In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for “Left-handed,” a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in “Keep the Lights On,” Ira Sachs’ well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

Now Clegg has written a follow-up, “Ninety Days,” a tumultuous chronicle of his early sobriety. The book begins with Clegg’s release from rehab and follows him as he struggles to keep clean for 90 days, a milestone for those in recovery. Over the following weeks, he tries to rebuild his shattered life — befriending other recovering addicts, searching for a new apartment and shuttling from meeting to meeting — but before long, he is once again drinking, smoking crack and having anonymous drug-fueled sex. Thus begins a dramatic series of relapses.

The book, which is written in straightforward, readable prose, is an often-vivid testament to the difficulties of overcoming addiction and the value of companionship. Despite occasional moments of cattiness (Clegg can be ungenerous in his description of other meeting attendees), Clegg comes across as a deeply troubled but a perceptive and sympathetic man, learning lessons about addiction in some very difficult ways.

Salon spoke to Clegg over the phone from Manhattan about the fallout from his first book, the unique appeal of recovery memoirs and why he won’t be writing another book.

It’s been a long time since the events of this book happened, and now you’re doing interviews and publicity about them. Does it feel strange to be rehashing all this stuff?

I wouldn’t say it’s strange, because one of the ways I’ve stayed sober is to stay very close to the things that happened, both when I was using and also in early recovery. I can’t talk enough about those early days of getting sober, because it’s the things I did and the lessons I learned — and the things suggested to me in those early days — that keep me sober today. The more comfortable I get and the more I forget it, the more vulnerable I am to relapse. And it’s pretty simple. Those experiences in those first 90 days are ones I never want to get away from and never want to forget.

Your first book was about your descent into drug addiction and alcoholism. This book is about your recovery. Why did you write it?

It came from a sense of not being finished when I completed the writing of “Portrait of an Addict.” During the three years it took to write that, I felt tethered to this live thing that needed my care and attention. I had this expectation that when I was done I would feel severed from that and I didn’t. So I just kind of didn’t stop writing. But I don’t feel connected to it, or any writing, at this point. I feel completely done.

In what sense?

Finishing this book, the process definitely stopped. I was reading the audio book a couple weeks ago and I hadn’t seen the text in a while. Reading from beginning to end, I almost couldn’t identify with the person who wrote the book. I identified with the person who lived the experiences, but I couldn’t really identify with somebody who would sit for six hours at a time and see that [book] to completion. I just don’t have it in me right now; it’s beyond my imagination that I’d be able to write anything longer than an email. Which is a relief, let me tell you. These books just sort of bullied their way into existence. I have a pretty busy day job as an agent, so I’m kind of amazed that they exist, these things.

What do you think is the overall message of this book?

I thought that once I got out of rehab that if I just stayed away from drugs and alcohol and followed a few simple suggestions there would be a clean narrative of getting sober, that there’d be a before and after that would be clearly defined. And that process for me was a lot messier than that. So if there’s a message in there, it’s that the only way that, in my experience, I’ve gotten sober and seen other people get sober is by asking for help and getting involved deeply in a community of addicts and alcoholics in recovery.

The first book was such a huge success. How did you deal with the sudden fame that came with it? The book included some pretty shocking scenes.

I guess I dealt with that in the same way I dealt with every difficult or wonderful thing, which is one day at a time. If I step back and regard any aspect of my life, whether that be my relationship with my family, or my job, or that publication, or this one, I will probably get overwhelmed and driven to my knees in exhaustion and despair. I was busy at that time doing my job so I just did everything that I always do but maybe with a little bit more desperation. I didn’t stop and look around and try and make meaning of any of it. I just kind of showed up to what I needed to show up to — whether it was an interview or working on the copy-edited manuscripts or whatever — and then moved on to the things that crowd my life.

Do you think your disclosures from “Portrait of an Addict” have changed the way people interact with you?

Because my collapse and the revelations of my alcoholism and drug addiction were so known to people in the book publishing world, it sort of mediated or affected every interaction I had professionally when I came back to work, whether that was with prospective new clients or colleagues. I think because that history was informing so many of my interactions and relationships, I got used to it as a kind of third person in the room. In terms of people outside the sphere of book publishing, it was challenging. I’m a self-conscious person by nature, and there were certainly uncomfortable moments.

Is there one big moment is “Ninety Days” that stands out to you as being particularly meaningful?

When I look back and try and locate some moment where a great shift occurred, it was the feeling [at one point during the recovery period covered in the book] when I was walking toward a place where I did drugs all the time. I was walking towards the door and thought of Polly (this woman I got sober with who is still very close to me) who was not sober at the time. She was, at that point in her recovery, pretty dire — like life or death. I felt like if I went in and got high and went down that rabbit hole, she might show up to a meeting and find out that I had relapsed and that that would keep her out of there.

My involvement in her recovery and connection to her was the thing that stopped me from walking through that door. Somehow the pull of my feeling of usefulness and responsibility to Polly was greater than my desire to use. That was the first time anything stood between me and a drink or a drug. And I turned around and walked away. Very soon after that, the obsession to use and to drink lifted, which was something that hadn’t happened in all of the time that I had tried to get sober.

