Jean Hanff Korelitz

My daughter was young, nearly a year old, and on an utterly normal suburban summer day, I was driving her home from an exercise class at my local YWCA when I felt the first tickle on my scalp. The dreaded word popped into my head: lice.

When I got home, I put my daughter in her crib and went to the bathroom. Parting my hair, I saw a tiny black dot moving over my scalp, then another. Then I felt a tickle on my arm. Another one on my leg. These lice were colonizing my limbs. I hurriedly checked my daughter, but she seemed to be fine. I considered this something of a victory.

Because it was me, not her, I thought I’d better get a doctor’s opinion. Sitting in her examining room a few hours later, I pointed out a tiny black dot moving leisurely across a patch of exposed knee through a hole in my jeans. She snatched it between glass slides and went into the next room, where I was soon invited to examine an absolutely vicious looking insect through a microscope. My doctor laughed. I had already been in that summer for a nasty reaction to a bee sting and for a Lyme tick bite.

“You don’t need a doctor,” my doctor said. “You need an entomologist.” I was sent home with instructions to follow the instructions on the Nix package, and I stoically did so: shampoo, then an hour of combing my long black hair on the back porch. I felt rather smug that I had handled things so well. By late that afternoon, I was on the phone to my father, bragging about how responsible I’d been, how competent, how efficient. My first case of lice, dispatched with alacrity! I’d certainly showed those little bastards who was boss.

I noticed, as I said this, a tiny black dot crawling up my leg. Impossible. It was impossible. I’d followed the directions exactly. I’d combed and combed. I’d stood in a scalding shower making sure every millimeter of skin was washed clear of little black dots. How could this be happening?

I called my doctor. Sometimes you need to do it twice, she said.

I did it twice. I scrubbed and combed, and for the next three days, those little black dots continued to crawl over my scalp and body. I ceased to live a normal life. I sat for hours, obsessively examining my skin, ignoring my daughter except to ascertain yet again that she was little-black-dot-free. I endured carcinogenic levels of Nix as I did the treatment a third time. They wouldn’t stop crawling over my body. I began to fixate on the word “infested.” I was infested. But what was the source of the infestation? Was it inside me? Were they crawling out of an orifice? Or some heretofore undetected interruption in my skin? I did not know how, or if, I could ever enter the world again. How could I go out in public with insects crawling all over me, as if I were a piece of food left rotting in the sun? Was this the first stage of a process of complete decay? Ashes to ashes? Dust to dust?

Then, gradually, my obsession began to clear. An hour passed without a new, crawling black dot. Then two hours. Then 12. I began to brighten. I didn’t know why it was ending, but it did seem to be ending. I thought I might try to drive into town and get some groceries. I took my daughter out to the car and put her in her car seat. I was about to close the door when I noticed a tiny black dot crawling over her plump little leg.
Transfixed and horrified, I did, nonetheless, begin to have a glimmer of an idea. I pressed down with my hand on the back seat. Black dots swarmed over my fingers.

I wasn’t infested. My car was infested.

And so the mystery unraveled itself. It began with the bird’s nest, lodged on an overhead beam in the garage. We were too kindhearted, of course, to inconvenience the birds and their progeny, who were so cute if you ignored the bathroom they made of the roof of the car. Rather less obvious were the little mites they shook from their feathers, sprinkling them over the car’s top.

If you looked closely, you could see an orderly line of them from the roof to the right rear window, where they disappeared through a crack into the car’s interior. The upholstery was an insect convention, and we were the equivalent of raw chicken.

I called my husband. He came home with two flea bombs, tossed one in the back seat and the other in the trunk, and for a delightful, sadistic hour I watched every insect in that car die what I fervently hoped was a painful death. I did not park my car inside the garage until the birds had left for alternate accommodations. And so ends my strange but true story of lice.

Except, of course, that they weren’t lice at all. But if you’ve ever had lice in your family you knew that already — you knew as soon as I said I could see those little black dots on my scalp, because actual lice are too small to be seen (though their eggs, or nits, are not). And you knew when I found them all over my body, because lice tend to stick to the hairy parts. What they specifically were, those nasty, horrible, crawling things, I’ve never actually found out. My doctor, in her wisdom, was speaking the truth: I did need an entomologist.

