Arts & Letters Daily has been one of the Web’s surprise hits, a text-heavy site that consists of little but one long scrolling page — technologically, it’s about as un-cutting-edge as can be. On it are found no animations or applets, just links to articles and essays published elsewhere, with teaser paragraphs describing the highlighted articles. The site caught on quickly as a kind of unofficial “best of the Web.” (Full disclosure: A few of my Salon pieces have been highlighted by ALD.) For readers interested in ideas and the arts, the site, which was purchased by the journal Lingua Franca in November 1999, is like a daily digest assembled by brainy, freewheeling grad students.

Now Dutton — the scholar as Internet impresario — has struck again, founding the online publishing house Cybereditions, dedicated to making available worthwhile scholarly books that had fallen out of print. Cybereditions offers them up as e-books, HTML downloads and print-on-demand paperbacks. Salon caught up with Dutton by phone, as he took a break between a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics and an e-book conference in New York. As always, the conversation hit the ground running.

You just attended a conference of estheticians. How is the concept of beauty doing these days?

I think the idea of the social construction of beauty — this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is — is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there’s also a natural response people have to it.

But wouldn’t it be fair to say that an enjoyment of haute cuisine and Bach generally comes only with an education?

Sure. It’s clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there’s no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. Any theory of esthetics that ignores these two sides of the appreciation of beauty is missing something important. I feel that as a young person in the Peace Corps I was too impressed by cultural differences and didn’t look closely enough at similarities. Evolutionary psychology is a terrific corrective to the idea that we’re all purely products of culture.

When did you start Arts & Letters Daily?

I designed it in July of 1998. It first went live on Sept. 28 of that year. The design of the page is based on an 18th century broadsheet.

Why?

The 18th century broadsheet tries to pack the maximum content on the minimum amount of paper. So I took that classically simple idea and turned it into a Web page.

I imagined it had something to do with your enjoyment of clashing points of view.

I do like the idea that there’s a range of views on the page, and all sorts of competing voices.

How quickly did people discover the page?

It took off very fast. These days, we’re often above 20,000 visitors per day. As with most Internet sites, weekends have smaller numbers, and Friday isn’t as big as Monday.

What do you know about your readers?

They’re the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and the New Republic — people interested in ideas. One of the things that pleases me about the Internet is that people have for a long time idealized the ’50s and 1960s as some kind of golden age of journalism. With three networks and every city having a monopoly morning daily — as if that were a golden age! For diverse points of view and open, robust criticism, things have never been better than they are today.

What has been the most controversial piece you’ve linked to?

A couple of times when we had some pieces that were excellent, sober, scholarly articles from the magazine Christianity Today, these seemed to get up some readers’ noses. People who wouldn’t think twice about something out of Commentary were objecting that we were publishing out of Christianity Today. They seemed to think we were somehow forcing religion down people’s throats.

What have you learned from your readers?

One thing that surprises me is that people are not necessarily looking for short pieces. Many of our most popular items have actually been quite long. This challenges the idea that everything on the Internet ought to be short and sharp. People are also looking for longer, meditative pieces that provide an occasion for thinking.

There is an audience out there for high-end material. You don’t hear much about them.

It’s all supposed to be shallow glitz.

In the media biz it’s taken for granted that magazines have to work a niche market. Yet if your site has a theme, it’s variety.

We’re very conscious of that. The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let’s expand ourselves intellectually.

I know people who love your site but scratch their chins, because they can’t figure out your point of view. They want to know your agenda.

[laughs heartily] I heard recently about a British Marxist who finds that the site enrages him. But he can’t help but look at it every day. We’re reacting against cant and clichés wherever we find them. Whatever’s prevalent in the universities and among the chattering classes is sometimes something that needs exploding. And we’re willing to throw the dynamite. On the other hand, there are certainly many items on Arts & Letters Daily that present a fairly standard line that educated people take on many issues. A vegetarian gun-control advocate who opposes capital punishment is fine. But what pricks my interest more is the vegetarian anti-capital punishment cowboy who carries three shotguns displayed in the back window of the cab of his truck.

Let’s talk about Cybereditions. Book publishing is such a nutty field. Why would a professor of philosophy want to get involved?

My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles and I’ve been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

When did Cybereditions go up?

It’s been selling books off its site since the middle of this year. We have about 30 titles in process right now, and we’re hoping to raise that number to over 100 in a couple of months. Books have been going out of print at the rate of 30-40,000 a year for the last 40 years. So Cybereditions takes high-quality, out-of-print books that the authors have the rights to and does a new edition where possible. Some of our books are unchanged from the original edition, but most are in some way updated.

What are your bestsellers?

Frederick Crews’ book “Skeptical Engagements” has been selling, Norman Holland’s book “Poems in Persons” has been selling. And Mark Turner’s “Death Is the Mother of Beauty” has been popular. We recently acquired Ihad Hassan’s “The Postmodern Turn,” and Brian Boyd’s first book on Nabokov’s “Ada.”

As successful computer people are beginning to kick back a little, are they becoming more interested in the cultural applications of the technology and the money?

