Fiction

Knowing, self-deprecating humor is the default approach these days. Take Sam Lipsyte's satire about a failed artist turned academic fundraiser, "The Ask," a novel so caustic you might want slip on a pair of safety gloves before turning its pages. Milo Burke, Lipsyte's narrator, is emasculated both at home and abroad, from the wife who withholds sex and casually cheats on him to the third-rate university that keeps him on only at the insistence of an old friend turned philanthropist intent on jerking his chain. Lipsyte's second novel, "Home Land," also featured a perpetually bullied (though younger) narrator, and there are readers who find his well-turned prose and grotesque scenarios hilarious. I am not, alas, among them. The hammering, ground-in nastiness of "The Ask" strikes me as overly grim — Neil LaBute meets Martin Amis — but if your idea of fun is the kind of novel where male co-workers routinely greet each other with questions like, "What's the matter, your pussy hurt?" then by all means, have at it.

Chances are I'd be recommending James Hynes "Next" to you this week, if not for a frustrating conflict of interest: Hynes (whom I've never met), blurbed my own book. Suffice to say that this novel about another put-upon, midlevel university administrative worker is more fully rounded and less claustrophobic than "Ask," with a wallop of an ending that has been justly praised by those reviewers who lack the good fortune to be encumbered by Hynes' generosity.

Which brings us to this week's choice, Thomas Kennedy's "In the Company of Angels," definitely not a satire. The gravely injured 50-something man at the center of this novel has infinitely better reasons for losing faith than Lipsyte's and Hynes' narrators do. His name is Bernardo "Nardo" Greene, once a teacher of literature in his native Chile, who, as a result of discussing the work of a radical poet with his students, was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime. The novel takes place in Copenhagen, where Nardo has sought asylum and receives treatment from a psychiatrist who narrates some of the chapters. Other chapters are told from the point of view of Michela, a Danish woman who frequents the same cafe as Nardo, as well as Michela's dying father and her callow boyfriend.

The style of "In the Company of Angels" is, like its somewhat unfortunate title, so earnest as to seem almost artless; by the standards of contemporary literary fiction, it's often hopelessly on-the-nose and unsubtle in describing its characters' inner lives. Yet this in no way detracts from the novel's power or its tractor-beam-like ability to lock the reader into the unfolding drama of Nardo's recovery, a fragile structure that's always on the verge of disintegrating into despair.

What this novel reminds me of, surprisingly enough, is Stephen King — though not King's supernatural apparatus or breakneck action, and certainly not his slangy, strip-mall prose. What King and Kennedy (an American who lives in Denmark) share is an interest in the idea of violence as an occupational hazard of masculinity. For this reason, there is a seeping dread that crawls through the lives of the characters in "In the Company of Angels," much like the demonic forces that infiltrate the suburban idylls of King's novels, an apprehension that cruelty and domination might be contagious and that even victims are capable of unwittingly spreading the infection. Eventually, Nardo's therapist comes to believe that he can hear his patient's chief torturer whispering taunts to him when he's at home with his wife and kids, polluting the sanctum of family life with a knowledge of human evil at its most extreme.

Every character in "In the Company of Angels" is battling that evil in one way or another, and none of them is entirely free of it himself. "You will never again be a man to a woman," the chief torturer told Nardo, and although he was speaking of physical damage, it is the experience of utter helplessness and degradation that has wounded this once-respected teacher most deeply. Such impotence is utterly incompatible with his previous understanding of manhood; therefore, he must be unmanned. The urge to cancel out a shaming weakness with some act of force is a temptation that all the men in Kennedy's novel face. If they succumb, they will only perpetuate the contagion, but to transcend violence requires an imaginative courage difficult to muster.

Trauma isn't an unusual subject in contemporary fiction, but more often than not, it's handled in a sentimental, even precious fashion (Chris Cleave's "Little Bee," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close") through characters who are children or have a charming, childlike naivete and an uncomplicated relationship to their own suffering. Kennedy, who worked for a Copenhagen rehabilitation center for torture victims for several years, is much more convincing in rendering the aftereffects of unthinkable ordeals. "In the Company of Angels" is a novel about grown-ups, people battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their own responsibility, whose understanding of their past never stops evolving. It's the dignity of their adulthood — the elusive prize at stake in any midlife crisis — that makes them so admirable and, above all, so moving.

