Then “Basic Instinct” changed everything. I first saw it on video, long after the controversy (from gay and lesbian rights groups, about the film’s depiction of bisexual women as murderous) and the box office bonanza had died down. It’s a mess, with its typically muddled Joe Eszterhas plot and laughable attempts to capture seamy nightclub life and a score so flagrantly stolen from “Vertigo” that the estate of Bernard Herrmann ought to sue. That doesn’t really matter though; the movie intended only to offer the spectacle of Michael Douglas’ reptilian everyguy being tortured yet again by some emasculating aspect of modern life. Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell, wasn’t meant to be more than the perfect flowering of his paranoia made spectacular flesh.

She was decidedly more than that, and how Stone did it still mystifies me. Certainly, she managed it entirely on her own. Screenwriter Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven are deeply stupid about women; in their fantasies, foxy babes treat sex like professional wrestling, a sport based on taunting and attitude. Stone’s performance floats so far above their conception of Catherine that it seems only tenuously attached to the movie itself, as if she had just dropped by on the way to someplace much more interesting. It’s more persona than performance, really, which is what movie stars are all about.

I knew people who theorized that “Basic Instinct” represented a Madonna backlash, people who argued that it was misogynistic rather than “biphobic,” while still others insisted that it was really an example of male bashing. I didn’t care about any of that. I just marveled that I liked her now, this actress who once repelled me. She became instantly famous, interviewed and photographed, and the more I saw of her the more I liked her, wished her well, admired her even. Every movie she’s ever appeared in since has been bad in some fundamental way, but, to my mind, she never is, however wretched her surroundings. She has learned to concentrate her essence in some way that makes her splendor impervious, another sign of bona fide movie stardom.

Before “Basic Instinct,” Stone was only a very pretty starlet; afterwards, she was beautiful. She still plays femmes fatales, but by some peculiar alchemy, they’re no longer villains. Now they seem like the only sensible people on screen. She’s brought us over to her side.

There’s no clue to the source of Stone’s transformation in Frank Sanello’s “Naked Instinct: The Unauthorized Biography of Sharon Stone.” In fact, having the likes of Sanello write about her is precisely the sort of thing Stone has acquired the habit of rising above. Sanello, who has also penned biographies of Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and Eddie Murphy (you get the impression he can crank out a new one every six months), studied dozens of back issues of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and made at least two phone calls in researching the definitive work that is “Naked Instinct.” (Studio head Sherry Lansing — “not only the most powerful woman in the movie business, she’s also one of the nicest” — talked to Sanello, while producer Mark Rydell, we’re told repeatedly, “wouldn’t even return my calls” despite the author’s tireless, and thoroughly documented, cajoling of “his assistant, Debbie Leonard.” Sanello’s preface reads like an excuse note to an unsatisfied editor.)

“Naked Instinct” — there must be some way, in the public interest, of suing Sanello for that title — is less a book than a 204-page-long series of remarks. Unaccustomed to celebrity bios, I anticipated Sanello’s breathlessness, even relished kitschy expressions like “flop after flopola.” But who can plan for a sentence like “the plot sounds as though Luis Buquel had been given two and a half million bucks to make ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Unabomber’”? Huh? I found myself puzzling over some of Sanello’s attempts at wit as if they were lines of cuneiform or Derrida. “Stone is positively Mr. Billious here, suitable for laming,” he writes of her role in 1994′s “The Specialist.” You figure it out.

With no access to Stone and an underfurnished imagination to boot, Sanello can’t offer much insight into the movie star’s inner life. Instead, between cryptic quips, he hauls out “Beverly Hills psychologist Dr. Brian Miller” to deliver moth-eaten, rent-a-shrink pronouncements about “self-sabotage” and “dysmorphic body image.” Stone, a famously good interview, provides the sharpest commentary on herself. Even if all the quotes from her that Sanello uses are lifted from old magazine articles, they’re still the best stuff in the book.