A couple of years ago it was impossible to interest people in the computer world in anything that used the dreaded word “content.” If it wasn’t a switch that made something go faster or some kind of whizbang program, they weren’t interested. Cybereditions is an application of computer technologies to a very traditional business. Book publishing is and always was, as Jason Epstein has said, a cottage industry. It’s a matter of authors working with editors to produce books that are useful to readers. There’s no way to mass-produce good editorial work. And good books are no more going out of fashion than good stories or good food. We have found backing in Silicon Valley, though it’s very modest.

Authors tell me that, now that publishing houses are aware of electronic publishing, they won’t let rights revert to authors anymore. The publishers are refusing to admit that books have gone out of print.

That’s exactly right. This is going to enrich a lot of lawyers. Ask the publishers for the rights, and they’ll dawdle and claim a book is simply out of stock. At the same time, there are thousands of authors who, before all this, when they were told their books were out of print, simply took the rights back. So there’s a huge field that Cybereditions can work with even if the current publishing scene is not entirely friendly to a new entrant.

What rate do you pay?

We pay up to 40 percent of what we net, and with electronic downloads that can be done.

Does Cybereditions have a physical location somewhere?

The server’s in Santa Clara, Calif. The company doing the editing is in Christchurch, New Zealand. The technical people are there too. We’ll be using contract editors all over the world. Our authors will certainly come from everywhere. It is a New Zealand corporation, but with international investment. And the print-on-demand books will be done, mostly, in the U.S.

How do you react to the new Gemstar e-book readers?

The quality of the devices is excellent. But Gemstar is intent on controlling and licensing what the devices can actually be used for. Rather than using an open format, which allows you to use any file of your own, you can only read what you download either through their site, or what is licensed by them.

A lot of commercial publishers are high on Gemstar’s approach.

If this is the future of electronic publishing, I think you can count most readers out. Who would have bought a television set in 1955 if it turned out that the television-set manufacturer controlled what programs you could watch?

What kinds of opportunities does electronic publishing offer someone interested in scholarly publishing?

For one thing, it changes the concept of the book. Normally a book comes out in a final finished edition. Perhaps years later a second edition follows. But an electronic book can be continually revised, more like a computer program than a printed book. You can have an initial edition, then make some corrections — that’s edition 1.01. Some more and you have edition 1.02. Right up to a really new edition, and that’s version 2.0.

Everything becomes software.

We can continually update. Another thing: Traditionally, the book is published and sits out there alone and undefended while the critics pick it apart. With e-publishing, a scholar who’s worked for years on a book can now come out with a revised edition answering critics. We think that the idea that writers can now answer their critics is very important. That’s why we’ve registered the domain name booksthatbiteback.com.

So much of what gets said about electronic publishing is about how the floodgates will finally be opened and the native genius of the people will finally be released.

I sing the praises of the many contrary points of view that are available on the Web. The downside is that much of the material that’s available on the Web is unedited and self-indulgent. More than ever, the Web demands good editors who can knock writing into line and make it serve readers rather than the egos of writers.

Internet utopians tend to use the term “gatekeeper” as a synonym for “devil.” As a publisher, what’s your view of the role of gatekeepers in the Internet world?

The old libertarian paranoia about gatekeepers is passé. Gatekeeping is impossible on the Internet anyway. What we do need, as much today as ever in the past, are intelligent editors and publishers who can be relied on to select the best material.

We need guidance.

And guidance of that sort isn’t manipulation. It’s entirely rational, and an economic use of time.

In a way that’s what the canon is — guidance.

The classical canon is a great way to begin an open-ended reading list. It was never intended as a straitjacket, nor should it be.

You’re an egghead who has created an intriguing business. What have you learned about the business world?

Many of the people I’ve encountered, particularly in the computer industry in California, are some of the smartest and most imaginative people I’ve ever met. And one has to laugh a bit sadly at academics who look down their noses at people who happen to have done well in the computer industry.

I’ve always been amazed by the way some academics seem to think that they’re smarter than everyone else.

I once read that people with Ph.D.s in fact have slightly lower IQs than people with M.A.s. Apparently, a lot of really smart people feel, once they’ve got the M.A., enough of this, I’m out of here. And some people who go on to get the Ph.D. have a kind of stupid doggedness. As a Ph.D. myself, I suppose I might admit it takes one to know one! Even so, you also find some of the best minds in the world in academia.

Are there assumptions academics make about businesspeople you’d like to shake them out of?

The usual leftoid malarkey — that the business people are only interested in profit, really, while we academics worry about the good of the world, and whether our four-month vacations might be reduced to three and a half.

I left academia in the late ’70s. Bring me up to date.

There’s a very serious divide that’s developed in the academic community. The science departments have remained strong. And those departments such as psychology or economics that have tried to give an empirical base to their research and teachings have remained lively and productive. The sad story is over in the English department. English as a discipline has been reduced to a laughingstock by its adoption of cultural studies as its central focus. In a sense you can see how it happened. The students don’t want to read long, hard, old books. And many faculty members find it unrewarding to teach classic literature to recalcitrant students. But to rescue the situation by turning to politicized readings of comic books, soap operas and the media has been a big mistake. Of course, there are still holdouts for real quality — Bard College is a notable example. But increasingly they’re an embattled minority.

