Who is Bathsheba Hart? The concise answer is delivered at the very beginning of Zoë Heller's highly addictive second novel: "She is the forty-two-year-old pottery teacher recently charged with indecent assault on a minor after being discovered having a sexual affair with one of her students-a boy who was fifteen years old when the affair began." A more circuitous answer emerges only gradually from the narrative supplied by one of Sheba Hart's colleagues, Barbara Covett. A caustic spinster at once delightful and deeply sinister, Barbara is Sheba's self-appointed "caretaker" and our guide to the "sexual affair" that became a tabloid sensation and wrecked the pottery teacher's otherwise comfortable, unexceptional North London existence. It's Barbara who has compiled these "Notes on a Scandal," and Barbara's question that supplies the novel's title, What Was She Thinking? Of course, it's the wrong question: The immaculately repressed, terrifyingly intense Barbara should be asking, "What was she feeling?"

A married female schoolteacher, a "wispy," big-eyed beauty, sleeps with her yellow-haired, "plump-lipped" student-that's a premise Zoë Heller, a magazine journalist and newspaper columnist, could have exploited in any number of ways, from the pornographic to the grossly sentimental to the stridently political. Instead, she has fashioned a funny, unnerving, acutely intelligent novel of psychological suspense. We know what happened right away; thereafter we're concerned with motive, mysteries of the head and heart, and in order to come up with any answers, we have to read against the grain of Barbara's arch commentary. When she tells us early on that "Sheba's testimony regarding her conduct is not always entirely reliable," it should serve as a double warning: Barb Covett and Sheba Hart, both aptly named, are both in their way unreliable.

A reader confronted with this kind of slippery narrative needs to hang onto something solid, and luckily, it's right there on every page: The fastidious Barbara is clear-eyed about everyone but herself, and the details that she registers fix the novel in a recognizable, verifiable world, a contemporary urban landscape peopled with instantly plausible characters. In the staff room of St. George's, a rough school by any standard (a "holding pen for ... pubescent proles," in Barbara's acid judgment), we're treated to a glimpse of a female teacher's armpit-"violently pink, as if inflamed, and speckled with black stubble"-that sets the standard for unflinching and hypercritical observation. Barbara, who teaches history, is after "maximum accuracy." Ms. Heller makes believers out of us-even as she stokes our skepticism.

Is it still a love triangle if the three sides never meet? Sheba and Steven Connolly certainly "fornicate" (to borrow Barb's term)-at least 20 times in the bushes of Hampstead Heath-but it seems safe to say that their affair is a clash of two incompatible fantasies, his erotic, adolescent (he tells the tabloids, "I fancied her, didn't I?"), hers hopelessly romantic, complex and perhaps partly maternal. Sheba has two children, one an odious, stubbornly rebellious 17-year-old girl, the other an 11-year-old boy with Down syndrome-in other words, one is utterly unwilling to express affection, the other is sweet but limited by his handicap. Her husband Richard is older than she is, a self-satisfied and condescending academic, yet by no means a bad man. If, as Sheba tells Barbara, "Things fall asleep in a marriage," those alfresco trysts wake them right up. Here's Barbara's terse summary: "I think it is safe to say that she found the physical side of their relationship satisfactory." The victim first of temptation, then of delusion; Sheba is good-hearted, weak-willed and fuzzy-headed.

Though she wouldn't admit it to herself, Barbara is in love with Sheba. It's not an erotic attachment, but it's plenty powerful all the same. "Lonely" doesn't begin to describe her isolation before she and Sheba become friends. The first time she's invited to the Hart's house-for a simple family supper-she wears a new pair of high-heeled sandals bought especially for the occasion; the straps cut into her ankle and she bleeds. That trickle of blood is as eloquent as Barbara's typical understatement: "I am not a casual person." One notes from the beginning something avid and a little louche about Barbara's growing interest in her new colleague. She's clearly envious of the warm bustle of the Hart household, and she's excessively conscious, it seems, of social class ("Sheba is the only genuinely upper-class person I've ever known," she says; and also, "Until she met Connolly, Sheba had never had any intimate contact with a bona fide member of the British proletariat"). But her disturbing quirks are more than made up for by the fact that she refuses to condemn Sheba on moral grounds: "It is mad to describe a middle-aged adulteress as innocent, and yet there is something fundamentally innocent about Sheba."