Sanello has all the usual preoccupations of mediocrity. He loves numbers, supplying us with not only Stone’s IQ (154) and cup size (36-B), her salaries, of course ($300,000 for “Basic Instinct,” $2.5 million for “Casino,” $7 million for “Diabolique”), but also how much the sultan of Brunei paid for the Beverly Hills Hotel, where a minor anecdote occurs ($400 million). He’s positively obsessed with nude scenes, particularly as an indicator of an actor’s clout (the more clout, the less nudity). His amusing quirks include a high opinion of Michael Douglas’ butt and flouncing asides like “Los Angeles magazine, whose editorial board I know from personal experience was staffed by male chauvinist pigs.” But Sanello has no nose for the deeper story. He can report that Stone asked her best friend, Mimi Craven, to lie on the floor out of camera range and hold her hand during the filming of the sex scenes in “Basic Instinct” and never bother to explain who Craven is or the nature of this extraordinary friendship.

Stone has described her childhood as that of “a nerdy, ugly duckling who sat in the back of the closet with a flashlight and read,” distorted by experimental “gifted child” educational programs that made her a misfit among her peers. Perhaps it’s in those memories of standing apart that she finally located the sang-froid that’s carried her through so many bad films. Stone’s particularly bracing to watch when you can practically hear her thinking “Christ, this is idiotic, but nothing surprises me anymore.”

In some of her earlier roles (“Stardust Memories,” “He Said, She Said”), Stone played hallucinatory dream girls. The bland, WASP-y perfection of her youth reminded those filmmakers of a blank screen, ideal for projection. Stupid directors thought they were being clever when they cast her as face-of-an-angel/soul-of-a-grasping-tramp paradoxes (“Irreconcilable Differences”). As long as Stone tried to play along — or, even worse, pose as a regular gal — she set everyone’s teeth on edge. It wasn’t until she embraced her own freakishness that she finally became extraordinary.

In the iconography of the movies, good women are beautiful but don’t know it and bad women are beautiful and use it, but Sharon Stone is beautiful and doesn’t give a shit. It’s no accident that Stone didn’t hit her stride until the age of 34, when most women are confronted with the disastrous transience of their sexual power. That’s when you realize that if you are your face, you’re in big trouble. Stone — who not only doesn’t lie about her age, but makes a point of mentioning it in every interview — seems to have made that leap with exceptional grace. The potency of the interrogation scene in “Basic Instinct” doesn’t come from that notorious flash of Stone’s naked crotch — it’s rooted in the way she eyes the men questioning her and telegraphs, “I know each of your tired little fantasies — bitch, goddess, tail — all too well, and fellas, they’re your problem, not mine.”

In the otherwise inane “The Specialist” there’s a scene that epitomizes this, the way Stone invites us to see how beautiful women bear witness to the blind narcissism of men. Eric Roberts — playing a preening, brutish mafioso, unaware that his mistress, Stone, is the daughter of a couple he once killed and is plotting his death — gazes at her covetously and says, “I see something I like when I look at you. You know what that is? I see myself.” He can’t see, as we can, how much she despises him; he’s too busy dreaming of how she looks on his arm and in his bed.

Chronic irony may be one source of our current moral malaise, but Stone is ironic about our last sacred cow, the importance of appearances. She wears her beauty well because she wears it lightly, ever aware that it’s just passing through, that (in therapeutic parlance) it’s not about her. Her face is her fortune, but that’s all it is. Fawning celebrity journalist and Esquire contributor Bill Zehme once wrote that “women took to her with instant disdain and distrust” because Stone brazenly pursues her own desires and for “reasons perhaps more petty,” a coy way of saying we envy her beauty. I couldn’t disagree more, but to really appreciate Stone, strange as it sounds, a woman has to have digested the fact that looks and sex are never going to nab you anything really worth having. Or, as Stone put it so tartly, “You can only sleep your way to the middle.” And once gravity wreaks its havoc, what have you got left, sugarplum? Like the silent film star Louise Brooks, Stone’s going to make a great old lady — can you really say the same for Winona Ryder or Michelle Pfeiffer?

I like Sharon Stone for other reasons, too: for letting me savor a female Clint Eastwood in “The Quick and the Dead” (she even gets to ride off into the sunset, leaving a woebegone Leonardo DiCaprio yearning in a doorway), for channeling the spirit of Bette Davis in “Diabolique,” for turning in the only top-notch performance in “Casino,” whose director referred to her as “the girl” on the set. But most of all, I admire her for being impossible to degrade, although sometimes it seems that she’s paid for her invulnerability in loneliness (then again, what did vulnerability ever do for Marilyn Monroe?). She’s often a sex object, but even when imperiled, she’s never that truly contemptible thing, a rescue object. When she’s on-screen, the audience gets all the glamour and charisma we demand from a movie star, but she doesn’t sell her soul. She never begs to be loved. She gives us just enough of herself to suggest how much more we’re not getting, and can never get from a phantom of light and shadow. She reminds us of how much less a movie star is, after all, than a real, live woman.

