Zacharias, whose bio says she has a forthcoming memoir on the murder of 3-year-old Karly Sheehan, is careful in her piece to state that “Nobody is suggesting that there’s a connection between Adam Mansbach’s book and child abuse or child neglect” and that “Mansbach is undoubtedly the kind of father who heaps love, affection and attention upon his daughter.” But, as she explains, “the lines of what’s appropriate parenting have become blurred” and, as a concerned Oregon attorney says, the book is full of “violent language in association with children.” For the corker, she quotes child development expert Dr. David Arredondo, who implores, “Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos,” and she says, “It is hard to imagine this kind of humor being tolerated by any of the marginalized groups Arredondo cited.” I wonder, is that because the sleep habits of Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos aren’t relevant? Because “Take a Nap Right Now, Goddammit, Person of Color” just doesn’t make a lick of sense?

Zacharias, whose comedic credentials include a blurb from Jeff Foxworthy, has drummed up a world of disagreement; her story has received over 2,000 comments in just one day since her bizarre Op-Ed appeared. The more restrained can be summed up by the reader who noted “Humor helps people deal with stress” and the person who suggested, “This lady is out of her mind.”

It has ever been thus that one person’s laff riot is another’s big fat “I don’t get it.” I may never comprehend Mr. Bean, but I won’t be outraged if that’s your thing. But the line between funny and not funny gets blurrier when the question becomes whether or not the comedy is offensive. Tracy Morgan got in hot water this month for a routine in which he said “gay is a choice,” and that his son “better talk to me like a man and not in a gay voice or I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little nigger to death” — a bit Louis C.K. defended by saying, “It’s a dumb thing to take at face value.” But Morgan himself nailed his real problem with the bit, noting later simply that he said “really stupid shit.” He then atoned for his anti-gay remarks by doing a routine about how “Them young retarded males is strong … like chimps.” So he may still be feeling his way around that one.

Comedy explained isn’t comedy at all. And when you speak up and say that something is offensive, you inevitably run the risk of being labeled a humorless scold. But real humor rarely involves taking cheap shots at groups of people who are regularly misunderstood or victimized. It comes instead from observation of the absurdities of life, from the frustrations of being the underdog, from sticking it to the man. Being shocking is fine; taking lazy jabs at the already put-upon is to bomb unforgivably.

That’s why it’s so silly to take umbrage at “Go the F**k to Sleep,” because Zacharias doesn’t seem to get who the joke is on. She argued Monday on Twitter that “The point is that far too many children live in homes where ugly thoughts are acted upon,” as if ugly thoughts inevitably lead to ugly deeds, or ugly thoughts shouldn’t be laughed at. It’s not that sometimes children aren’t verbally browbeaten for real. But Mansbach’s humor is about the tyrannical boss — the boss, in this instance, being the baby. And if you’re a parent, you damn well know who wears the poop-loaded, spit-up-stained pants in your torturously sleep-deprived relationship.

As Steve Martin once explained, comedy isn’t pretty. It’s not supposed to be. It just has to be funny. And while everybody has a different sense of what constitutes hilarity, it’s safe to bet if you’re endorsed by Jeff Foxworthy, you’re no expert.

According to Salon’s senior book writer and Moby Awards judge Laura Miller, the best book trailer of the year didn’t even take home a prize, though it was nominated in the category for best “Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object”:

“The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” didn’t win anything because it sort of fell between categories. Some trailers are better than others as videos, but this was the only one that conveyed any sense of what the book was like.

Judge for yourself with the trailer for Elisabeth Bailey’s  “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating“:

Jonathan Franzen also “won” in the category of “Worst Performance by an Author,” in which the “Freedom” scribe rails against book trailers as he is interviewed for a trailer to promote his second novel.

Though wow, he pretty much nailed it on what’s silly about book trailers, doesn’t he? Let’s all go to our still place now, and meditate on Patty.

Another “Worst Performance by an Author” finalist (and crowd favorite) went to Brandon R. Benjamin for “Atlantis”:

Winning two golden whales this year (including the coveted “Grand Jury/We’re Giving You This Award Because Otherwise You’d Win Too Many Other Awards”) was Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story.” Which does have an amazing trailer (albeit one that has nothing to do with the story) that’s more reminiscent of a Funny-or-Die sketch than a promotion for a piece of literature.

“Super Sad” also won for “Most Celebtastic Performance” with its James Franco cameo, though personally I would have given it to Jay McInerney for his role in the video.