Has she done any harm? Connolly remains something of a cipher, which seems right: Essentially he's unformed, still a boy. When the affair is exposed, his mother goes ballistic (there's a horrible, hilarious scuffle in the foyer of the Hart home: "The contact lasted only a few seconds, but when Richard pulled Mrs. Connolly off, she was holding a surprisingly large amount of Sheba's hair in her hand"), and the London press explodes with jubilant sanctimony-but actually there's no hint that the kid has been in any way damaged. Barbara insists that "He's had a rather thrilling ride."

But what really matters, in this novel about what the law considers "indecent assault on a minor" (Sheba's brave retort: "There was no assault and I've done nothing indecent"), is not the hot topic of a taboo sexual relationship, but the legally safe and psychically perilous bond between a housewife turned pottery teacher and a bitter, envious spinster. Zoë Heller, master manipulator of these two flawed creatures, manages by the end of her novel to achieve an impressive feat: So hooked are we by her story, so engrossed by Barbara's tightening grip on Sheba, that we lose track of the scandal's looming consequence: the distinct possibility that Sheba will be sent to jail. And-even more impressive a tribute to the sympathy with which Ms. Heller has drawn her characters-we worry about what's next, should Sheba Hart end up in prison: What will happen to the appalling Barbara Covett when she once again finds herself all alone?

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

There's architect Peter Moore, who's been living like a nomad, moving from one Tribeca apartment to another with his wife and two kids. There's writer Zoë Heller and her boyfriend, Sopranos screenwriter Lawrence Konner, and their daughter, who'd moved out to Brooklyn as a last resort. There's photographer Laurie Simmons and her husband, painter Carroll Dunham, who'd left Soho a few years ago, only to feel like displaced Manhattanites in Brooklyn Heights. There's painter Matthew Ritchie, sculptor Harry Rosenzweig, Seven Stories publisher Dan Simons and two other writers, all of whom Mr. Moore describes as the kind of people who made Tribeca what it is, but who are now basically priced out of the neighborhood.

A month ago, the friends–some are just acquaintances–became co-owners of 16 Desbrosses Street, a former shirt-fabric-manufacturing facility. The purchase was the brainchild of Mr. Moore, 43, who studied under Robert A.M. Stern before becoming a Tribeca-specific architect. Mr. Moore came up with the idea 10 years ago; he likes to work on small residential projects that friends–or at least people he likes–will eventually live in.

At his ground-floor office at 515 Canal Street, Mr. Moore, who grew up in Yorkville, described the situation as a solution to the problem of how to get by in Manhattan–which has become a struggle even for him and his upper-middle-class friends, the artists and creative types who used to be valued as the heart and soul of the city. "We can afford this, but none of us are swimming in dough," he said. "People used to do this in the 60's and 70's, but they also tended to be 18 or 20 years younger than the average age of this group, which kind of reflects the harsh realities of New York real estate … the struggling upper-middle class. I don't know how we could do this any other way.

"Now, the buyer [in Tribeca] is a well-heeled professional person, basically," Mr. Moore continued. "There are vestigial pockets that are more creative, and there are sort of white, middle-class ghettos where the rent-protected tenants, who basically just won a Lotto ticket, are clinging on to this crazy ticket–so there's some of that sense of time standing still. But not much."

From his office, Mr. Moore can see the strange new building that he and his friends are now renovating into eight apartments. He describes the process as " Survivor meets This Old House ." Mr. Moore took his first look at 16 Desbrosses Street 10 years ago; he'd wanted to rent and rehabilitate it in the then-fledgling trendy residential neighborhood. "I've always liked the building; it's kind of quirky. It's a turn-of-the-century building, and the façade was stripped in the 40's, so the inside is tin ceilings and cast iron and oak, and the outside is a modern thing, which is very popular these days."