Still, the dream of interactive books lives on, despite a series of digital disappointments ranging from hypertext fiction to CD-ROMs to experimental Web novels to current ventures in social reading. Previously, I wrote about the inherent tensions between interactivity and narrative in enhanced fiction e-books. Indeed, there’s little evidence that images, videos, sound effects or clickable doohickeys add anything of value in the eyes of most readers of prose fiction. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the enhanced e-book of Stephen King’s novel “11/22/63″ contained a 13-minute film by King himself, yet only 45,000 readers were willing to shell out the extra $2 to get it, compared to 300,000 who bought the unadorned e-book ($14.99) or the 1 million purchasers of the print edition ($35). King’s publisher expressed doubts that enhanced e-books were worth the extra trouble and expense.

Nonfiction, however, is another matter. While some developers labor in vain to improve upon the immersive storytelling of novelists like King, others are taking factual material that might have once been published between hard covers and turning it into strange and wondrous new creations. The most successfully enhanced e-book is the one you may not even recognize as a book.

The first among these were introductory science apps like “The Elements” (used to showcase the iPad’s potential when the device was first released) and astronomy apps like “Solar System for iPad” and “Solar Walk.” A recent release, “Back in Time,” lets the user turn the hands of a cosmic clock and scroll through a series of images to explore a timeline of the history of the universe. All of these books — for that’s the category they’re given in Apple’s App Store — use touch-responsive 3-D animation and other model-like features to help the reader visualize concepts well outside their everyday experience: vast distances in time or space, the motion of the planets and the relationship between molecular structure and palpable objects. Technically, I know that the earth’s tilted axis as it orbits the sun determines the changing seasons, but “Solar Walk” allows me to see it happen.

The popularity of science apps like “The Elements” no doubt encouraged Apple to move aggressively into digital textbook publishing with its recent upgrade to iBooks. The iBookstore, with its too-broad categories and abysmal metadata, has failed to emerge as a contender among retailers of trade e-books. Apple now seems to be concentrating its energies on the education market. IBooks titles can incorporate an array of visual, audio and video features, which make it possible for publishers to create books like “The Elements” for older students. Sometimes the results add little more than eye candy, sometimes not. The sample book released with the upgrade, “Life on Earth” by E.O. Wilson, sports a lot of beautiful photographs and videos, few of which are particularly informative, but the animations of cell activity do help make the weird-looking structures of the microscopic world comprehensible.

Whole categories of routine instructional books are in the process of being digitally revolutionized. Cookbooks can include demonstration videos for beginners and advanced forms of recipe organization for more practiced cooks. You can better learn to lift hand weights or fix a car or do card tricks from a combination of text and video. There’s not much glamour or art in enhancing such practical titles, but there’s a lot of common sense. The linearity of stories may be fundamental to the pleasure they offer, but in books like these, linearity was always merely arbitrary, imposed by the print book form. Hardly anyone reads them one page at a time, in order, from cover to cover.

Even a work of substantive narrative nonfiction, however, can be genuinely enriched with some basic multimedia add-ons. The enhanced edition of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” comes with several short videos featuring the Mumbai slum dwellers who serve as the main characters in that remarkable book. These films form a moving version of the photographic inserts traditionally tipped into the center of biographies and histories. You can’t read the book without wanting to know what these people look like. However, since most readers deciding which version to buy haven’t read the book yet, it will be interesting to see how many are willing to spring the extra buck for the edition with the videos.

Boo shot the footage on a Flip camera as part of her research. Once upon a time (say, two years ago), these videos might have been offered for free on the author’s or publisher’s website. But not every nonfiction author just happens to have a lot of documentary images and video on hand, waiting to be repurposed for publication. The great problem with any e-book enhancement is cost. Original artwork, video and animation must be commissioned or the right to use preexisting works obtained. That gets expensive — really expensive. Voice-overs and readings call for the skills of professional actors. The whole kit and caboodle then has to be inserted into the text, which depending on how well-integrated it is, may require the expertise of programmers.

