the end, the game is drearily predictable: Everybody dies.

What happens to the remains when human life is extinguished? It's sort of slapstick. Chapter 6 begins like so: "The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first." A day later, the ugly biological facts are taking on bold hues: "The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides … Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard."

It could be argued that Mr. Crace has merely elaborated beautifully on the great lines from King Lear : "Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all." As he tells us, "Celice and Joseph were soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat." Toward the end of the novel, he shares with us the thoughts of the disaffected daughter: "No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death–or birth–except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."

This is not the sum total of Mr. Crace's message. He's just as interested, I'd say, in living narrow but deep, with memory and imagination coursing through the channel. No one transcends. And yet, with loving attention to two putrefying corpses, Mr. Crace succeeds in granting Joseph and Celice a kind of immortality. There's no afterlife, at least not as advertised from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, but this fictional couple lives in death.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.