Though that project didn't pan out, Mr. Moore recently heard that the owner of the building, Tuvia Feldman, was leaving Tribeca. "It's a very small neighborhood, with not that many buildings and not that many owners," he said. "You get to learn the lay of the land pretty intensely. The last buildings [left to be renovated] are all like the last of the Mohicans."

Of course, Mr. Moore knew Mr. Feldman. "I've known him for something like 10 years," explained Mr. Moore. "He's a New York story in himself: He drives around in a Rolls Royce, and he came from nothing." They agreed on a price for the building and made a private deal. "People are throwing serious money around, so the very fact that a bunch of regular folks got together to do a building is pretty incredible. [The window on that is] pretty much shot now."

No one else would describe Mr. Moore's partners as "regular folks." Said Mr. Dunham, who sells his lithographs on the Whitney Museum of Art's Web site for up to $1,500 each: "We'd been looking for something with Peter for years, so it was not a new idea for us. It's because of Peter's resourcefulness that this worked out, and he knows a lot of people and he hears the best things."

The owners have divided up the six-story building. Mr. Dunham and Ms. Simmons are building a duplex–a half of one floor as an apartment for their family of four, which will be connected to a studio on the floor below for Ms. Simmons. (Mr. Dunham will keep his studio on West 27th Street in Chelsea.) Ms. Heller and Mr. Konner are taking half of the top floor–2,500 square feet. And Mr. Moore is taking half of the top floor, and the roof, for a garden. "Nothing too exotic," he said. Two other occupants will take whole floors of 5,000 square feet each.

"We're in the midst of figuring out how to build out the space," said Mr. Dunham. "But the idea is to try to get in there as quickly as possible. There's a lot of work to do."

One of the questions is how to deal with such a long, narrow building, which fills its entire 35-by-180-foot lot. There are windows only on either end of the long floors. "That presents its own design challenges," said Mr. Moore.

Otherwise, the building is in terrific condition, Mr. Moore said. "It has old cast-iron columns and old wood floors. They're in wonderful shape–practically just need a coat of polyurethane."

That doesn't mean the construction process has been easy. "It's not just the work of the renovation; it's all the steps, the legal steps, required to get through it," said Mr. Konner. "So there are moments when you feel like it's your full-time job. But if, at the end of it, I have this apartment for a reasonable wholesale price, it's worth it."

Mr. Konner said that, during all this, he has been warned not to read Ms. Heller's column in London's Daily Telegraph , in which she's been chronicling the experience. In her April 28 installment, Ms. Heller explained how the renovation has triggered her "deco-phobia": "My tendency is to assert some absolute but slightly eccentric preference and then, when questioned on it, to take umbrage and refuse to elaborate. I recently announced that I didn't want any kind of kitchen cabinets because they were all ugly. When my boyfriend reasonably inquired where we were going to put the pots and pans, I became huffy and accused him of being 'pedantic.'"

And while it doesn't seem like anyone is about to get voted out of the building, Mr. Moore said that renovating a building with a group of friends can be a trial. "It's kind of like the co-op from hell," said Mr. Moore. "It's not like there's a board meeting once a month–there's one every day."

But Mr. Moore speaks somewhat philosophically about "working collectively": "If only that model could be applied to development on a larger scale," he said. "The idea of pooling child care came up, and that was in itself a compelling reason to do this project." Two other reasons: The basement will be converted into a garage (a long-term plan), and there will soon be rent coming in when AZ Art Framing moves into the ground-floor space.

Then, presumably, Tribeca will be viable for a dozen New Yorkers. "Hopefully, this'll be Sleepy Hollow. I don't think I'll be moving again," said Mr. Moore. But he's not ruling anything out. "Maybe we'll all find a building somewhere else if the market stays strong, and we can make some money [on this building] and roll it over into the next one."