Most authors and book publishers aren’t in the business of producing this sort of thing. Add to that a prevailing attitude among consumers that e-books ought to be cheaper than their print counterparts — no matter what extras they include — and there’s not much incentive for book publishers or authors to take the trouble. As understandable as this reluctance may be from a business perspective, it’s still disappointing. Imagine how much more enlightening, say, a book on popular physics or the military campaigns of Alexander the Great or the current fiscal crisis might be with a few well-considered moving or interactive images.

An example, and one of the few enhanced e-books considered a genuine success, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” an examination of the popular right-wing response to the counterculture of the 1960s. The enhanced e-book edition includes 27 clips, taken from CBS News archives, illustrating key events in a highly televised period of American history. Each clip is embedded in the page that refers to it. But bear in mind that the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, is a division of CBS, which surely made it much easier to obtain the rights to use those clips.

“Nixonland” started with a (celebrated) text, then added video. NBC News recently announced the formation of a digital book publishing division that works in reverse. It will produce titles on current events and personalities with the clips as the springboard, and then incorporate text from published books, NBC staff writers and freelancers. Companies who already know how to make videos, animated graphics and complex websites have the edge when it comes to publishing multimedia e-books. All they have to do is hire some professional writers. Traditional book publishers, on the other hand, have to figure out how to commission several types of visual media despite having little experience in working with anything but text. Besides, writing is cheap, right?

Not so fast. Complaints from app consumers about the weak writing in some otherwise spectacular digital books suggest that corner-cutting in this department is rife. Programmer- or designer-driven works often borrow text from Wikipedia and other public-domain sources, and this does not go unnoticed. One happy exception is the recently published “Skulls by Simon Winchester,” an app by Touch Press, the company responsible for “The Elements” and last year’s groundbreaking T.S. Eliot e-book, “The Waste Land.” The ever-debonair Winchester, bestselling author of “The Professor and the Madman,” not only wrote the text that accompanies the app’s 300 rotatable images of human and animal skulls (as well as artifacts representing the human head) — he also reads it. The result is informative and thoughtful as well as gorgeous and diverting. More, please.

Further reading

The Wall Street Journal on enhanced e-books

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is the result of intensive, immersive observation over the course of four years in the life of a Mumbai shantytown called Annawadi. Boo’s technique is as exhaustive as it is self-effacing. She conducts countless hours of interviews with her key “characters,” interviews that, to judge by the results, can be as searching as therapy sessions. She backs these up with documentary research and shoe leather reporting. To establish what actually happened during a crucial event — the self-immolation of a one-legged woman following a dispute with one of the book’s central families — she interviewed 168 people, many of them more than once. She never mentions herself.

It’s tempting to compare the resulting narrative, seamless and intimate, to a novel, but since the reading public appears to be allergic to fiction about people like the Annawadians — poor, foreign and dark-skinned — that would hardly do it justice. This is a scrupulously true story, and therefore comes to us with an added luster of authenticity. But unlike most reporting on the poor, foreign and dark-skinned, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” mightily resists the urge to treat any of the half-dozen principle characters as examples of their class. The whole point of the book, as Boo states in an interview with her editor included as an afterword, “is to portray these individuals in their complexity — allow them not to be Representative Poor Persons.”

Who are they? Most of them are members of two families, each led by an indefatigable but flawed matriarch saddled with a weak spouse. The Husains are Muslims, migrants from northern India, who have built some modest security for themselves in the trash-picking trade, largely through the sharp eyes and diligence of the oldest son, Abdul. The other clan is Hindu and led by the formidable Asha, a ruthless fixer who aims to make herself the “slumlord” of Annawadi via her connection to the Hindu nationalist political party, Shiv Sena (a sort of Hindu Tea Party). Supporting characters include the bright and curious Sunil, a boy of indeterminate age, who sells his scavengings to Abdul.

Abdul is the quintessential head-down striver, while his brother Mirchi — in whose education the family has sunk a lot of its resources — dreams of “wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel” like the ones attached to the nearby international airport. For her part, Asha has raised a beautiful daughter, Manju, who promises to be the first female college graduate from Annawadi, though she’s too tender-hearted for her mother’s tastes and dreads being married off, as planned, to a boy from Asha’s home village. Still, Manju’s lucky compared to her spirited best friend, Meena, whose Dalit (untouchable) family beats her every time she presumes to question their orders or plans for her.