The radicalism of the cult-studies approach seems to go hand in hand with a complete caving-in to commercialism.

Yes. There’s an odd way in the which the left, by trying to remain avant-garde, has gleefully adopted commercialism as the only reality — playing perfectly into the hands of the philistine right. Realistically, we have to understand that there’s always a considerable percentage of students who are not given to independent thought, and who rather enjoy being told how to talk about their favorite soap operas in deconstuctionist jargon. In any society there are people who are easily led.

I’ve run into a syndrome among some younger people recently. At about the age of 30, they start to realize they were brainwashed instead of given an education. And only then do they start to wake up from it.

So long as you have contrarian sources of news and information, hope is not lost for intellectual independence. And we’d love Arts & Letters Daily to be the meeting place for critical thinkers from all over the map.

A novelist who has also taught at colleges told me that the people who are really interested in reading and writing are leaving English departments and going into creative-writing departments instead.

So the abiding classical interest in great prose and how it gets made will persist. It will just be reborn in another department.

You aren’t a pundit bemoaning the end of culture!

All of these interests can go only temporarily into eclipse, because they’re permanent human concerns. I’m a democratic optimist — I live in the belief that the more information people have, the more they can be trusted to make the right choices.

Coleman Silk is a respected if tactless classics professor at Athena College, a small school in the Berkshires. Roth sets the scene of his hero’s destruction ominously:

It was about midway into his second semester back as a full-time professor that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him to voluntarily sever all ties to the college — the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena, and the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife’s death.

That’s a hell of a setup. It puts all of your “And then what happened?” instincts on high alert: You might be coming to a Dumas-style cliffhanger or to an instance of hubris straight out of Greek tragedy. What Roth gives us instead is farce. Noticing that two students have yet to appear in class five weeks into the semester, Coleman asks, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” It turns out that the missing students are black, and when they hear about Coleman’s question, they file a complaint charging him with racism. Coleman explains, of course, that he was using “spooks” not as a racist epithet but simply as a synonym for “phantoms.”

But his astonishment at having to offer this obvious, elementary defense is matched by his contempt. Like a lot of intelligent people in recent years, Coleman finds himself in the position of having to do something akin to explaining that water is wet; it’s the type of explanation no rational person should have to make and no rational person would demand. Coleman finds no defenders among his faculty colleagues and more than a few of them ready to take revenge for the exacting standards he maintained when he was dean. He resigns in a huff, and a few months later his wife is dead — killed, he is sure, by the vicious charges against him.

Still, his persecution isn’t over. The 71-year-old widower begins an affair with an illiterate 34-year-old college cleaning woman named Faunia Farley. For both of them it’s a retreat into the pleasures of uncomplicated sex. Coleman is working to lay aside the rage that has consumed him since his resignation. Faunia is trying to forget the accident that left her two children dead and for which her ex-husband, a psychotic Vietnam vet, blames her and is still stalking her. But this is a country where private acts are now open to public scrutiny, and so the affair holds no solace at all. Having already been “proved” a racist in the college community, Coleman — like the president who is being hounded by Congress and the press — is now ripe to fill the role of the powerful man “sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age,” as an anonymous letter writer puts it.

The revelation about the corruption of language at the heart of the book (and if you want to preserve the surprise for yourself, you should stop reading right here) comes, fittingly, in a precisely chosen word. “What burns away the camouflage and the covering and the concealment?” Roth asks. “This, the right word uttered spontaneously, without one’s even having to think.” For Coleman, the right word comes in a conversation he’s having with the young attorney he has consulted after being harassed by Faunia’s ex. Instead of the legal action the old man expects, he finds himself on the receiving end of a presumptuous and condescending lecture, the gist of which is that he should end his affair with Faunia. With the cloud of racism hovering over Coleman’s reputation, the lawyer tells him, he is courting scandal by being “involved with this woman.” Coleman hears out the harangue, and then he replies, “I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face.” And though the young lawyer is perplexed (“Why ‘lily-white’?”), Coleman knows he has burned away “the camouflage and the covering and the concealment” from the truth he has hidden for years: the fact that he’s black.

Roth writes as if to illustrate the distinction Terry Southern once made between the desire to shock and the determination to astonish. He doesn’t seem to know any way to write except boldly, and in the past 10 years he has taken more risks than any other American writer. The revelation that Coleman has been passing as white is not as flamboyant as the examination of the split in the Jewish psyche in “Operation Shylock,” Roth’s riskiest book and his greatest comic achievement. But at a time when the issue of race seems more barbed and complex than it ever has, when the clear-cut moral assurances of the civil rights years have disappeared, it’s still brave enough.

The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over “The Human Stain”: There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years. But Coleman Silk is a singularly conceived and realized character, and his hidden racial past is a trap Roth has laid for his readers — a temptation to fall into the judgmental mind-set, “so rich with contempt for every human problem you’ve never had to face,” that is the book’s primary target.