WEST VILLAGE

A HELL OF A PLACE FOR A HONEYMOON: LIV TYLER'S NEW HOUSE Actress Liv Tyler found a husband; now she's found a home. Ever since deciding to flip the 4,200-square-foot apartment she'd bought at the Loft, a new condo at 30 Crosby Street, last winter, the 24-year-old actress has been hunting for a Manhattan address. On May 17, Ms. Tyler signed a contract to buy a $2.9 million townhouse on West 11th Street, according to her publicist, Stephen Huvane of Huvane Baum Halls. Mr. Huvane said that Ms. Tyler was on tour with her fiancé, singer-bassist Royston Langdon of the band Spacehog, and could not be reached for comment.

The four-story, 3,250-square-foot townhouse, near West Fourth Street, has 14 rooms, five of them bedrooms. It also has south, north and east exposures. According to records, it was last purchased in 1995 for $307,500.

When Ms. Tyler, daughter of Aerosmith's lead singer, Steven Tyler, decided to sell the Crosby Street apartment without ever moving in, her mother, actress Bebe Buell, told The Observer : "She wants her home to be the one place where she can find sanctity." Unfortunately, her new house was divided into apartments when she bought it and will require a lot of work to convert into a single residence. Then again, being homeless has never been more glamorous: Ms. Tyler spent the early part of the year in New Zealand filming her next film, Lord of the Rings . According to Mr. Huvane, the work on the house may be finished by December, when the film is scheduled to open.

Meanwhile, Ms. Tyler's fourth-floor apartment at 30 Crosby Street, home to Courtney Love, is still on the market with the Corcoran Group for $3.3 million.

374 West 11th Street

1,758-square-foot condo.

Asking: $1.95 million; selling: $1.95 million.

Charges: $716.

Time on the market: five months.

NOT-SO-WILD WEST? "These folks lived in the Jensen Lewis building [on Sixth Avenue and 15th Street], but they wanted the West Village," said broker Alexander de Bordes of Eychner Associates of his clients, who bought this full-floor condo in January. The apartment, with its "flexible floor plan" (i.e., you have to put in the walls yourself), is in a new condo development on the West Side Highway and seems far from the noise and foot traffic of Chelsea. It has Hudson River views and easy access to the waterfront esplanade, which has helped make the neighborhood increasingly dignified and increasingly popular. Still, said Mr. de Bordes, apartments in the impressive development–and everywhere–are taking some time to sell these days. "Things are selling close to asking," he said, "but it takes longer." This one took six months.

SAG HARBOR, L.I.

RAOUL FELDER'S DIVORCE FROM THE EAST END WAS ACTUALLY ONLY A SEPARATION Last summer, when divorce lawyer Raoul Felder sold his house in East Hampton, he told The Observer that he was through with the East End. "East Hampton is fine," he said, "if you could move it 60 miles closer to the city."

He also said that he had never rented out his house, which he bought in 1980 on Three Mile Harbor Road, because he didn't want to "sleep in a bed someone [else] slept in."

That was before Mr. Felder, 67, was hired by Mayor Giuliani to represent him in his bitter divorce from Donna Hanover. A highlight: Mr. Felder recently said Ms. Hanover was "howling like a stuck pig," and that the next Mayor would have to drag her out of Gracie Mansion from the chandelier.

On May 24, perhaps in order to escape the backlash from his public attacks on the city's abandoned First Lady, Mr. Felder coughed up $540,000 for a brand-new condo on West Water Street in Sag Harbor, a 10-minute walk from the town. (Mayor Giuliani's girlfriend, Judi Nathan, owns a similar condo in Southampton.) Mr. Felder had only seen the place in photographs, but two weeks before the deal closed, his 30-year-old daughter Rachel gave her seal of approval to the place.