And believe it or not, in the six years since, no one in my family yet has been afflicted with real lice, an effect I attribute (perhaps wrongly) to one of my greater failings as a mom: a certain lack of scrupulousness in the hair-washing department. My daughter is lucky if hers gets done once a week, and it’s well known that lice prefer clean hair. (One close friend, who is very punctilious on this issue and washes her daughter’s hair every night, had a whopper of an infestation last year.)

Despite this inadvertent precaution and the fact that the lice themselves are reportedly becoming more resistant to our treatments with every passing hour, I still keep my package of Nix on hand, preparing for the inevitable. When they come — and they will come — I will beat the crap out of them with every weapon in the arsenal.

And what of my two cousins, routed out of Dalton for unleashing lice on the fair heads of New York’s junior elite? One became an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and the other’s a pediatrician at one of the best children’s hospitals in the country. So there!

So last fall, when I first read about the Million Mom March, a Mother’s Day demonstration in Washington to protest the vast number of guns in our culture and the ease with which they can be procured, I thought … well, first I thought: “Why didn’t I think of that?” Then I thought: Brilliant.

The person whose idea it was is Donna Dees-Thomases, a New Jersey mother and a part-time publicist for David Letterman. Dees-Thomases’ children attend preschool at a Jewish community center — a preschool not unlike the one in Granada, Calif., where, last August, a white supremacist decided to “send a message” by shooting at kids.

A week after the JCC shooting, Dees-Thomases applied for a permit to march on the Washington Mall. Then she started calling her friends. Says Dees-Thomases: “It was my idea for about five minutes.”

The Million Mom March was launched with a press conference on — symbolically enough — Labor Day. In keeping with the pregnancy theme, the 25 mothers at the press conference challenged Congress to use the nine months before Mother’s Day to enact what they call “common-sense” gun legislation.

Personally, I would love to see every gun on the planet disappear. But the Million Mom platform isn’t calling for an outright ban on handguns. This march is about the no-brainer stuff: equipping all handguns with safety locks and childproofing devices; licensing and registering each handgun; requiring background checks and cooling-off periods before the purchase of a handgun; and limiting handgun purchases to one per month per person. It is hard to believe that responsible gun owners would want anything less.

In nine months, Dees-Thomases announced at the press conference, thousands of mothers would march on Washington, either in celebration of such laws having been passed, or — in the more likely event of Congress’ continued inactivity on this issue — to reiterate the demand for them.

It’s hard to imagine a barrage of objections to Dees-Thomases’ proposals. Aren’t we sick of it already? Haven’t we had enough of the carnage caused by guns? Ten-year-olds sharpshooting their classmates? Surly adolescents opening fire in the lunchroom? The “disgruntled former employee” looking to go out in a blaze of glory? A 6-year-old looking to settle a score on the playground?

And what about the more than 4,000 children who die in gun-related accidents each year? That’s 11 kids a day. And we’re not talking about crimes, or intentional shootings. We’re talking — or not talking enough — about accidents.

In March 1996, a paranoid loser took his arsenal into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and murdered 16 children and their teacher. The British were not silent in their outrage. Though guns in the United Kingdom were already relatively scarce, less than a year passed before an act of Parliament all but banned them. (It’s almost quaint to note the few guns exempted by this law: starter’s pistols, guns intended for the humane slaughter of animals and pistols for use in recognized pistol clubs, to be locked and stored in the clubs when not in use.)

In this country, by contrast, this sensitive and decisive response to tragedy seems to be out of the question. Where is our outrage?

The Million Mom March takes a big-tent approach to generating support for gun legislation: Its organizers believe that women from a broad political spectrum can and do agree that guns ought to be both regulated and rare.

I’m looking forward to meeting people who disagree with me about everything under the sun except, for example, the notion that each gun manufactured in this country ought to be outfitted with one of the 30 existing patented devices designed to help childproof it. Even more, I look forward to the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of mothers (and others) converging on the Capitol. And perhaps most of all, I await with keen anticipation the spin that G. Gordon Liddy and his ilk will employ in order to demonize scores of mothers and their children.

“Jack-booted soccer moms,” perhaps?

Yes, there will be celebrities (Rosie O’Donnell has already RSVP’d). And yes, I’m sure a couple of rock stars will drop by to serenade us between the speeches, and yes, we will be joined by those members of Congress whose political convictions match our own.