Coleman’s light skin is what makes his deception possible, but what makes it necessary — for him — is his profound desire to be an individual. Following the wishes of the father “who had been making up Coleman’s story for him,” the young Coleman had left his home in East Orange, N.J., for Howard University, where he found himself in a velvet-lined version of the invisibility Ralph Ellison famously described:

He discovered at Howard that he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we’s overbearing solidity, and he didn’t want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? Another place that’s just like that, the substitute for that? Growing up in East Orange, he was of course a Negro, very much of their small community of five thousand or so, but boxing, running, studying, at everything he did concentrating and succeeding … he was, without thinking about it, everything else as well. He was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneersof the I.

What, you can imagine Roth’s critics asking, would a Jew know about this? A lot. The comedy of Roth’s early work, which another set of detractors has long used to peg him as a self-loathing Jew, came from the tension between background and aspiration, the desire to propel oneself out of everything provincial and stultifying in one’s upbringing. “The Human Stain” offers Roth’s most ruthless (and least comic) example of this will to separate. In order to be who he wants to be, Coleman is willing to tell his widowed mother that he has decided to live as a white man, that he will never see her again and that she will never see her grandchildren, will never even know if she has any.

Roth’s rendering of Coleman’s resolve is a brilliant example of what can happen when a writer sets out to understand experience rather than to judge it:

Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure? Was it the misleading that provided his pleasure, the carrying off of the stunt that he liked best, the traveling through life incognito, or had he simply been closing the door to a past, to people, to a whole race that he wanted nothing intimate or official to do with? Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less? How petty were his motives? How pathological? And suppose they were both — what of it? And suppose they weren’t — what of that?

That Roth should pose those questions toward the end of the book, where most writers would begin summing up, is evidence of his determination that literature amplify rather than reduce. But he never lets us forget that the present is a distorting mirror in which Coleman’s decision to be separate finds reflections he could never have anticipated. The biggest of these distortions, for Roth, is the one between the good intentions of midcentury liberalism and the blight that has been its outcome.

In the closing scenes, novelist Nathan Zuckerman — who functions in this book, once again, as Roth’s narrator and mouthpiece — talks to Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, the one family member who, through surreptitious phone calls on the occasions of births and deaths and marriages, has kept in touch with her brother. Ernestine is a schoolteacher who has remained in East Orange — she still lives in the house she grew up in — and felt the familiar galling paradox of becoming more empowered with rights while simultaneously seeing the middle- and working-class neighborhood she grew up in destroyed by the blinkered good intentions of urban renewal. If you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, listening to a parent who had grown up in the city talk about what it was like, you can hear in Ernestine’s voice the unsentimental nostalgia of bitterness fighting it out with melancholy:

I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main Street. You know what we’ve got today? We’ve got a ShopRite. And we’ve got a Dunkin’ Donuts. And there was a Domino’s Pizza, but they closed. Now they’ve got another food place. And there’s a cleaners. But you can’t compare quality. It’s not the same.

Yet that physical desecration seems puny next to the intellectual desecration she describes to Zuckerman:

Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it’s a black author or it’s a white author? I’m impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in February and concentrating study on that to milk that’s just about to go sour. You can drink it, but it doesn’t taste right.

Those words are something like a death knell for the liberalism Roth thought he knew. It’s as if E.M. Forster’s great dictum “Only connect,” which had seemed so romantic and noble when young people rediscovered him in the ’60s, had been replaced by a new generation of inner-city youth with “Only separate.”

Roth, though, has refused to separate, even if his mouthpiece, Zuckerman (who has been at the center of eight Roth novels since 1979′s “The Ghost Writer”), has tried to. In “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and now “The Human Stain,” Zuckerman, having withdrawn from everything but work, is living in a two-room cottage in the Berkshires. His separation is, of course, doomed to failure: Life, in the form of other people, keeps flooding in.

In “American Pastoral,” it’s the hero of Zuckerman’s youth, the Jewish athlete whose blue-eyed, golden-haired good looks and later success in everything seemed to contain a whole Jewish generation’s dreams of assimilation. In “I Married a Communist,” it’s Zuckerman’s high school English teacher, Murray Ringold, a victim of the blacklist, and Ringold’s radio-actor brother, Zuckerman’s first mentor. Coleman Silk does not figure in the novelist’s past; Zuckerman first meets him when Coleman bursts into his refuge, insisting that Zuckerman write the story of his persecution. Zuckerman initially declines, but a friendship begins, partly because the two men share a frame of reference.

Though Roth is nearing 70, both the quality and the quantity of his writing — six novels in the past 10 years — are evidence of an amazing vigor. Still, you read this trilogy conscious that the author is trying to fix the middle-class Jewish Newark of his youth in much the same way that, at a certain age, you begin asking your parents to repeat the stories you’ve grown up hearing, to make sure you have the details right — accepting your role as repository of memory. In “I Married a Communist” Ringold reconstructs Newark’s vanished Italian First Ward in a long description that is as full and affectionate as Ernestine’s description of present-day East Orange is spare and disdainful. It’s just one of the many echoes of memory in these three books, which are haunted by the past. And yet there is a terrible, twisted continuity in the way Roth links the past with the present.