"I like the town of Sag Harbor," said Mr. Felder about his waffling on the Hamptons. "It doesn't have the hustle and bustle of East Hampton, which is beginning to look like Coney Island on a bad night."

He said condo life appealed to him, too. "I like that someone else has to worry about the swimming pool and tennis grounds. At my age, I have other things to tend to than all the drudgery."

Mr. Felder's condo comes complete with pots, pans, furniture, a stereo system and bedding. "Just like a hotel," he said. "I can move right in." There are 36 condo units in the complex, the only one on the waterfront in Sag Harbor.

Broker Andrea Ackerman of Dunemere Associates said the three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom condo, with decks off the master bedroom and living room, had recently been renovated "to the nines" and is "really, really cool." "The finishes on the walls were hand-painted," said Ms. Ackerman. "The floor in the powder room was all inlaid rocks from Japan."

"Japanese modern is not my choice," said Mr. Felder of the décor, "but I don't have a problem with it …. But it is pleasant, particularly if you want to be a Zen Buddhist."

Does Mr. Felder want to become a Zen Buddhist?

"I don't know," he said. "I'm a work in progress."

UPPER EAST SIDE

1075 Park Avenue

Two-bed, 2 1/2 bath, 1,800-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $1.695 million. Selling: $1.5 million.

Charges: $2,004; 43 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: nine months.

A FINE MESS OF MEETINGS Selling an apartment can be quite costly, especially if the co-op board of your building is difficult. That's what one couple found out when they were relocated to Hong Kong for longer then they'd expected and were forced to sell their apartment. For their first two years abroad, the co-op board permitted the couple to rent out their classic-six (two bedrooms and a maid's room) apartment. In the beginning of 2000, the couple requested that they be allowed to continue to rent out the place, but heard nothing from the board for months. Finally, after repeated calls to the managing agent of the building, they were told that their request had been turned down months ago, "thus delaying the listing of the apartment for sale," said the seller. It was annoying, but they weren't furious–at least not yet. In April of 2000, they put the apartment on the market for $1.895 million. They didn't sell the place until the following January, after lowering the price to $1.695 million and accepting a young couple's offer of $1.5 million. The hopeful buyers rushed to submit their application to purchase the apartment before the board's scheduled February meeting, but at the meeting one member of the board requested more information, which the board would then have to review at their next meeting. Then the March meeting was canceled for spring vacation, and the board did not meet again until April 9–but this time the board member who'd requested the extra information didn't show up. In a state of panic, the sellers telephoned the board president and arranged for a special meeting on April 17. The buyers were approved after that meeting and the deal finally closed on May 7, but the sellers claim that the two-month delay by the board cost them plenty–not to mention more than $12,400 in maintenance and finance costs. The apartment is sold, but the sellers are still fuming.

This is a review of Zoë Heller's new novel, Everything You Know , but it's really much more about Bridget Jones, the fat-phobic heroine of Helen Fielding's 1998 novel, Bridget Jones's Diary , a book so wondrously smart and funny that it pretty much spoiled my appetite for new fiction-never very large to begin with-for a solid year and a half. It's the first book I can actually remember rooting for, as if it were a sports figure; when it hit the best-seller list (without Oprah Winfrey's help), I was actually whooping with glee.

As with any enormous success, Bridget Jones has her detractors, though I don't pretend to understand them, and her imitators. The book was based on a fictional, confessional-style column that Ms. Fielding wrote for the London Independent and later for The Daily Telegraph . The fiction was good in the it's-funny-because-it's-true sense, and soon there were many confessional-style columns by women in the London papers, some fictional, some actually autobiographical. Which brings us to Ms. Heller, who wrote the latter style of column (her sex life, her Prozac, her guilty enjoyment of Monica Lewinsky) for the London Sunday Times until she quit, declaring that she was tired of being pigeonholed as a "girlie" writer. Now she has turned out Everything You Know , a novel that reads like the anti- Bridget Jones's Diary .