The Husains’ fate takes a turn for the worse when they decide to spend some of their new disposable income on a tile floor for their shack. (The “Beautiful Forevers” of the book’s title refers to a repeating ad for similar tiles, posted on the wall that screens off the slum from the airport road.) Their neighbor — the one-legged, man-crazy and quarrelsome Fatima — virulently objects to the noise, and the ensuing dispute ends with Fatima setting herself on fire after promising to “put you in a trap.” In the hospital, she accuses the Husains: first of burning her, and then of compelling her to burn herself. The case plunges the family into the nightmare world of Indian law enforcement and jurisprudence.

The charge is ridiculous, but this system, which for several years consumes much of the family’s time and nearly all of its money, is less a method of controlling crime and enacting justice than a vast bribe factory for the officials within it. Corruption and cronyism run and shape the world of Annawadi, from the thugs who extort protection money from rag pickers like Sunil to the nun who takes expired food donated to her orphanage and resells it to street merchants. In one of the book’s most eloquent ironies, Manju has to give up teaching the makeshift English classes she’s been offering to the local children because she’s too busy helping her mother administer an entirely fictional network of kindergartens funded by a Western nonprofit.

Boo mostly refrains from generalizing commentary; that’s part of what allows “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” to hug its subjects as closely as their monsoon-drenched hand-me-downs. But when she does choose to pull back a bit, it’s to comment on how magical thinking and conspiracy theory flourish in a world this arbitrary and unjust, a place that so glaringly lacks “a link between effort and result.” A string of deaths in Annawadi are attributed to a curse prosecuted by Fatima’s ghost, and above all, “powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked … Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously with one another for spoils.”

You can see why some of the people Boo writes about give up, but what’s more striking are the ones who don’t. Abdul in particular makes for an arresting figure, a man struggling to work out the pattern of a virtuous life in an immoral world. Little Sunil cases the city outside Annawadi with an eye to unexploited opportunities. Manju joins a civil defense network so she can study the manners of its middle-class members. By the time “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” winds to a close, it seems almost unbearable not to know whether any of them will succeed. We can’t. What happens next can’t be told because it’s still happening, right now.

I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book — although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad’s system-wide “pinch to expand” feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother’s pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, “I’m trying to read the story!” (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.

The latest crop of enhanced e-books struggle mightily to overcome this dilemma. The vast majority of such books are kids’ titles, for the simple reason that literature for young children has always included images. The pictures give kids something to look at as the books are being read aloud to them, and this helps cement the relationship between printed and spoken language. Every children’s e-book offers a read-aloud feature in which a recorded voice recites the text. Most offer the ability to tap individual words to hear them spoken aloud. Parents understandably believe that these apps will help their kids learn to read — and that they make tempting, but still educational, alternatives to television.

The most celebrated children’s e-book at the moment is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” an app created by the Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios. “Morris Lessmore” is also a film, one of the five nominated for best animated short in the 2012 Academy Awards. It’s about a boater-wearing bibliophile who gets blown by a hurricane to a magical library where the books fly around like birds and quote their most famous lines. It’s not much of a story, but it looks fabulous. Nevertheless, you can tell a medium is in trouble when artists in some other form start making gooey nostalgic tributes to its inherent “wonder.” Although “Morris Lessmore” is sort of an e-book, it’s mostly a movie, apparently because only a movie can do justice to the glory of reading.

Moonbot’s follow-up, “The Numberlys” is even more gorgeous than “Morris Lessmore.” A visual tribute to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and set in a colorless, industrial world of numbers, it’s about five homunculi (looking just like the little men holding hands around the edges of Chinese pincushions) who invent the alphabet. “The Numberlys” allows its “reader” to help in this manufacturing project by shooting projectiles, bouncing objects and spinning devices to fabricate each letter. What the app illustrates is that the more sophisticated an enhanced e-book becomes, the more closely it resembles a game. Text is even more marginalized in “The Numberlys” than it is in “Morris Lessmore,” and while the result is charming, no parents should kid themselves that it will help teach their kids to read; it’s more likely to teach them how to play “Angry Birds.”

By now, the theory that the novel of the future will be a game has become almost venerable. That’s despite indications that — as the critic and author Tom Bissell pointed out in his book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” — narrative and interactivity are in fundamental respects incompatible. Where games offer the pleasure of mastery, narrative offers the pleasure of surrender. You can beat “Halo, ” but you can’t win “To Kill a Mockingbird”; the notion doesn’t even make sense. A “Hamlet” in which Hamlet can blithely decide to kill his uncle as soon as his father’s ghost tells him to is not “Hamlet,” and, furthermore, not that interesting. Part of the power of that story is its feeling of inevitability, the understanding that each event follows from those preceding it and ultimately derives from the nature of each character.