“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” can be read independently of one another, but they come together more fully than any set of American works since the first two “Godfather” movies, forming an epic portrait of what Roth calls “the indigenous American berserk” — that is, the craziness that always threatens to topple real life into (as Greil Marcus put it just as Clinton’s detractors were building up a head of steam) what passes for real life these days.

The two earlier versions of the berserk — the rise of the leftist fringe during the Vietnam War in “American Pastoral,” McCarthyism in “I Married a Communist” — are more cataclysmic than “the ecstasy of sanctimony” that found its outlet in the impeachment of Clinton, but this latest outbreak is the most disturbingly widespread. After two books in which, respectively, the delusions of the left and the delusions of the right took center stage, Roth has written a concluding volume in which the delusions of each side come together, the hunting of Clinton (from the right) finding its perfect echo in the hunting of Coleman (from the left).

At first it may seem that Roth is a few years behind the zeitgeist: The culture wars of the early ’90s look almost as distant now as the ’68 Chicago police riots did by the time of the ’72 presidential election. Even the term “p.c.” has taken on a certain quaintness. But think about it for a minute, and you realize how deeply the passion for what is “appropriate” has come to rule public discourse on both the right and the left. Pick up the April Playboy and you can read conservative tag-team Evans and Novak calling Clinton’s infidelity “relevant” because “when you are doing things in the working quarters of the White House … that is in the public domain.” A recent Time Out New York contained this description of D.W. Griffith’s tenderest masterpiece, “Broken Blossoms”: “If you can get past famous white dude Richard Barthelmess playing an Asian, there’s much to admire in this sensitive melodrama.”

For Roth, the need to cushion circumstances that any normal adult should be able to understand is the wellspring in the impeachment drama. He calls the summer of 1998 the time “when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life.” In the America of “The Human Stain” we have all become children, talking to and talked to by others as if the primary function of adult conversation were protection.

Yet for all that, these books suggest a deep determination to avoid rage. The characters who succumb to it bring about their destruction. Even the epiphanies of disgust in these novels (like the scene in “I Married a Communist” in which Roth describes what he regards as the most ludicrous, self-deluding spectacle in recent American life, the funeral of Richard Nixon) reach their pitch of emotion through hard, measured reason. Proceeding from the assumption that adults don’t need coddling, Roth addresses us in language as direct and as clear as he can make it.

I’ve hardly touched on the book’s finely drawn characters, or on the concrete and subtle ways that Coleman’s predicament links up with Clinton’s, the two of them captured in Roth’s title, which denotes both the notorious stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue Gap dress and the basic fact of human imperfection. “The Human Stain” is the capstone to a cycle, both cruel and brave, of novels that Roth has graced with a lovingly unsentimental portrait of his own vanished past. At the end, the voice of his alter ego and hero, Nathan Zuckerman, moves from a solitary, familiar “I” back to an uncertain “we.” Where that change will lead the novelist and his creation isn’t clear. Roth’s portrait of the derangement we’ve accepted in real life — or what passes for it these days — leaves it open as to whether Zuckerman is headed back to a bizarro world or to a world where the novelist’s voice could find an audience willing to listen.

Prose has taught writing at numerous colleges and is clearly appalled by the puritanical mood on campus today. Yet her dissection of the chilly campus climate goes way beyond simple p.c.-bashing. Things weren’t so good in the old, pre-feminist days, either; Swenson’s wife, Sherrie, the college nurse, has seen enough students “destroyed by faculty Romeos.” But nowadays the students seem oddly childish and fearful. At the heart of the malaise lies an odd sense of entitlement — the students’ insistence that they don’t have to hear anything they might find disturbing or that might make them feel “unsafe.”

But learning is unsafe; thinking is unsafe. Swenson and his faculty colleagues take cover behind cautious language, and it’s this corrupting betrayal of language that makes Prose particularly furious. Her hero dumbs down his criticisms of student work, performing “the weekly miracle of healing the terminally ill with minor cosmetic surgery.” Some of the other, rather predictably portrayed English department members (its one deconstructionist, its one feminist) have taken an easier way out and actually believe the banalities they teach.

“Everything we read turns out to be the same story,” complains Angela, Swenson’s one talented student, “the dominant male patriarchy sticking it to women. Which I guess is sort of true … except that everything isn’t the same.”

This novel tells a different story. I trust I’m not spoiling anything for you if I reveal that a book called “Blue Angel” is about the young and heartless seducing the old and foolish. The seduction is as literary as it is sexual: Angela privately begins to hand Swenson pieces of the novel she’s writing, which Prose makes compelling enough to ensure that Swenson and we, Angela’s other readers, are hooked.

The erotic energy of the situation (writing as seduction and power trip, reading as willing submission) keeps “Blue Angel” hurtling ahead for perhaps its first half. And then, surprisingly, it becomes bleak and almost plodding. A lot of creaky plot mechanics get set in motion. A sense of inevitability creeps in: Swenson’s transgressions pile up like documents in a prosecutor’s dossier, unrelieved by any of the go-for-broke hilarity that Jack Nicholson, for example, brought to the male writer’s impotence in “The Shining.” (Why is it that the writer who can’t write has become our universally accepted emblem of the lost soul?)