See all the winners and finalists for the Moby Awards over on the official website, and congratulations to all the winners.

Jonathan Franzen captures this particularly divisive moment in our culture with breathtaking clarity and wit in his new novel, “Freedom,” yet he may as well be one of these somewhat distasteful characters himself. Best misunderstood as the snooty genius who recoiled at the sight of an Oprah’s Book Club logo on the cover of his widely lauded novel “The Corrections,” Franzen‘s actual comments on the subject were hardly ferocious.

No matter. In the age of the echo chamber, popularity and talent and lofty ideals, when combined with a tendency to split hairs, will only win you the widespread resentment of other, far less popular fallen idealists. It’s not surprising, then, that Franzen is garnering a new wave of contempt in anticipation of the Aug. 31 release of his new novel. Thanks to a gushing, preemptive New York Times review (“a masterpiece of American fiction”) and reports that Obama himself, at this very moment, may just be perusing the pages of “Freedom” on Martha’s Vineyard, we are forced to encounter Franzen much as we encounter the faintly competitive urban perfectionists he portrays in his new novel: We have just enough information to revile him, but not enough information to truly understand him.

Or at least, that’s how Franzen quite cleverly begins his story. We meet Patty and Walter Berglund first through the neighborhood gossip about them. There is nothing at all wrong with this couple, and that’s precisely what’s so wrong with them. “They paid nothing for their Victorian then killed themselves for ten years renovating it,” Franzen writes, and we know this pair immediately. As Franzen puts it, they are the sorts of privileged liberals who have the time to wonder, “Was bulgar really necessary?” and “How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be?” Patty Berglund, an overachieving homemaker, alienates her neighbors with her relentless attention to detail, yet she sprinkles self-deprecation into all of her conversations, to the point where they wonder if such exaggerated self-loathing is the tic of someone who is “trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers” — or maybe she’s just trying to disguise her superiority complex.

The almost cartoonish exaggerations and gossipy distance of the first section of the novel are a neat trick, really: By the time Patty’s overzealous child-rearing backfires and her intolerance for those who don’t share her values starts to emerge, we’re primed to enjoy watching her take a hard fall.

This is when Franzen brings us in closer, in an autobiographical segment ostensibly written by Patty herself, about her childhood, the mistakes she made in child-rearing, and her regrets concerning her marriage. Thanks to a particularly brutal betrayal by her socially conscious but somewhat callous parents, Patty’s overbearing nature is soon rendered not only understandable, but almost valiant. And yet, Patty remains a recalcitrant, demanding, obnoxiously pushy force throughout the course of the novel, always saying too much and then regretting it, always lavishing love and attention on her favorite son while showing inadequate appreciation of her devoted husband. We sense that Patty’s many resources — time, money, love, luck — only bring her the luxury of misery. It’s as if the more room she’s given to thrive, the more she creates enemies and neglects her allies and eats herself alive. Patty is a delectable reflection of the times, in other words: good intentions undone by pent-up anger, misguided devotion, and the insatiable demands of an oversize ego, an ego that goes unchecked because Patty has the impulse control of a small child.

Even as Franzen sets forth this conflicted modern archetype and others — at once loathsome and likable, self-deluded and admirable, self-serving and self-sacrificing — he dares to nurture his affection for each of them. He has the same sense of humor about his characters that John Updike once did: He pokes fun at them, but he delves into their pasts so we can see how their weaknesses and flaws were once adaptive traits that pulled them out of dead-end situations. Walter Berglund strikes us as a self-righteous, prim little man, until we see how he’s dedicated most of his life to taking care of his alcoholic father and misguided but sweet mother, no matter the cost. His friend Richard Katz is a prototypical egocentric rocker type, with all of the effortless charisma and lady-slaying tendencies that entails, but his devotion to (and envy for) Walter hints at an undercurrent of self-loathing beneath his ennui. Walter and Patty’s son, Joey, is the ultimate blustery, handsome golden child whose petulant lashing out at his parents would be intolerable, if not for the loyalty and sweetness in him that he has trouble accessing and expressing. It’s hard not to feel for these characters. Although we’re often suspicious of their motives or question their loyalty and goodness, we still want them to get what they want, even when we know it’s all a big, misguided mistake.