There will be the mothers and fathers of children whose lives have been devastated by guns. (Some of those mothers and fathers will travel all the way from Dunblane.)

And then there will be the rest of us: those of us who know that our children are just as vulnerable to gun violence as anyone else so long as we continue to allow easy access to handguns.

Naturally, no march on Washington would be complete without its counter-demonstration. The Armed Informed Mothers (that’s AIM for short), an offshoot of an organization called Second Amendment Sisters, will be there to let Congress know that they “won’t stand for having our right to defend our families ripped away.”

According to this group, the Million Moms have all been persuaded that guns fire themselves. AIM has put a new spin on the old adage: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Their new version goes like this: “Any inanimate object will just sit there until a person picks it up. What they do with it depends on what kind of respect they’ve been taught for human life.”

To me, respect for human life begins with making it more difficult to obtain an inanimate object that is designed to snuff it out.

So when Mother’s Day rolls around May 14, I’m getting on the bus. Tough as it might sound to leave town on the only day of the year my children are obligated by law to be nice to me, I find it more important to spend the day making things a little better — a little safer — for them.

Brilliant.

I wish to make my position clear. Am I claiming that a mutt — a result of undirected and frequently unknowable parentage, an animal often elevated from the streets or plucked from the death row of an animal shelter — is just as good as a purebred dog, whose lineage has been shepherded through generations of superior specimens?

I am not.

I am claiming that a mutt is better.

I admit to a certain sick fascination with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with its eccentric, dog-mad participants (who insist on calling dog shows their “sport,” though many aren’t in the same peak physical condition as their canines) and with the absurdity of placing vastly different dogs in competition with one another by judging which comes closest to its own breed standard. Most of all, I am struck by an irony central to the lot of a purebred dog: As it attains the hallmarks of its breed, it seems to simultaneously relinquish its basic dogginess, until it is less a dog than a Pomeranian, Collie or Bloodhound. A purebred dog, in other words, may indeed be pure, but is it a dog? Dogginess, to a poodle, is a secondary trait, far less essential than poodleness. And let’s face it: A Yorkie is only a Yorkie — whether it’s a dog at all is questionable.

A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference. A mutt knows that you have chosen him for himself, and not because he is of the type you set out to get. Unlike a purebred, who has been bred to attain the standard of some anonymous person’s aesthetic opinion, each mutt is paradoxically unique in its doghood, the product of a now broken mold, an experiment in canine endeavor whose results will never be repeated.

A mutt is also a poster child for natural selection: tough as a whip, sharp as a tack and just generally glad to be alive. He seems to understand that he has been brought into the world by forces far more serendipitous than human design — nobody is out there breeding mutts.

The implication of AKC registration is that a dog who has it is better than a dog who hasn’t. But television exposis have shown that AKC puppy mills can be identical to non-AKC puppy mills, and understandably so, since the AKC can hardly investigate and monitor every breeder who registers his or her dogs by mail, or indeed computer.

More to the point, purebred dogs, unlike mutts, can be rather frail. Like those European royal families of the 19th century, the animals are so aggressively inbred that many breeds have, by now, their own earmarked diseases or infirmities. Bulldogs, their faces bred flatter and flatter over the years, are known for breathing problems. Dachshunds, bred long, suffer spinal problems. Huskies go blind more often than other dogs. German Shepherds are known for hip displasia. Dalmatians, as I’ve recently learned, are often born deaf. Scotties can be absurdly aggressive. And Retrievers and Labs — to put it delicately? — are stupid.

It isn’t their fault, poor things. They’ve been mercilessly messed with, altered in color, feature and trait, their DNA cut and pasted over countless generations. And for what? AKC breed specifications are sometimes related to the work a breed traditionally did in the misty past — a Jack Russell Terrier, for example, is supposed to have a strong tail because he might get stuck chasing a rabbit into a hole and need to be pulled out — but remind me, what important work did a Maltese perform?

And while we’re at it, what possible difference does it make whether a Great Dane’s ears point straight up or not? At the same time, the standards provided by the AKC are of an almost literary content, but markedly impractical for the task of judging one dog above another. As the standard for one popular breed reads, “the ideal dog is stamped with a look of quality and nobility difficult to define, but unmistakable when present.” And I thought anthropomorphism was just an SAT word!