Adams' follow-up to her 2005 novel, "Harbor," reads like a season of "The Wire." Only here the Washington Spectator (a thinly veiled Washington Post) has replaced the Baltimore Sun, and the streets of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, stand in for the projects. Written in a precise, lyrical voice, the book takes place shortly after 9/11 and provides an inside view of both the U.S. intelligence community and the newsroom floor, allowing Adams to explore how reality is created, warped and disguised at the whims of those in power.

Adams' depictions of journalistic hierarchies are especially vivid, as you would expect from a Pulitzer-winning writer who spent 11 years as a reporter for the Washington Post. There's Adam Sanger, the executive editor, whose thirst for fresh news overrides his interest in historical truth. Beneath him is Stanley Belson, the sensitive, beleaguered night editor, weary of seeing the galaxies of human nature shoehorned into a few predictable storylines. And at the bottom is Vera Hastings, the newbie beat reporter and former ballerina, whose passion and ambition are almost comically thwarted at every turn.

Adams recently spoke with Salon over the phone from her apartment in New York City about the death of journalism, why she'll never again write nonfiction, and the massive egos of White House reporters.

You began writing your first novel right after 9/11. Months before that, you'd left the Washington Post newsroom to become a contract writer for the paper. What sort of changes did you notice in the way the news was reported after 9/11?

In the immediate aftermath, the first year, there was a feeling of patriotism that made it difficult to report fairly. The Post says, "We don't report objectively, we report fairly." And I would argue that in any country that's been attacked, the reporters are not going to be able to be fair. If you read the history of war reporting, you can see it, even in the best people. Ernie Pyle's accounts from North Africa are gorgeous pieces of reportage, but they're very pro-American. So I noticed that change. I'm not saying it's wrong. I think it's impossible to be fair in those situations.

You worked as a news journalist, first at the Dallas Morning News, then at the Post for over a decade. Why did you decide to write a novel?

After 20 years of reporting and writing news stories, I was well acquainted with what many call a jaded perspective, or what I call a wised-up perspective. I realized that I could probably find out what happened in many different ways, I just couldn't put it in the newspaper, and there would always be something I couldn't get at because I announced myself as a reporter. That frustration built. By the end, the frustration was so unbearable that novel writing seemed to me the only way to approximate a better truth.

So you'll never go back to writing nonfiction?

I'll never write nonfiction again. I've thought about it, and talked about it with my agent. I was thinking of writing about the Bam earthquake in Iran a while ago. But there were always difficulties. One, for example, was that the people I wanted to talk to -- about the horrific things that happened because of the ineptitude of the Iranian regime -- these people were afraid to talk to American journalists because that could mean a term in Evin prison. I'm not willing to make people talk to me and risk their facing solitary confinement as a result. I think it's unconscionable.

How do you feel about the ways blogs and alternative news sources have changed the way news is reported and consumed?

In the news business, there's always been a sense of hierarchies of authoritativeness, that a story isn't real until CNN or whoever reports it. I think that's going to change. I think we'll stop privileging news outlets. Especially considering what's been going on lately. When you've got a book on Hiroshima, for example, published by Henry Holt, and you find out that the writer wasn't just duped by one pilot, but there's a whole slew of things that are wrong and they're withdrawing the book. The privileging of the content platform gets called into question. That's what happened with James Frey and Oprah.  These privileged outlets aren't checking anything either. So why should they be accorded a certain reverence in terms of truthfulness?

You once said in an interview that the forms of storytelling haven't really changed since the New Journalism era of the '60s. Why do you think so little has changed, especially in newspapers and magazines?

Right now they're in a siege mentality. And when you're in a siege mentality, you hunker down and you do what's tried and true. Although, at this point, it's contributing to their downfall and their lack of readers, but they somehow seem blind to that and I can't see why. As for the New Journalism guys, they were reinventing a form and making journalism into this thing we now call reportage, the kind of stuff in the New Yorker and Granta, which are now dying. In a daily newspaper, they don't want you to write like that. But they think they do!

I remember once writing a magazine article for the Washington Post, and I used the word "refrigerant." And the editors were like, "This is too fucking showy, this is pretentious, fuck you." I had to go to John McPhee's book about Alaska, "Coming Into the Country," and point out that he used the word "refrigerant," and then they let me use it.

In his new book, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," David Shields argues that the novel is not as relevant as it once was. Do you think this is true?

Of course it's fashionable to say the novel is irrelevant to the culture or it's dead. And yet the novel miraculously persists. I remember one of the first books I reviewed was a biography of Fanny Burney, a novelist and playwright around the turn of the 19th century. Her father and her brother were both well-known historians. But Burney, for whatever reason, is the one that survived. We don't read those historians at all. You can't say that essays survive the way novels do. Maybe Sam Johnson, but that's fucking rare.