This potent sense of causality, along with a subtle balance of expectation and surprise, is the great storyteller’s secret weapon. When you find yourself caught up in a story like a swimmer in a riptide, unable to tear yourself away, chances are you feel immersed in another world. You know it’s not real, but somehow, for a while, it has become far more palpable than the reality around you. You can almost see the characters, feel the cold wind on their faces, hear the pursuing footsteps of the villain, and your heart speeds up. You may even become oblivious to your immediate surroundings. (Video games can create a similar sense of immersion via different means, which is one reason why the two are sometimes confused.)

Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced e-book publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions.

Take, for example “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” an iconic Sherlock Holmes story frequently chosen by e-book enhancers as a giveaway to demonstrate their wares. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are in the public domain.) Recently, I read the story three times, in three different enhanced formats.

The first, a Vook edition, represents one of the earliest stabs at an enhanced e-book. It presents the complete text with interspersed videos offering background information on Baker Street and Holmesian detection techniques. Some of these mini-documentaries are narrated by a man wandering around the streets of London, inexplicably dressed in formal evening wear and top hat and looking like a music hall performer, but you can’t expect “Masterpiece Theatre”; a problem with adding videos onto books is that it’s expensive to produce. Some of the videos are interesting, but only after you’ve read the story, which means there’s no particular reason why they should be packaged with it.

A newer company, BookTrack, dispenses with video entirely and sells books with accompanying soundtracks that keep time with your reading. If it’s a dark and stormy night in the story, the soundtrack plays rain effects. BookTrack’s accompaniment to “The Speckled Band” mostly consists of crackling fires, ticking clocks and chirping birds (for the scenes in the countryside). This is pleasant enough, but once I slipped into the tale (which works surprisingly well even when read three times in a row), I largely ignored it. Perhaps this indicates a kind of success — at least I wasn’t distracted from Holmes’ exploits. On the other hand, I was so intent on the old house of my imaginings that I didn’t need creaking floorboards and footsteps to make it more present. And as someone who resents overbearing movie soundtracks instructing me on how to feel about every scene, the music was simply obtrusive.

The most enjoyable version of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is published by Byook (I know, I know). It’s sort of an adult picture book that features both BookTrack-style soundtrack and marginal illustrations that soak into the page over the course of a minute’s reading. These reminded me of the elaborately decorated editions of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books passed down to my siblings and me from my father’s parents; hovering at the periphery of my vision, they really were atmospheric without being distracting. And because Conan Doyle’s story hangs on the layout of a room and of the rooms along a creepy corridor, a couple of the illustrations were actually helpful. An abridged version of the original story (heretical to purists, but I can’t say I minded), the Byook “Speckled Band” also features some fine original full-screen art in a style resembling paper cutouts, a little like the full-page plates routinely found in print novels during Holmes’ time.

Being shown the floor plan of the Gothic Stoke Moran manor house isn’t essential to understanding “The Speckled Band,” but it didn’t pitch me out of the imaginative space of the story, either. To the contrary; having to puzzle too hard over the text to visualize the configuration of a scene (as I did when I first read the story, at age 12) can sometimes break a story’s spell. When an author’s fictional world is very complex, and spans several volumes — as is the case with, say, George R.R. Martin — it’s easier to see how an enhanced e-book can help sustain the illusion of an alternate reality, rather than undermining it. Martin’s U.K. publisher, HarperCollins, has just come out with an enhanced e-book of “Game of Thrones,” with maps that track the characters’ movements and a glossary so readers can look up any character whose identity has temporarily slipped their minds — Martin has created over 1,000 of them.

For the most part, though, fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements. When they don’t work, the enhancements can’t save them. Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games” seems piercingly vivid to her millions of young (and not so young) readers, even though none of the print editions of the books have contained a single image of her heroine. An expertly told story is all the enhancement most works of fiction require.

But, of course, not all books are fiction or narrative. It’s with nonfiction — a vast category of books, unfortunately defined by what it’s not — that the enhanced e-book offers the most thrilling potential and the most illuminating accomplishments. I’ll be taking a look at those next week.