Of course, the really impressive feat here is Franzen’s larger portrayal of the misguided mistakes of middle-class America: the delusions we indulge in our pursuit of happiness, the ways we neglect the greater good for the sake of our little family units, and the difficulty of setting aside our personal needs to save a world on the brink of total collapse. We’re free, yes, and we use our freedom to build our own little fussy, claustrophobic, granite-countertopped islands, while the rest of the world goes straight to hell around us. Sooner or later, with our racing thoughts and our cruelly competitive urges, we join them there, Maui vacations and Wakefield furniture be damned.

“Freedom” is a multilayered, richly imagined novel, full of big ideas and provocative characters and a riveting plot. But even as we delight in Franzen’s characters and understand how they got to be the way they are, we don’t quite feel how it is to be inside their skin. Maybe that’s because the characters themselves seem to watch their own actions from a distance. When Patty is pushed to the brink of ruining everything she’s built, she remains oddly detached. “There came to her, with curious vividness, a kind of PowerPoint list of names in descending order of their owners’ goodness.” When Walter becomes tempted to give in to an obsessive distraction that’s been dominating his life for several months, he never seems to lose himself to it completely. “There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake.” Even moments of extreme passion are described with all of the feverishness of high-level diplomatic negotiations: “He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them.”

This distance may reflect a conscious attempt by Franzen to capture the alienated thinking of the modern neurotic. There are heated arguments, dark nights of the soul and crystalline moments when something new is revealed about this or that character, but even the players involved observe most of it from the psychiatrist’s leather chair. “Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights,” Franzen writes of a low point in Walter’s marriage. “Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous,” Joey rationally observes of his depressed girlfriend. At another point Joey wonders, “Why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her.” Even as Franzen zooms in, the messy, indistinct core of each character’s experience is never fully breached. And when the emotionally catastrophic events take place, they’re described in retrospect or observed with casual indifference: “On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one.”

At other times, Franzen uses intellectual distance to demonstrate the impossibility of separating the personal from the political. As betrayal and death and other twists loom on the horizon, we’re treated to lengthy passages on how to resolve the estate of the deceased, or we disappear into the folds of mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia. These diversions fit into the rather tight premise of the novel, concerning as it does the push and pull of capitalist pressures against honoring the greater good. As much as we might enjoy a more visceral experience of Patty or Walter or Richard, these are characters who never quite manage to get to the heart of any matter without being led astray by their own neuroses.

Ultimately, “Freedom” is a complexly layered, richly imagined domestic tale about personal responsibility that dares to challenge the long-term global ramifications of our most private choices. Because, when even the hair-splitting idealists among us are ricocheting around in their little pinball machines instead of standing up for what they believe in, the world really is in big trouble. 

As almost everyone reading this will already know, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the autobiographical and presumably truthful story of a woman who “pulls a geographic” (as some 12-steppers say) on an epic scale, fleeing first her troubled marriage and then her relationship with a hot, younger boyfriend for a year-long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali. Gilbert is a sharp and amusing prose stylist and an openhearted critic of her own foibles and failings. She’s aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else’s dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.

(A personal note before continuing: I knew Elizabeth Gilbert some years ago, when we worked together at Spin magazine. (She was then married to the man she leaves at the beginning of “Eat, Pray, Love.”) She’s a wonderful writer and an even better human being. There’s no question that I think about her book — and the mediocre Hollywood movie resulting from it — differently than I otherwise might, because I have no doubts about the genuineness and generosity of Liz’s intentions. I’m not surprised that she ended up writing a bestseller, and she’s well suited to handle money and fame. I could speculate about her reactions to the merchandising campaign around “Eat, Pray, Love” — which encompasses clothing, jewelry, tea and candles — but then, many of her readers will have asked themselves the same question.)

At any rate, the secret of Gilbert’s book was not so much in the subject matter or the story but in the execution. Whether you find it captivating or maddening — and the marketplace has clearly voted for the former — it’s an artfully managed literary exercise, a thoughtful work of self-examination that’s designed to encourage the reader’s own. Movies don’t do that well, or at least not the kinds of movies people build around Julia Roberts. Inevitably, director Ryan Murphy’s version of “Eat, Pray, Love” (he also co-wrote the screenplay, with Jennifer Salt) is a shorthand romantic fiction, a pretty but hollowed-out imitation that’s one remove from Gilbert’s commentary on her experience and at least two removes from the experience itself.