Ms. Heller, unlike Ms. Fielding-who lives in Notting Hill and whose reputation, pre- Bridget Jones , was confined to Fleet Street-arrived in America in the early 90's on the Tina Brown Mayflower, settling in Brooklyn and Bucks County, Pa. From there, Ms. Heller filed her dispatches to London as well as plummy profiles of actor Sylvester Stallone for Ms. Brown's Vanity Fair and designer Marc Jacobs for Ms. Brown's New Yorker (to cite the sampling offered in Knopf's shiny press packet for Everything You Know -no girlie columns included). Ms. Heller's celebrity interviews were not her only brush with filmdom; her father was a screenwriter ( What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ), so too, is her brother and her boyfriend; and in her feckless youth she herself tried a screenplay, which she now dismisses along with the columns.

Everything You Know is clearly meant to raise her up out of the feminine froth she once paddled in and now publicly derides. Her novel is narrated, unreliably, by a 50-year-old man named Willy Muller: a germophobic, half-Jewish, half-German celebrity journalist-ghostwriter with heart trouble, a couple of unappealing girlfriends and a stack of dead female relatives. His wife, Oona, expired in 1971 after hitting her head on a refrigerator door-he may or may not have pushed her; his younger daughter, Sadie, committed suicide not long ago; and by book's end his mother has been eliminated, too.

Willy wrote a self-exonerating tell-all about his marriage called To Have and to Hold that he is trying to turn into a screenplay (he occupies the seamy outskirts of celebrity, which Ms. Heller documents knowingly and well), but he has a significant distraction: Sadie's sexually explicit diaries.

Interestingly enough, though Ms. Heller has protested about being forced to write in a young female voice by her newspaper editors-and her attempt to channel an older man is certainly admirable-Sadie's diaries ("Am feeling v. v. depressed," she writes, Bridget-style) are what keep Everything You Know from being merely a heavy-handed, less-than-wholly-convincing character study.

Willy pretty much loathes the entire world, but he reserves his most acid bile for the opposite sex. He hates it when "women get feisty and direct about stuff." He hates women who cry. He hates nudist beaches-something about the "fried-egg stare of a woman's naked torso" repels him. One girlfriend looks like a "rotting peach." Another girl is a "lipsticked ferret"; yet another "fabulously desiccated … almost heroic in her hideousness." And then there's that "frizzy-haired gargoyle with varicose veins throbbing beneath her tan-colored stockings." I'm not one of those people who thinks misogyny is antithetical to good literature-I often find myself defending the narrators of Martin Amis and John Updike novels-but one can be forgiven for suspecting that, in her strenuous attempt to underscore that she is not, repeat not , a girlie columnist, Ms. Heller has spread the misogyny a bit more thickly and crudely than necessary. (The novel is also heaped with excrement, phlegm, vomit and spit.) The problem is not that Willy is an unlikable character (Humbert Humbert, anyone?); the problem is that he's an abjectly tedious character.

The author is in general a graceful prose stylist, but her taste for extravagant metaphor is not limited to descriptions of women. Mexican cockroaches are "ambulatory patent leather handbags"; the narrator's stomach gazes up at him like "an affectionate haggis." It is not political but esthetic offense that caused this reader's gaze to wander longingly to the galley proof of the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary : Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason . The new book is not due in stores until Feb. 28, so it's too soon to review it. (But reserve your copy now; it's even better than the first one: It's a hundred pages longer and feels a hundred pages shorter.)

Ms. Heller, whose Britishisms ("Tuh!") seem to have been thrown into annoyingly sharper relief by her protracted stay in America and who is perhaps best at portraying what she calls "the grey drear of lumpen Englishness," believes that the American fiction audience has a lamentable tendency to read only what resonates with them or amuses them. Everything You Know feels too much like it merely exists to thumb its nose, albeit with flights of skill, at that tendency. I am plumping, as she might say, for Ms. Fielding's The Edge of Reason to be a big hit, and I will not complain if Ms. Heller's book and its sorry protagonist fade into the darkness. Willy Muller was created by an author cosmetically quite unlike himself, but he's still less daring a creation than Bridget Jones.