There's Montaigne. And Emerson.

Yeah, we got three there. But I think there are a fuck of a lot more novels that survive, and I don't think the human condition has so radically changed that that won't be the case. I believe that art endures, and I don't believe that commentary does.

Vera Hastings, the young night-cop reporter in the novel, is told by her college guidance counselor that journalism is dead, and yet she goes into it anyway. Did anyone try to dissuade you from a journalism career?

Coming out of graduate school at Columbia, David Remnick was a dear friend. And when I told him I planned to go into journalism, which he was already doing, he said, "No no no, don't go into newspapers. It's all over. You should go into cable television, that's where the future lies." Well, cable TV news today is frantic, crazed, losing audiences.

I would argue: Go where you cannot help but go. Go where you just can't stop yourself from going. All the advice in the world amounts to nothing if you don't have passion for the work.

Much of your new novel has to do with the ways reality is created and warped, not just by the players in Washington, but by the reporters and editors that cover them. Are White House reporters really that megalomaniacal?

Most definitely. Journalists who are considered at the top of their games are assigned to the White House. People like Judith Miller -- who was talking to Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff -- was aligning herself with these men and saying, "I'm as big a deal as they are, I'm one of the actors, not one of the observers." The egos of some of these writers is such that they come to identify with the people they write about. They want to feel that they are as big as their subjects.

What we really need is not more information about the people in power. We need more information about the ways in which decisions are informed by the facts, and how those facts come to be facts.

I won't lie and say that "The Surrendered" doesn't occasionally indulge in either of those two things, but that doesn't wind up mattering, because the narrative sweep of the novel turns out to be irresistible. Characters that shoulder their way into the reader's psyche with an almost alarming vitality and Lee's organically skillful plotting are the powerful engines driving "The Surrendered." It's about survival and its costs, as embodied by two people: June Singer, a well-off Korean-born antiques dealer who is rolling up her Manhattan life in the early chapters of the book, and Hector Brennan, an alcoholic janitor in New Jersey. Hector is, implausibly, the father of June's son, Nicholas, though he doesn't know the young man exists and hasn't seen or heard from June in decades. Nicholas has run off to Europe and disappeared, and June has resolved to barge back into Hector's life, insisting that he join the search.

We learn, from the novel's first chapter, what June endured as an 11-year-old refugee fleeing south from North Korea during the war; she lost her parents, her older brother and sister and finally the younger brother and sister entrusted to her care. All this leaves her boiled down to a flinty core of stubborn will and, Hector thinks, "surely the strongest person he had ever known." Whether June's fearsome will was forged by the war or simply revealed by it is one of the novel's mysteries, but without a doubt it's the reason she made it out of Korea alive, as well as why she prospered afterward.

Hector, on the other hand, is merely lucky, although he doesn't see it that way. He's big and, despite his drinking, still fit, "a shockingly beautiful man," according to June's dispassionate assessment. Hector wins every fight he gets into and his wounds heal with uncanny speed. As a soldier in the Korean War, he stepped away, unharmed, from scenes of carnage. With the name of a classical hero and hailing from the town of Ilion, N.Y. ("Ilium" being another name for Troy), he appears singled out for a glorious destiny, but as Hector sees it, he's cursed to trudge onward even as the people around him are destroyed. As an adolescent, he slipped away for an assignation with a married woman instead of performing his nightly duty of walking his drunken father home from the neighborhood bar; his father fell into a river and drowned. Crippled by guilt, Hector has spent his life believing he was "the cause, and the symptom, and the disease; he was the dooming factor for everyone but himself."

What links this unlikely pair is love, not for each other, but for Sylvie Tanner, the wife of a minister who ran the Seoul orphanage where Hector once worked and June once lived -- even then, at the age of 14, she was a notoriously aggressive loner. Sylvie's story is the third strand of the novel, coming in late and telling of her childhood as the daughter of missionaries so devoted to their cause that she felt "set just outside the centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work." Kind and gentle, she represents, for June and Hector, the possibility of emerging from trauma with one's humanity, and ability to feel for others, intact. How did she end up failing them both?