It’s not that Prose can’t “do” male acting out — she did it brilliantly in “Guided Tours of Hell,” in which two participants in a Kafka symposium are helpless to stop one-upping each other, even while touring Auschwitz. But in this book she seems to have handed Swenson over to Angela: He becomes a sinner in the hands of an angry, uncontrolled and gleefully experimental student writer. Maybe this fate is intended as his punishment, but it still feels labored — or, as Angela might say, “technical.”

Many of Prose’s previous novels, including my favorites, “Bigfoot Dreams” and “Primitive People,” have loopy, meandering plots that don’t go much of anywhere but feel spacious all the same; they unfold into “the open destiny of life” that Grace Paley has said “everyone, real or invented,” deserves. “Blue Angel,” in piling up evidence, incident and literary reference, feels cramped and airless.

You could argue — as Swenson’s students might — that this constriction was intentional. In fact, I so enjoyed parts of “Blue Angel,” and so wanted it to work better than it did, that I briefly tried the ever feeble “meant to feel that way” defense myself. To no avail: Try as I might to explain away its shortcomings, “Blue Angel” definitely sags. Which is a shame, because it’s such a smart and savage take on a contemporary mood — a rueful meditation on the slippery slope from self-consciousness to self-regard to self-destruction, a study of the dumbed-down banality of mischief.

News accounts of Richard and Dawn Kelso leaving their 10-year-old son,
Steven, at a Delaware hospital the day after Christmas with his toys,
medical supplies and a note saying they could no longer care for the
boy, dwell on the fact that the Kelso family lived in a $200,000 house
and drove BMWs. Clearly, these selfish, privileged bastards … Well,
enough said.

No, NOT enough said. I understand exactly how a desperate parent could
do what Dawn and Richard Kelso did. The part that makes them heroic, in
my book, is that they took Steven somewhere where people are trained to
give him the care he needs, instead of loading him into one of those
spiffy BMWs and heading for a bridge abutment.

And the sanctimonious “professionals” who are anxious to point out that
respite services are available. How defensive do they sound? Yikes, we’d
better let folks know we had services available! But of course we have
budget problems, and shortages of trained labor, and income guidelines
that clients have to meet. But we might have done something to help
them, we might have if they’d known where to look, begged a lot, and not
had the resources to pay for (nonexistent) private care.

“It’s very disturbing to think a parent would get to the stress level
that would cause them to abandon a child,” said Diane Carey, executive
director of the Chester County chapter of Association for Retarded
Citizens (ARC), an advocacy group for the retarded. Bullshit. It’s very
disturbing to think that someone who runs an agency like ARC would say
something that naive about the families they are supposed to be helping.

“There are a ton of services out there for parents to access to get
help for that kind of thing,” said Kevin Casey, executive director of
Pennsylvania Protection and Advocacy. “It is sometimes difficult and
very bureaucratic to get that help, but if you keep pushing for it, you
can get it.” Gee, maybe the Kelsos should have taken time off from
bathing, feeding and changing Steven’s diapers and clearing his
ventilator to “push” to get services for “that kind of thing.”

Am I making my point here?

Let me just think back to a few of the days I had when my younger son
was 10 years old — and nonverbal, not toilet trained, nearly five and a
half feet tall and completely mobile. I’d try to stay awake when he was
awake, but there were moments when I’d collapse from exhaustion and wake
up to find that he’d smeared feces all over the stairway from his
bedroom to the kitchen, and then helped himself to a pound of cheddar
cheese and some (raw) hamburger I’d been thawing in the fridge. Then he
left the refrigerator door open while he went to sit on the living room
carpet to smear shit and cheese onto the television screen while he
pointed to Bert and Ernie. Was there an agency on call to help me clean
up that mess?

I finally found an agency to watch him after school so that I could get
a job — and they called me at work at least once a day to complain that
he’d scratched a volunteer or taken off his clothes on a field trip and
wouldn’t put them back on.

Dawn Kelso has a husband to help her with Steven — I had that with my
two sons just until they were diagnosed with Fragile X, a
genetic disorder that causes retardation and autistic behavior. Then I
was on my own. Did my family help? I suppose the stress was too much for
them too — but no one wrote headlines in the paper like “Grandparents
Visit ‘Normal’ Grandchildren With Disproportionate Frequency.”

One thing I had that the Kelsos didn’t was helpful neighbors. I remember
one morning when Andy found a loosely sealed can of paint and painted
the floor and woodwork in the kitchen while I extravagantly sat on the
toilet a moment too long. My neighbors answered my tearful calls at 8
a.m. on a Saturday to help clean up the mess. They helped me search for
him innumerable times when he “escaped” — usually when I was unloading
groceries from the car or going to the bathroom (again!) and he’d
disappear out the front gate.

“What caused the meltdown?” asked Stephen Sheridan, executive director
of the United Cerebral Palsy Association of Philadelphia. “Why couldn’t
they cope anymore?”

Caring for a disabled child is a “lifelong responsibility,” said
Sheridan. “It doesn’t go away. It’s early in the morning until late at
night every day of the week, every week of the year. If you do that
morning and night every day of your life, it could be awfully
draining,” he said.

It could? Shocking.