I find Ms. Heller's dismissal of "girlie" writing specious. We are not so overwhelmed with female and feminine voices ringing untrammeled around the globe that we couldn't stand to hear a few more. Good or bad writing is not determined by topic, but by execution.

And it seems Ms. Heller herself has not yet entirely abandoned the "girlie" genre; flipping through the January issue of Harper's Bazaar , I noticed that she has penned an account of her post-pregnancy weight-loss quest. How very Bridget Jones.

Oh, you cool, beautiful Brits. Yes, your emotional lives are opaque and, no, you don't put much stock in personal hygiene. But you never, ever take yourselves too seriously.

Having been as defensive as anyone about the British invasion of publishing- lamenting their values (trashy), their eccentricities (James Truman allegedly chewing on the plastic bulb at the end of a blind pull during a meeting) and their anti-Semitism (what wide acclaim there was for last year's Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh , in which a typical line, from Waugh, went, "Yes, I am afraid I must admit to a shade of anti-Jew feeling. Not anti-Semite. I rather like Arabs.")-I find that I'm coming around. I realize that we brought the Brits on ourselves. Our journalism had become turgid and overprofessionalized.

If English Brits are famous for not working, American Brits maintain immigrant standards. "They're like transfer students, they work harder," the writer Patty Marx says. You might even think of them as new Jews: a tiny striving minority who exercise enormous influence over the media.

When my people were clamoring loudly at the gates, Leo Rosten softened up the goyim by humanizing us and promoting our language with The Joys of Yiddish . No Brit has taken on this job. It goes against their public school code (or private school-who can figure that out?) to blow their own horn or open those cool, cabineted hearts to sympathy.

Still, their argot gently seeps. About the sixth time lately that an editorial assistant with an American accent said, "That would be genius" when I merely agreed to fax her something, or maybe when The New York Times Magazine described a Los Angeles police officer as "sneaking out for a guilty fag" ("sneaking out for a guilty smoke just didn't have it," the author Richard Rayner says), I thought, Can I do it? Can I sing the Joys of Briddish?

Here goes:

Knackered . Dead tired. From knacker's yard, slaughterhouse.

Shag . More neutral than screwing or fucking. One source tells me that a slapper (retro Briddish for slut) in a bar might actually say, Fancy a shag? Another Brit says you could say to your liberal uncle, Guess who I shagged last night? "You wouldn't say 'slept with'?" I asked. "That sounds posh." You never want to sound posh when you're talking Briddish.

Tosser . A useless person. From tossing off, one of the poet Philip Larkin's favorite expressions (and activities). Synonym to wanker. It's working class, but that's key to understanding Briddish. Briddish is an upper-class tongue, but it's all high-low. Privileged Brits assimilate the phrases of the working class without quote marks. One Brit reports that Camilla Parker Bowles, possibly the future Queen of England, muttered, "Don't want to bollock the car" when squeezing into a tight parking space. Status-conscious American English could gain something from this mix. (Especially considering the typical flat American response to Prince Charles and Camilla: Why does he want to be king if he wants to be a Tampax?)

Have it off . We had it off last night. Briddish always makes sex sound joyless. Was it Johnny Rotten who captured the national spirit by describing sex as a minute and a half of squishing noises?

Naff . Naff is sure to catch on here, naff is key, naff may be everything. If the Eskimos have 50 words for snow, and apparently they don't, the English have tons of words to express disdain. Naff is wrong, off, or lame, but with a harsh class edge to it. Margaret Thatcher was naff because she was so dowdy, yes, but mainly because she was the daughter of a greengrocer and took herself too seriously. The Spice Girls, the shimmering empty heart of naff.

Pissed . Drunk.

Assholed . Plastered.

Brilliant, brill, fantastic, amazing, excellent, genius . Sorry, English dude, we don't need any of these.