Gilbert’s fans may enjoy the lovely locations and the appealing supporting cast — especially James Franco as her New York post-marriage lover and Javier Bardem as the Brazilian dreamboat who sweeps her off her feet in Bali — and Murphy works hard to incorporate snatches of her wry, warm prose without turning the project into an audiobook. But the story of “Eat, Pray, Love” isn’t really about people, places and things (although it has apparently done wonders for Bali’s tourist trade). The pasta dinners, the long sessions of Hindu meditation and the glorious, curtain-fronted Balinese gazebos are meant to be accoutrements that enable a questing consciousness to uproot itself from routine and make a crucial inward journey. That’s tough to convey when you’ve got Julia Roberts drifting around looking lovely and vulnerable in a succession of going-native costumes.

Roberts doesn’t look much like Liz Gilbert — although she has indeed absorbed some of her mannerisms — but after all she gets paid to look like Julia Roberts. She gives a nice performance here, ranging from brassy to vulnerable to drunkenly flirtatious. It isn’t her fault that the script tries to jam a memoir into the romantic-comedy template, spiced liberally with New Age nostrums, and can’t quite get it right.

Non-devotees of the book are likely to find Murphy’s “Eat, Pray, Love” an emotionally murky, inflated Lifetime Channel movie, alternately charming, cloying and dull. At 140 minutes, it’s much too long to tell a compact story, but not nearly long enough to explain itself adequately. Stephen (Billy Crudup), the suburban husband Gilbert ditches, appears in several scenes but is more like a personality-free ghost than a character; marrying him and leaving him seem like equally mysterious decisions, since he doesn’t exist. Her ensuing relationship with David (Franco), the underemployed, guru-devoted actor, appears to go instantaneously from hot late-night hookup to shacking up to angry, sexless unhappiness.

Murphy and Salt’s screenplay skips over logistical realities that Gilbert herself never conceals: She was a highly-paid freelance writer who financed her world travel with a substantial publisher’s advance; she had no job to quit because sampling Roman restaurants, Indian meditation centers and Indonesian oceanfront bars pretty much was her job. Gilbert’s first two travel episodes, sampling Italian cuisine and Indian religion, play out as reasonably diverting light comedy, the first frivolous and the second more rueful. Characters come and go quickly — Tuva Novotny as a Swedish gal-pal in Rome, Richard Jenkins as a heartbroken, aphorism-spouting Texan in India — providing Gilbert with teachable moments along the way.

Of course a few scenes in a movie can do almost nothing to explain why Gilbert spent months in an Indian guru’s ashram, or what it is she thinks she found there. And why should it? If the book flirted with the most hackneyed kinds of female escape fantasy, and dared itself to escape that genre, the film has almost nothing else to offer. When we finally get to Bali and rumpled Brazilian divorcé Felipe (Bardem) runs Gilbert’s bike off the road with his jeep, you can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from the filmmakers (and their audience). A lonely guy, a lonely girl, a comic pratfall and an exotic location — from here on in, we’re golden.

It’s not even ironic that one woman’s painful and almost desperate attempt to reconnect with herself and the world became a calculated publishing phenomenon that has spawned a Julia Roberts movie and lines of prayer beads and leather-bound diaries. It’s just the way the world is in an age when the most desirable commodities are private experiences that, at least at first, do not present themselves as commodities at all. (Am I wrong, or is going “off the grid” nearing critical mass as a hot lifestyle trend?) “Eat, Pray, Love” is a minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that’s not a crime. The fact that we find it almost impossible to talk seriously about the pervasive emotional or spiritual or psychological yearning that a story like this represents — that’s a bigger problem.

As anyone who pays attention to Hollywood gossip knows, an English-language adaptation of the Larsson trilogy is purportedly in the works, with David Fincher directing and Daniel Craig playing crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Carey Mulligan of “An Education” may play pint-size feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander — not a great choice, if you ask me — and then again she may not. (Kristen Stewart, who would be terrific, says she definitely, maybe, sort of isn’t interested.) But that project has development-hell problems that go well beyond casting.

Are Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian really going to make one of those ’50s-style movies where the characters all live in a foreign country but speak English? That particular suspension of disbelief works OK if you’re dealing with the distant, mythic past — nobody expects a movie like “300″ to be in ancient Greek, although that would be kind of cool — but otherwise I associate it with cheeseball costume dramas shot in rented Italian villas, or pompous middlebrow movies about how much some dude loves his cello. If they don’t do that, though — if they transfer the setting to, say, Cape Cod or the Napa Valley — well, that screws up the plot in all kinds of ways and you might as well make a different movie.