Two years ago, when a Kentucky man who’d recently been widowed shot
himself and his 40-year-old disabled son when the son was put on a
years-long waiting list for residential placement, that didn’t shock me
either.

Twenty years ago, children with severe disabilities were
institutionalized. That’s no longer the case. The deinstitutionalization
effort has put the responsibility for caring for disabled children on
their parents. And getting help is damn near impossible. There is no
government help, private agencies are short-staffed nightmares and
school is a battleground.

The Kelsos were charged with misdemeanor counts of child abandonment and
conspiracy. If I were them, I’d stay in jail, go on a hunger strike and
kick and scream until people start to notice. The world hasn’t become a
better place for the most severely, profoundly handicapped kids, or for
their parents either. We can get in your face and make some noise, or we
can keep making acts of quiet desperation like the Kelsos did. I hope
you’re so fucking shocked that you start to pay attention.

In both plays, the dilemmas in confronting racism’s legacy lead to
personal as well as social tragedy. The juxtaposition of the two reveals how the master/slave dynamic has persisted long after slavery’s end. Gilman’s characters
struggle with race from a largely white perspective: How should they talk — and
how do they really feel — about blacks and other minorities? Is anything
correct about “political correctness”? What can they do to assuage
their guilt or help minorities? Wilson’s characters — all of them black — face the flip side of those issues: How can blacks maintain their dignity in a society that denigrates them and would prefer to ignore them, except when actively blocking their attempts to
make meaningful lives for themselves? What kinds of compromises are
acceptable, or necessary, with whites and the power elite? Is it
possible to maintain an African-American identity and community without
resources under African-American control? The common theme is that blacks and
whites alike are trapped by history — no confrontation with the legacy of racism has a
chance of success without addressing the continuing imbalance of power.

“Spinning Into Butter” takes place in the office of Dean Sarah Daniels, who is in her first year at a small Vermont college. It’s clear from the start that Daniels means well. She wants to provide a special minority scholarship to a deserving student. But when the chosen recipient edgily insists on being identified as “Nuyorican,” Daniels tries to
cajole him into being Puerto Rican for the sake of the forms
she must fill out. Later, when it’s reported that two racist notes had
been attached to the door of black student Simon Brick’s room, the white administrators, faculty and students all rush to advance their various self-serving agendas: They keep it quiet (to avoid bad public relations); call a campus-wide meeting (and write a lengthy paper analyzing and condemning racism); and form Students for Tolerance (to bolster chances of getting into law school). Nobody bothers to consult the minority students — and only Daniels suggests talking to Simon first.

As the campus crisis deepens, the other administrators demand that
Daniels come up with a concise, 10-point plan for battling racism on campus — one
that won’t require much money, but promises to have “great impact.” In a long night at the office, Daniels begins making a list, in parts cynical, whimsical and painfully ambivalent. “Stop being stupid,” is the first step on the not-terribly helpful agenda. “Admit defeat,” it concludes.

Daniels unleashes her tirade of confusion and despair to a horrified colleague. She wants to help minorities — she even studied African-American literature! Maybe nothing
works, she fears. Maybe she can’t transcend racism. Then the tone
shifts ominously: Maybe blacks can’t either. She reflects on her
experience at a black college, and living in Chicago. “In the
abstract” blacks were fine, she said, “but in reality they were so
rude.” Although the people who irritated her may have been a minority
within a minority, “the ones who were awful seemed exceptionally awful,
loud and belligerent and abusive … I know blacks have agency,” she
acknowledges, but thinks maybe they don’t succeed just because they’re “lazy
and stupid.”

After the FBI determines that Simon sent the notes to himself, he
is expelled by the other administrators, without so much as a phone
call to his parents. Daniels falls victim to the crisis as well.
There is as little effort to understand Simon’s actions as there was to
support him as a lonely and isolated student, but the cop who drives
him home observes afterwards to Daniels, “He wouldn’t have done that to
himself if somebody hadn’t done something to him.” Daniels notes that
Simon was like the storybook character of Little Black Sambo, getting
all the menacing tigers to chase each other around the tree,
ultimately “spinning into butter.”

Gilman argues that whites objectify blacks as the “other,” thus
failing to treat them as equals who might be worthy of respect. This
seems equally true whether her white characters have few encounters
with blacks (as with most of the Vermont academics) or many encounters (as
Daniels does). At one level, the play is a gibe at “political
correctness,” which is presented as often being a fraudulent cover for
deeper, unexamined racial prejudice, ignorance or distrust. The
anguished and self-important academics are easy comic targets,
especially with the campus cop playing salt-of-the-earth foil. Daniels
is portrayed as warm-hearted but pathetic as she apologetically
navigates the terrain of her own guilt, but despite her impolitic
outburst she has more compassion than her colleagues. The problem with
“political correctness,” however, seems less in the aspiration to
confront racism and more in the failure to take individuals seriously
in a world driven by bureaucratic categories and sociological
abstractions. In the end, the white administrators had the power not only to
define those categories and award aid, but also to summarily expel Simon
because he violated their terms for dealing with racism.