Watching the dog show judges finger the dogs’ tails, peer at their teeth and feel their bones, I am always reminded of that scene in “Europa, Europa” in which the eugenics professor measures a young schoolboy’s head with calipers and pronounces him satisfactorily Aryan. (He’s actually Jewish.)

Yes, I acknowledge the reverse snobbery of mutt devotion: My mutt is indeed better than your AKC registered dog — hale where yours is delicate, intelligent where yours is dim, game where yours is standoffish. My dog is vicious to the uninvited guest, lavishly affectionate to the invited one and so freakishly acute that he has mastered the English language.

When people frown at him and ask, “What breed of dog is that?” I can only say that he transcends breed. And to those who vie for best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show this week? I humbly submit that the best dogs of all aren’t even in the running.

I just had my second planned Caesarean section. Anyone want to fight with me?

Yes, yes, I know natural birth was born of the women’s movement. I know about those midwives down on the Farm in Tennessee who rhapsodized about “the surges” (that’s contractions, to you and me) in their classic book, “Spiritual Midwifery,” and reminded us that labor is an expression of female power, an umbilical connecting us directly to the goddess, the earth, our higher power as we understand her. We’re supposed to eschew pain relief in order to experience fully our transformation into mothers and the rush of new life.

I understand all that. I even respect it. But I maintain that, in the end, the natural birth movement has done a great disservice to women. That its insistence that a mother can and should control her labor — equipped with “birth plans” and proscriptions about fetal monitors and episiotomies — is both illusory and damaging to women. Because when you get right down to it, labor can be neither planned nor controlled; its a kinetic, quicksilver process that may slip instantly through the fingers of the best doctor or midwife, who must then be ready to react with any and every available response — including C-section — to avoid a tragic outcome for mother, child or both.

It’s the preachiness of the natural birth phenomenon that I can least abide, the sympathy and tut-tutting of other women when they discover you’ve had a Caesarean (the sympathy is if you had to have one; the tut-tutting if you chose to). And, worst of all, the utterly unnecessary self-castigation of mothers themselves, wrought by this absurd requirement that we have a “good” and “successful” birth experience.

I remember the first of these mothers I encountered, seven years ago in a prenatal exercise class. She had a young child already and tearfully confided to the rest of us, first-timers all, that she had originally planned to wait another year or two before having a second baby, but the failure of her first birth experience (she’d been “forced” to have a Caesarean by the fetal distress of her baby during labor) had proved so overwhelmingly and lastingly upsetting to her that she felt compelled to try again, as soon as possible, to “get it right.”

This smack of failure, this sense of falling short despite the best intentions to be “natural,” is something I’ve heard again and again from otherwise sensible women. And seldom, if ever, do they pause to consider what the consequences of that catalytic fetal distress or erratic heartbeat might have been, had some authoritative and scalpel-happy doctor not burst their bubble by commanding a Caesarean. It seems to me that the fear of doing it wrong has replaced our fear of dying in childbirth (which is now, thankfully, very rare) and surpassed our fear of losing our baby in childbirth (which is also, thankfully, very rare). But try thinking of each and every one of those disappointing emergency Caesareans as a baby who didn’t die, or wasn’t devastated by oxygen deprivation on the way to being born. Get the picture?

Of course, adherents of the natural birth religion aren’t the only ones down on Caesareans. There are perfectly sane women who fervently wish to avoid them on a variety of seemingly sensible grounds, chiefly a perception of greater pain and a longer recovery period than that associated with vaginal birth. With the understanding that I speak only of scheduled Caesarean sections — and not emergency surgery following long hours of labor — allow me, please, to dispel these myths.

Myth No. 1: pain. Sure, a Caesarean is painful, at least immediately following the surgery. You can’t expect to get off scot-free. When that spinal block wears off, you may feel, as I did seven years ago, as if Hulk Hogan were sitting on your abdomen. And yet I clearly recall clicking away at my handy morphine drip and listening to some poor woman screaming down the hall. I was in pain, but my pain didn’t approach that pain. And it quickly got better.

Myth No. 2: a long recovery period. Here, it’s important to take into account the extenuating circumstances of a scheduled Caesarean. You know when you are going to give birth — it’s scheduled. You go out to dinner the night before, for a festive (if non-alcoholic) farewell to your childless state. You go home. You go to bed and sleep a civilized eight hours. (Farewell to that too, but that’s another story.) You wake up in the morning, read the paper and drive to the hospital. You have your baby. You begin your recovery. Stairs and lifting will be difficult for a while. You’ll have to press your hand against your abdomen when you cough or sneeze. On the other hand, you won’t have to sit on one of the those silly doughnut pillows while your episiotomy heals. I was back in exercise class two weeks after my daughter was born.