We’ll let those people sit around in Malibu spending millions of dollars trying to figure that out, and in the meantime we’ve got Alfredson and Frykberg’s lean, mean and workmanlike adaptation, with Spanish-Swedish bombshell Noomi Rapace as ass-kicking, Web-hacking Lisbeth and Michael Nyqvist, who is something like the Scandinavian world’s answer to George Clooney, playing the phlegmatic Blomkvist. They make an appealing yin and yang, around which Larsson’s murky, conspiratorial plot whirls, but one of the problems this middle chapter faces is that they’re kept apart from each other for virtually the entire movie.

Exonerated of the libel charges that sent him to prison in “Dragon Tattoo,” Blomkvist is back at the helm of Millennium, his muckraking magazine, which is about to publish a young journalist’s explosive exposé of a sex-trafficking ring that implicates many of Sweden’s top political, business and law enforcement figures. (At least in Larsson’s vision of 21st-century Sweden, investigative journalism, charmingly enough, still matters.) His ex-lover Lisbeth has vanished from his life without a trace, and Mikael takes up again, in desultory fashion, with Erika (Lena Endre), his more age-appropriate co-worker.

We know, of course, that Lisbeth is back in Stockholm but living under the radar, dropping in occasionally on her ex-girlfriend Miriam (Yasmine Garbi) for a little Sapphic action — and also on the loathsome rapist-lawyer Bjurman (Peter Andersson), with whom she has a little unfinished business. Actually, there’s a whole lot of secrets-from-the-past, “Return of the Jedi”-style unfinished business in this movie, including revelations about what exactly Lisbeth did as a girl that got her locked up and classified as “mentally incompetent.” (Spoiler police: If you want to get mad at somebody, blame Larsson and the filmmakers for giving away a key plot point in the title.)

Anyway, when Blomkvist’s journalistic protégé, the one with the big prostitution scoop, is brutally murdered along with his activist wife, and the gun found in their apartment has Lisbeth’s fingerprints on it, then we’ve got a crackerjack three- or four-way manhunt. Blomkvist searches for Lisbeth, certain that she didn’t do it, and also hunts for the real killers; gloomy Jewish cop Bublanski (Johan Kylén) plods through his investigation, and if he’s less convinced of Lisbeth’s innocence at least he’s not corrupt, unlike every other authority figure in the story. Lisbeth herself, of course, pursues all kinds of people, including the shadowy figures who’ve set her up. At the end of the road lie a notorious Russian gangster and his robotic minion, a big, blond palooka seemingly impervious to pain — but as readers of Larsson’s novels know, I’d better stop there.

As my critical mentor Joe Bob Briggs often used to say, there’s way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, which makes it tough for Alfredson and cinematographer Peter Mokrosinski to focus on the series’ strongest elements. Of course it’s the character of Lisbeth that has made these books and movies into a worldwide phenomenon, and Rapace gets to ride motorbikes, steal cars and do some paramilitary, weapons-based action sequences. But Lisbeth is more a cog in a big, grinding engine in “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which at its best captures both the beautiful but lugubrious Swedish landscape and the existential mood of contemporary northern Europe, trapped between the info-capitalist future and the ideological prisons of the past.

People of Lisbeth’s generation, and even Blomkvist’s, aren’t personally implicated in the crimes of World War II (the specter in “Dragon Tattoo”) or the soulless gamesmanship of the Cold War (referenced here). But even in the Internet age they still have to live in the world those events created, and Larsson’s genius was to suggest a connection between those cruel but supposedly dead ideologies and a continuing legacy of misogyny, rape and violence against women. This sense of history as a living, malevolent presence is largely alien to Americans — William Faulkner aside — and is just one of two or three dozen reasons why the Hollywood version of this story, if it ever gets made, is likely to get it all wrong.

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” opens July 9 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Palm Beach, Fla., Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Washington; July 16 in Baltimore, Charleston, S.C.; Indianapolis, Kansas City, Madison, Wis., Milwaukee, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; and July 23 in Albany, N.Y., Boise, Buffalo, N.Y., Chapel Hill, N.C., Charlotte, N.C., Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Honolulu, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Providence, R.I., Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Ariz., and Columbus, Ohio, with more cities to follow.