It is hard to argue with Daniels’ plea for frank, person-to-person
communication. Daniels’ long lament about “lazy and stupid” blacks
is a shocker on stage, coming from the middle-class academic. “Can’t
people admit they feel this way?” the dean asks. But to what end? If
such bluntness led to any meaningful dialogue on race, it might be
worthwhile, but it is more likely simply to legitimize the expression
of bigoted statements that have been thankfully dampened out of guilt,
shame or “political correctness.” These sentiments may mask real
feelings, but sometimes frankness or honesty can simply be an excuse
for sloppy thinking or crude prejudice.

The key issue is not so much objectification, political correctness or
some aspect of identity politics as it is who has power to define
social identities and relationships — white-controlled corporations,
media empires, universities and political organizations. Facing up to
objectification ultimately necessitates contending with powerlessness,
either submitting to it or struggling against it. That struggle with
powerlessness may lead as readily to personal pathologies, such as
Simon’s notes, as political movements, whether it’s Students for
Tolerance or the minority student organization. On the other hand, although
whites in “Spinning Into Butter” may agonize over how to deal with
blacks in their midst and what is the appropriate terminology and
conduct, they do not confront the fact that they still have
disproportionate power in the college and society, even with their ambiguous
power to “do good.”

The world of Wilson’s jitney drivers — operators of illegal but crucial taxis in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson grew up — is surrounded by whites, at times
penetrated by whites and always heavily influenced by whites, but
there are no white characters to the drama. Indeed, for all the
deleterious effects of the white-dominated power structure on the lives
of these men, one of them suggests that most whites don’t even know
they exist — just as the whites in “Spinning Into Butter” barely know
any black people.

Wilson, whose work ranks in the pantheon of American playwrights like Eugene
O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, once again brilliantly sketches memorable
characters and provides a realistic slice of black American life. As in other Wilson plays,
the drama of the African-American community is nearly self-contained here, but this world exists within a society that can — and does — reach out and destroy both black
individuals and communities. Whatever the complications that the white
administrators in Gilman’s Vermont college have in dealing with blacks,
they pale by comparison with the dilemmas faced by blacks dealing with the whites
who hold so much power over their lives.

Becker, a retired steel-mill worker, runs a jitney station, serving
the unofficial taxi needs of the black community. The jitney drivers
themselves are a rich collection of troubled but hard-working men who
transcend their easy identifications — an angry young man who is frustrated, but
trying to be a successful husband and father; an amiable drunk with
memories of being a tailor to black stars; a gruff gossip; a player with a
sentimental streak; a philosopher of self-improvement. Life at the
jitney station is a series of constant hustles, negotiations over small
change, limited opportunities and bigger, often faded dreams. The “car
service” offers the men a living and a sense of independence that is
threatened by the city’s plans to tear down everything on the street in
the name of urban renewal.

Yet Becker, who provides the initiative and order for the jitney
station, faces a more personal crisis. His son, Booster, is about to
leave prison after serving 20 years for murdering his well-to-do white girlfriend.

Booster’s act ultimately kills his mother and his relationship with his
father as well. Becker is bitter that his son, a good student who had
started college, threw away a promising career, but Booster had seen
his father’s lifetime of hard work and submissiveness to white
landlords and bosses as making him “small.”

Betrayed by his girlfriend, and caught in the web of her father’s deeply
hypocritical views of sex and race, Booster had thought that by seeking revenge he could redeem his father and make the Becker family name “big” again — as his father appeared to the young boy
within the confines of the black community.

Father and son never reconcile, but they indirectly attempt to redeem
themselves to each other. Becker decides to organize the jitney
drivers and fight urban renewal. “We can keep playing by their rules as
we have been,” Becker says. “But they change the rules. We’ve got to do
something else.” Yet Becker never gets to try his new strategy, falling victim to his rigorously responsible work ethic. As the dispirited drivers praise his father, Booster reflects that all he ever knew about his father was how hard he worked, and for the first time contemplates stepping into his empty shoes.

One of the beauties of Wilson’s plays is the economical way in which he presents complex characters as believable but imperfect human beings. They are
characters as universally human as those in any great drama, yet deeply
rooted in African-American culture and history — as much black Americans
as Ibsen’s characters are Scandinavian or Moliere’s French. They are
trying to live out their dreams — of family, happiness,
livelihood, sexual fulfillment and personal pride — but within a
context that limits and intrudes upon their actions. The city’s elite
can condemn their neighborhood and destroy their business. Landlords
threaten the roof over their heads and the stature of parents in
the eyes of their children. Whites control access to good jobs. Even when blacks
succeed in school, when they reach out and make personal connections to
whites, they face betrayal. But while “Jitney” does offer some understanding of Booster’s
rage, the play is clearly unsympathetic to his actions, which destroyed him and his
family and did nothing to right any wrongs. Implicitly, it argues that
the solution is rather for blacks to work together politically and to
create their own base of economic and cultural power.

Quite rightly, neither “Spinning Into Butter” nor “Jitney” attempts to
provide full-blown political analysis, let alone a 10-bullet
program of action for eliminating racism. Both Wilson and Gilman have made serious
efforts to provide realistic portrayals of how the conundrum of race plays out in American
life. In their hands, the tragic flaw in American life becomes the
stuff of great drama.