And let us not forget: One of the more horrific truths of modern obstetrics (or, more accurately, modern medical insurance) is the lightning-quick hospital stay for a vaginal birth, a rule that shoves you out the door, in some cases, within hours of giving birth. A Caesarean section, on most plans, buys you four days of hospital time — four days in which you can continue to be checked by your obstetrician and your baby by his or her pediatrician, four days in which you can sleep between feedings and the nurses can show you again how to get the baby to latch on or how to clean the baby’s navel. I’ll never forget an Australian woman I met during my stay in the maternity ward. In Australia, she sighed, the postnatal stay was a mandated eight nights, and on the final night, the nurses watched the baby while you went out for dinner with your spouse. I liked that woman. I always wish I’d gotten her name, but I didn’t have a chance. She was out the door too fast.

Seven years ago, during my very first obstetrical appointment, I asked my doctor if I could choose a Caesarean. She frowned at me. One did not choose a Caesarean; they were scheduled for medically indicated reasons only. Months later, my daughter obligingly got herself into a footling breech position. “Well it looks like you’re going to get that Caesarean you wanted,” my doctor said.

Last fall, when I became pregnant again, I asked her again for a scheduled Caesarean. “Hmm,” she said, considering. A first C-section doesn’t necessarily confer inevitability on subsequent ones. Successful VBACs (that’s Vaginal Birth After Caesarean) are often touted by secondarily successful natural birth enthusiasts. But during the intervening years, my doctor had undergone a few changes of her own. A marriage, a difficult pregnancy, a Caesarean, a healthy baby. “It’s fine with me,” she said.

You may call me reactionary if it makes you feel better, but I can assure you that my feminist credentials are intact, at least where I think they count — my daughter’s life is a Barbie-free zone, my surname unchanged since my parents gave it to me. I don’t advocate a return to the kind of gassed-into-unconsciousness birth experience condemned by Jessica Mitford in “An American Way of Birth,” nor do I hold with Joan Rivers’ version of the ideal labor: “Knock me out with the first pain, wake me when my hairdresser arrives.” I’m only urging a return to perspective.

Historically speaking, women and infants died in childbirth until a very, very short time ago, too short for us to forget (or at least fail to imagine) what that must have been like. The advances — Caesarean section among them — that made labor and delivery safer for us and our children are to be welcomed with gratitude as the valuable, lifesaving tools they are, not distrusted as the long fingers of the patriarchy. To condemn the widespread use of Caesareans is as nonsensical to me as condemning any other advance that has contributed to the relative safety of modern childbirth. Though the precedent is certainly there: 150 years ago, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was hounded to an early death and ridiculed by his colleagues as “the Hungarian crank” for having the temerity to suggest that doctors wash their hands after leaving the autopsy room and before examining their recently delivered patients — a small innovation that would ultimately make the dreaded epidemic of childbed (puerperal) fever virtually unknown.

A successful birth is not a birth without drugs or monitors or surgery. A successful birth is when you’re alive and the baby’s alive. Feel free to bring along any mood music you want, but if you lose sight of that priority, then you really have failed your first act as a mother.

I never did publish those early novels. They received the usual ecstatic rejection letters and were put away where, perhaps, most first novels belong, in that box at the back of the closet. But I didn’t stop writing, either. Instead, I did something that, even seven years later, still surprises me. I wrote a thriller. About a lawyer. Who investigates a seemingly random act of violence. And stumbles, gradually, upon a vast conspiracy. Which leads to revelations, twists and ultimately resolutions.

In other words, it had a plot.

Now, I worked hard on the writing in that novel, it’s true, but the plot was the unchallenged star of the piece, and when the book, “A Jury of Her Peers,” was published in 1996, reviewers did not dwell on my deathless prose.

You’d think that, somewhere along the line of this career readjustment, I would have stuck my head in the ground for shame and perhaps left it there, but a funny thing happened to me in the course of plotting my thriller.

I discovered that I liked it.

Like a classical music snob with a secret Barry Manilow stash, I liked it.