"The Surrendered" moves backward and forward in time with an impressive smoothness, nosing out the events that led June and Hector to unite, however briefly, and create Nicholas. Just once, Lee stoops to sheer melodrama (there's a car crash in the book's second half that's a bit over the top), but it's an error of daring too much, rather than of settling for too little, and ultimately, it's forgivable. So are the moments, not frequent, when he strains too hard after writerly gorgeousness, clotting up his sentences with an excess of metaphorical flourishes. In a novel so rich in the hearty pleasures of storytelling, these blemishes are almost endearing, the overflow of a welcome enthusiasm. Also, Lee's reaching does sometimes work, as when he describes intimacy's tentative return to the middle-aged Hector's life, thanks to a tender barfly: "With each night she spent, another diaphanous layer of her presence seemed to settle upon him and everything else, the fine dust of her that he could almost taste on a spoon, on the rim of a glass."

But who really reads a novel in search of lovely sentences? What most of us hope to meet on the page are characters who bloom into a persuasive illusion of life, and in June and Hector -- one strong of will, the other strong in body -- Lee has most definitely succeeded. It's impossible not to want to know how they came to be the way they are or how they will end up. They may struggle to go on caring, but we don't have to.

Poe sits at a desk with pen and paper in hand, seemingly at the height of his creative powers. His upper lip is clean-shaven, though he sports long, bushy sideburns. And there's the slightest hint of a smile on his face.

"It actually represents Poe as he appeared to his contemporaries -- a handsome, sophisticated young man on the rise," said Cliff Krainik, the owner of the portrait and a Poe scholar. "The daguerreotypes show him in his rather dissipated state, where he has gone through the difficulties of his life."

While the portrait has been authenticated, much of its history remains unknown, the details of its creation a mystery that even Poe's famed detective, C. Auguste Dupin, would have trouble unearthing.

This much is certain: Smith was a miniaturist who worked at various times in Philadelphia and Baltimore, cities where Poe also lived, and Poe sat for the watercolor in 1843 or 1844 -- five or six years before his death.

Smith drew another sketch of Poe around the same time that served as a model for an engraving that was printed in Graham's Magazine in 1845.

It is unclear what Poe thought of the finished watercolor -- though he was not fond of Smith's sketch. In 1844, he wrote to James Russell Lowell, "You inquire about my own portrait. It has been done for some time now -- but is better as an engraving, than a portrait. It scarcely resembles me at all."

It's unknown who paid the artist, and the painting's whereabouts before 1978 are unknown. That's when Krainik bought the portrait from a collector's vast estate in Charlottesville, Va. He knew immediately that it was Poe and paid only a few dollars for it, he said.

"I knew it was of historic importance," Krainik said. "I didn't think of it like, 'This is a steal.'"

Beyond the watercolor and sketch by Smith, the only other extant portrait is a painting by Samuel Osgood that hangs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. A portrait by James McDougal is lost.

Now, Krainik plans to sell the Smith portrait at auction, and he's picked an auspicious time. A rare copy of Poe's first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," sold in December for $662,500, a record for American literature.

Before the auction, scheduled for June at Cowan's Auctions in Cincinnati, the portrait will be unveiled in conjunction with Poe's birthday celebration in Baltimore. Tuesday is the 201st anniversary of Poe's birth, and the portrait will be on display Saturday and Sunday at Westminster Hall, the former church adjacent to Poe's grave.

Krainik claims money is not his goal in unveiling the portrait, but auctioneer Wes Cowan said he expects it will sell for at least $30,000 and perhaps more than $50,000.

"This is the only portrait of Poe that shows him in his occupation," said Cowan, who also is an appraiser on PBS' "Antiques Roadshow." "It's an exceptional image."

The novel's protagonist, Cass Seltzer, dubbed "the atheist with a soul" by the press, is a psychology professor at a small Massachusetts college who is rocketed to the intellectual's version of fame after he publishes a surprise bestseller titled "The Varieties of Religious Illusion." He's been profiled in magazines and invited onto "The Daily Show." In the course of the day during which the novel takes place, he encounters an ex-girlfriend, moons over his current girlfriend, thrills to a job offer from Harvard and prepares to debate the proposition "God exists" with a suave, ruthless neoconservative theist before a standing-room-only crowd. Much of the novel, however, consists of Cass' reminiscences about the past couple of decades, years during which he made the unlikely journey from dutiful pre-med student to celebrity philosopher.

Goldstein herself is a professor of philosophy as well as the author of several novels and nonfiction books on Spinoza and the mathematician Kurt Godel. She's also married to the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker ("The Language Instinct," "The Blank Slate"), which has surely given her a firsthand perspective on the experience of an academic popularizer. Cass, who specializes in "the psychology of religious conviction," feels no small chagrin in the knowledge that it's the appendix of his book, in which he lists and refutes the 36 arguments of the novel's title, that has gotten the most attention. In the knock-'em, sock-'em world of contemporary atheism debates, his more considered and nuanced work gets shoved aside as partisans avidly search for more ammo to use against the enemy.