Berk . A jerk, horse's ass. From Cockney rhyming English: Berkshire hunt equals cunt, shortened to berk, now crossing gender. What a beautiful journey, huh. Thus: berk in a Merc. (That's Mercedes, with a hard c.)

Cow . Term of derision for a woman, even a skinny woman. She's a silly old moo.

Bonking, slagging . Notice how Briddish, perhaps influenced by Yiddish, always sounds like it's rolled around in the dirt? (We may not be as clever, but we are cleaner and more presentable than they are. When Martin Amis got his teeth fixed, there was a national outcry.)

He's good news. As close as limp Briddish gets to enthusiasm.

He's passed his sell-by date . Back to the usual snarky fare.

Gobsmacked . Tabloid speech that's going wide, and why not. It means dumbfounded.

Cock-up (noun). A screw-up. Almost as fun to say as the great Yiddish adjective for screwed-up: f'cocked.

Bolshy . Has made the long march from the particular to the generic: self-righteous. "Self-righteous is even too honorable," says Inigo Thomas, of George magazine. "I'd say bolshy about a moody young child. I'd be looking on him fondly, giving him points for trying to get his way."

Stroppy . Bad-tempered. She's in a strop. Employed, as all Briddish is, to enforce a certain manner. "There are so many terms in England indicating a much lower tolerance for grandeur about oneself," says the writer Zoë Heller.

Stitching someone up . Understated Briddish for hatchet job. Stronger than "take the piss."

Take the piss out . A useful phrase meaning to mock or dis. Often wielded by the victim of such behavior: "Don't take the piss," a slightly confrontational expression meaning, You're being unreasonable. You're belittling me. You might even be fucking my wife. (Does a Brit care?)

Spivvy . I don't know what this means, but an English person said it. Something about a scammer with pointy shoes.

Scarpered . Fled.

Knickers . "The vicar was found wearing knickers-that's what British sex was like for a number of years," says Ms. Heller.

Snog . Typical of Briddish to take something sexy, in this case a tongue kiss, and render it silly, childish. It always sounds to me like a blend of snug and snot. Sorry; I prefer to French.

One-off . It happened after the Christmas party, sharing that cab downtown, and what a comedown to run into him on the street two weeks later, lantern-jawed and unctuous. Listen, he said, can we have a drink sometime? You smile icily, Briddishly. I think that was a one-off. An event not repeated. Jesse Sheidlower, an expert on slang at Random House, who disputes my claim that the Joys of Briddish will rival The Joys of Yiddish ("Yiddish was vast!"), reports that one-off is in the Webster's College Dictionary.

Wide boy . This should make it across the pond. Refers to a stylish lower-class man with attitude. Funny, cocky, flashy, scam-running. Bruce Willis before he hit it.

Chippy . Bearing a chip on the shoulder. Which the Brits do, coming over here from their laggard blind-pull-chewing culture. As sure as we Jews did (do?), teeming up from live-poultry Delancey. If you only get to know the Brits-and, no, they don't make it easy-you know that under the cleverness and snobbery, they're anxious to do well here in the bigs and gain our approval (and S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s pay). And why shouldn't they have it? They're better talkers than we are, they're motivated (even if they're no good with numbers).

Of course, speaking Briddish still seems pretentious, posh, climby. Your chippy narrator seethes when his friend says, "My fax machine is in hospital." (The writer Hilton Als says that's bullying: "Americans have always been suspicious of history and other people.")

All that could change, though.

If a tedious, self-important print culture was what pulled the Brits to New York, the push was naff conservative England. That berk John Major and that gray cow Margaret Thatcher. Who wanted to be around for that? Now Tony Blair is allegedly young and exciting (you could fool me), and they're spending millions on the new Tate Gallery and some sort of dome. The upside of Diana's death was that the global response reassured the chippy Brit that his culture still mattered. London's happening. Young Brits want to make their mark there.

They might stop coming. Now can you love them?