What’s more, the experience of conjuring a plot that would both entertain and surprise made me recognize and retroactively applaud the plot-driven novels I had loved (but perhaps failed to truly value) as a reader. I remembered, for example, the sublimely plotted “Presumed Innocent,” the only novel that has ever made me actually scream out loud in shock when its final secret was revealed (this occurred on the subway, which was … problematic), and my secret longtime favorite, “The Odessa File,” with its astonishing, troubling, final twist. I thought of Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus,” whose entire plot is unlocked by two separate, easy to miss sentences (on pages 296 and 336 of the Penguin edition, if they passed you by), and found new respect for Dickens’ frenetic, shuttling and altogether wonderfully messy story lines.

When you get right down to it, there’s something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next. And it is especially satisfying to surrender to an author who is utterly in command of a thrilling and original story, an author capable of playing us like fish, of letting us get worried, then riled up, then complacent and then finally blowing us away when the final shocks are delivered. Because, in the end, isn’t that what we’re really after when we choose a work of fiction — this temporary, benevolent loss of autonomy, this oddly satisfying sense of dislocation?

Working on my own plot, I was increasingly irritated with myself for not having given this element of fiction its due — after all, it’s a lot harder than it looks. My late cousin, the writer Helene Hanff, once described, in her 1961 memoir “Underfoot in Show Business,” the task of conjuring an original plot each week for the early television series “The Adventures of Ellery Queen.” “The budget … was so small that the cast of each script was limited to five characters. Since two of them had to be Ellery and his father, it left you only three characters for the murder plot: the character who got murdered (known as the corpse) and two suspects, one innocent and one guilty.” Making it both plausible and genuinely surprising? This is the essential challenge of a good plot.

If it were a simple task, there would be far fewer predictable thrillers, far fewer by-the-numbers coming-of-age novels and virtually no generic Hollywood buddy pictures. Moreover, if enthralling plots weren’t so tough to come by, why would Jane Smiley revisit “King Lear” in her novel “A Thousand Acres” or Charles Frazier transmogrify “The Odyssey” in “Cold Mountain”? And there’s no shame in retelling, as long as the story is made new in the process. A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly, to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.

Now I can’t quite say that my own snobbishness about plot has entirely abandoned me. How could it, when I hear my own former views parroted so frequently by (probably) well-meaning acquaintances when they ask me whether my novel in progress will be “another mystery” or “a new detective story”? (For the record, first: I dislike mysteries, never read them and wouldn’t dream of writing one, and second: My 1996 novel did not feature a single detective character.) That I have left the literary fold is the implication here. I have traded my early promising credentials (those ecstatic rejection letters! those summer artists’ colonies!) for the cheap thrill of a snappy story line, a move somewhat akin to having forsaken Italian cinema for “Dumb and Dumber.” And I won’t be allowed back across the great plot divide, no matter how finely wrought the prose in my current novel, “The Sabbathday River” — which its publisher calls “a literary thriller” — is considered to be. Forevermore, my Amazon.com designation will be “Mystery/Thriller.”

Well, I’ll live with that, I suppose. There are worse fates, and to complain unduly would be to deny the fact that, as a reader, I have myself gotten old and cranky. The truth is that I simply have little time to spare for fiction that eschews the plebeian “story” in favor of prose sent jumping through hoops, and not much more to spare for the sensitive drama of a youth coming to terms with his/her alcoholic/schizophrenic/anti-intellectual/homophobic/abusive parent/town/suburb as he/she contemplates and finally departs for the wider world, no matter how beautifully written. When you get right down to it, I’ve learned more about human nature from Scott Smith’s “A Simple Plan” and Peter Hoeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” than from a whole raft of evocative autobiographical first novels. Moreover, though I never stopped reading those novels praised for their prose, imagery and characterization, I have developed a tendency to hurl them across the room with increasing velocity. If nothing has actually happened after a hundred pages or so … whomp! Some of those flung opuses, moreover, are by authors I had previously esteemed for their writing; but their writing alone, alas, is no longer enough to hold my esteem. Harold Brodkey? Beautiful writer. Whomp! Louise Erdrich? Beyond compare as a crafter of sentences. Whomp! After all, I think, life is short: TELL ME SOMETHING.

Writers of plot-transcendent literary fiction may trace their lineage back to James Joyce, but who was Joyce if not a raider of Homer? I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it’s just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.