"36 Arguments for the Existence of God" marks a turning point in academic satire, that small but addictive genre devoted to skewering the foibles of university mandarins. In the '80s and '90s, trendy post-structuralist theory was all the rage in the humanities, and the sanctity of objective knowledge itself was challenged by trickster savants spinning impenetrable and often perverse thickets of jargon. The best-known send-up of this period is a trio of novels by David Lodge, beginning with "Changing Places," but James Hynes ("Publish and Perish") and John L'Heureux ("The Handmaid of Desire") also delivered biting portraits of faculties riven by warring multiculturalists, deconstructionists and old-school dead-white-male buffs.

The stars on campuses now, however, are champions of empirical knowledge and Enlightenment thinking -- scientists, mathematicians and other critics of "those thrashings of proto-rationality and mythico-magical hypothesizing" manifested (in the extreme) by Islamist militancy and Christian fundamentalism. "Extreme" was also the adjective attached to the professorship of Jonas Elijah Klapper, Cass' former thesis advisor and mentor, wooed away from Columbia by (among other things) the newly minted title of Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature and Values. Years ago, Cass fell under the sway of Klapper's incantatory erudition ("He's very oracular," says Cass' mother tactfully), and only after breaking that spell was he able to produce "The Varieties of Religious Illusion."

Obsessed with "genius" (and his own supreme authority in the detecting of it), his every utterance a torrent of arcane allusions and references, Klapper is an extended and merciless parody of Yale professor Harold Bloom. He hates political and post-structuralist literary theory, yes, but he reserves his most uncomprehending antipathy for the hard stuff: "Most of what passes for science is merest scientism," Klapper opined to the seven grad students (Cass among them) who hung on his every word throughout a seminar titled "The Sublime, the Subliminal and the Self." Each of these acolytes joined the anointed when told, by the great man, "I sense the aura of election upon you" (almost word for word what Bloom once said to the writer Naomi Wolf, in an incident she viewed as sexual harassment). Klapper sucked the life out of his students in exchange for allowing them to bear witness to his mighty cogitations and revelations, but he really latched onto Cass when he learned that Cass had family connections to an isolated Hassidic sect called the Valdeners. It seems that the great man harbored secret rabbinical yearnings; after all, no one basks in more unqualified admiration than the leader of such a community.

The title of Cass' book is an intentional play on William James' landmark study, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," and most of the characters in "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" are engaged in one kind of worship or another. Cass has a propensity for idolizing the unworthy; if it's not Klapper, it's a woman -- with his current girlfriend, the appallingly selfish mathematician Lucinda Mandelbaum ("the goddess of game theory"; the academics in this novel have more nicknames than pro wrestlers), presenting a case in point. Among the Valdeners, however, Cass encountered a character grappling with the sort of moral dilemma depicted by that other illustrious James brother, Henry. With the introduction of this figure, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" turns more serious, and deepens.

Goldstein packs a lot of ideas and information into this novel -- the history of Orthodox Judaism and the Kabbalah, the finer points of academic gamesmanship, and even dollops of anthropology and longevity science, in addition to the age-old clash between reason and faith -- not always with perfect grace. Yet, in a way, the forthrightness with which she approaches all of it means that her intentions can't be missed. Even those unpracticed in reading metaphysical fiction will be able to trace the philosophical issues and impasses embodied in her characters and recognize that she is offering no facile answers. If anyone expects this Princeton-trained logician to come out categorically on the side of materialism, they may wind up disappointed. Still, for them there is always the novel's appendix, which, like the one in Cass' book, lists and elegantly refutes the three-dozen most common arguments for theism. With it, let them arm themselves to clash by night; the rest of us have other things to do.

Dee's novel follows the marriage of Cynthia and Adam Morey, beginning with a bravura wedding-day set-piece in which the third-person narration ricochets from one character to another — the wedding planner, the groom's awkward little brother, the bride's glowering hipster stepsister, etc. — like the restless camera in a Scorsese nightclub scene. The author has set himself a singular challenge: Adam (a stockbroker) and Cynthia are, as Adam's brother puts it, "masters of the universe," yet Dee wants to depict the couple sympathetically, disarming the knee-jerk mixture of resentment and condescension usually reserved for those we dislike out of envy or righteous indignation.

The newlyweds are neither stupid nor venal. They're smart, clever and good-looking, and despite a troubled upbringing, each has found in the other a fail-safe ally in the campaign to remake themselves from scratch. Their marriage is invincible, a juggernaut cannoning forward into the future, undeterred by regrets, doubts, hesitations or divided loyalties. In the 30-year course of "The Privileges" they will become stupendously, fantastically rich.

"The Unnamed" is Ferris' second novel (after his much-celebrated debut, "Then We Came to the End," set in a Chicago ad agency during the 2001 recession). It describes the Job-like sufferings of Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a high-end Manhattan law firm who is suddenly stricken with a bizarre ailment: the unpredictable and irresistible compulsion to walk great distances until he collapses in exhaustion. The book opens with the second recurrence of this malady, and by now Tim's realtor wife, Jane, has figured out how to prepare for his involuntary treks, equipping him with winter clothes and a backpack filled with energy bars and first-aid supplies. Still, Jane's resolve buckles when she is faced with the resumption of phone calls at all hours, summoning her to collect her disoriented or sleeping husband from fields and parking lots, park benches in Newark, and the back rooms of Bronx beauty parlors.

Both of these novels focus on people of approximately the same social class (the Moreys start out as the sort who'd have dinner with the Farnsworths, but wind up as the sort who'd hire them), and both explore the submerged anxieties of the conventionally successful. But where Ferris tests his characters by ushering them into a realm of fablelike affliction, Dee prefers the waspish scrutiny of satire. He describes a discomfited woman as laughing "as if she were being filmed laughing," and a high-end hospice center, staffed by "drably luminous avatars of selflessness," as decorated by a small lake that's "plainly man-made and perfunctory-seeming, a kind of trope of serenity." The influence of Jonathan Franzen's "Corrections" can be felt on every page of "The Privileges," but unlike Franzen's feckless and self-deluding Lambert clan, the Moreys are without obvious frailties, an invulnerability that itself, in time, becomes a flaw.

Adam and Cynthia don't meet with any expected comeuppance. They don't cheat on each other, don't abuse substances or wallow in grotesque self-indulgence. Adam manages to start and then extricate himself from an illegal and highly lucrative insider-trading operation without suffering any repercussions, but then Cynthia compensates by funneling a goodly chunk of their wealth into a vast charitable foundation. So triumphant is their union that it seems to stunt the people around them — most notably their children, April and Jonas — who are cast into the roles of attendants, supplicants and admirers.

April becomes a clubbing socialite who can't seem to help "hanging out with the same stupid people doing the same stupid shit even though I don't really want to ... I mean, what am I supposed to do with my time?" Jonas makes a fanatical pursuit of authenticity; he's the kind of kid who for Christmas asks for "all twelve volumes of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, on vinyl" and shacks up with his grad student girlfriend in much shabbier circumstances than he can afford. His efforts to renounce the privileges bestowed on him by his parents, like April's attempts to drown in them, lead to disaster.

"The Privileges" is shrewdly realistic, even a bit gossipy; "The Unnamed" is the artier of the two novels, unfolding in a hushed, shadowed dimension located somewhere between myth and a David Mamet play. Readers of "Then We Came to the End" will find less humor in this book, although Tim's efforts to cling to his job while in the throes of his disorder do allow for some of the barbed office politics that made "Then We Came to the End" so invigorating. Nevertheless, Tim's battle against his condition proceeds as a relentless stripping of ephemera, a return to the primal and the eternal, and as the novel goes along, everything specific, everything of the moment, falls away.

The temptation to equate Tim's illness with something more familiar is inevitable: It could symbolize any addiction or compulsion or, just as easily, illness itself. Much of what he and his family endure — the endless rounds of consultations with doctors, the hopes raised and crushed, the rage and defiance in the afflicted, the soul-searching of the caretakers, the friends and colleagues whose sympathy fades to neglect as they get on with their lives, the glimpses of transcendence in ordinary experience — is experienced by most everyone hit by a serious, chronic disease. Yet what's wrong with Tim has no discernible cause; it is unnamed and his alone, making it even harder to bear.

I suspect Ferris would resist any simple correspondence between Tim's disorder and, say, cancer or alcoholism. Tim is at war with his body, a situation which is, after all and eventually, common to every human being. His work, his passion for Jane, his clumsy love for their daughter, his will and his own name, his very identity — all of these are the weapons he marshals in that war. Yet even life's winners are destined to lose in the end; the only real redemption lies in the grace with which we meet our defeat. No one ever gets to master the universe.