To me that reminds me how important it is to stay connected to other people in recovery. To me recovery is sort of moving from the first-person singular to the first-person plural. For me as an addict, I can get very consumed with my own anxieties and worries and struggles and ambitions. And if I get too wrapped up in those thing and lift away from my usefulness to other addicts, I’m most vulnerable to relapsing.

In the book, you enter a lot of spaces in which people are meant to be anonymous. There must have been tension between describing the people and wanting to preserve their privacy.

I felt very comfortable talking about my experience getting sober without naming the program of recovery that I’m involved in. And in the instances where there are people in the program that I got sober with and who are still in my life, I spoke to them about the fact that I was going to describe our experience and went to lengths to protect their anonymity and their privacy and followed their lead in terms of what they were comfortable with and what they weren’t. The main point is to transcribe my struggle to get a toehold in sobriety and maintain it. I didn’t feel that the focus of the book is on anyone else’s recovery necessarily, outside a handful of relationships that I had and still have.

One person in the book about whom this question arises is the character of Asa, whom you describe extensively as he helps you during your early sobriety. I’m assuming you weren’t able to get his permission to write about him.

I didn’t think so. He was, he made it clear at a certain point that he didn’t want to have any contact with me because he was no longer sober. But I’m very happy to report that he’s come back into recovery and is sober. He knows that he is in the book, and that he is well masked. I went to great lengths to protect his privacy.

You’ve been the rumored “muse” of a few projects that have gotten coverage in the media in the last few months. How does it feel to be the subject of that kind of attention?

I don’t really have anything to say about that.

One of those projects, the film “Keep the Lights On,” recently got a distribution deal. Did you have any participation in that?

I guess I can’t really speak to any books or films that any other people wrote that I may or may not be connected to by speculation in magazines and elsewhere. It’s not my place.

Fair enough. Going back to your book, the most famous recovery memoir in recent years is the controversial “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey, which you allude to in the book. Did other recovery memoirs affect your way of thinking about this book?

You know I haven’t read, probably very consciously, other books of addicts and recovery — but particularly in the last seven years, when I’ve been involved in working on these two books. People I got sober with would use this phrase, “compare and despair.” I probably internalized that while getting sober and set out not to read other books about addiction and recovery when I was writing these. I would probably think they were better writers than me, or be affected by it so I just felt like in the writing of these books, I just had to follow my own instincts.

What do you think is the appeal of the addiction and recovery memoir for readers?

I think there are a lot of alcoholics and addicts in this world. And they touch a lot of people. It’s a disease that cuts through all class and age and race, and affects many, many people. I certainly myself felt very lost when I was first trying to get sober, and other people in my life felt incredibly lost. Both experiences are very isolating, so when reading an account of somebody getting sober — or in the case of David Sheff’s book “Beautiful Boy,” reading an account of a parent whose kid is an addict — I think identification is a powerful thing. It makes the struggle feel less singular, and it shows at least one particular path which one may choose to take or not take in any of those circumstances, whether you’re an addict yourself, or the father of an addict, or the daughter or son. I think people look to books to find answers, separate from addiction and alcoholism, they look to stories to illuminate their lives more clearly, to more clearly find their way.

I think there’s also the appeal of witnessing someone’s downfall and redemption.

Perhaps. People tend to make mistakes, and the reading of how someone may prevail against those mistakes may be encouraging to some people. If it is, that’s one use of those books.

For some ambitious writers and creators, this can be reason for panic, as it was for Bissell as a young man. But over the course of “Magic Hours’” sharply observed, lushly descriptive and often extremely funny pages, Bissell (a former Salon writer and the author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter”) presents a case for art-for-art’s-sake, regardless of what may come.  And, though Bissell has no aspirations to be included in the “how-to” genre of nonfiction, “Magic Hours” subtly discloses a type of directive for new and young artists making their way.  Quite simply and hopefully, it seems to be: tell the truth about yourself and everything else, and pay attention.

Salon spoke to him over the phone about Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room,” the key to creative success and how the Internet has transformed writing.

In the book you write about director Tommy Wiseau and his movie “The Room.” You address our inability to assess our own talents, and the fact that we imagine ourselves, as you wrote, as “superlatively gifted.” That’s something that is discussed frequently now as a problem particular to our time. Do you agree with that idea that that is a product of our current culture?

I do. Tommy Wiseau is a fascinatingly American character in that he seems to have inherited every kind of bad assumption we have today – that not only will everyone have 15 minutes of fame, but everyone should have 15 minutes of fame. The only things that we Americans seem to make, or that anyone wants from us anymore, are entertainment products. We are basically living in the entertainment age. There was the Iron Age, and there was the Stone Age, and we’re in the Entertainment Age. It’s strange to me that someone like Tommy Wiseau really believes the single best use of his time – and emotional energy – is to make a film, despite being completely unversed in filmmaking and being startlingly devoid of talent. I have a hard time imagining any other culture that could welcome and accommodate someone like Tommy Wiseau.

And he’s not at all American. [Ed note: Wiseau is, in fact, an American citizen]

No, but he’s drunk the American Kool-Aid and had seconds. And thirds.

There are two different things happening there. One is that if he can just be an entertainment machine, then he’ll be that. But the original problem was that he really believed that his movie, which has been widely acknowledged as incompetent and utterly terrible, was high art, right?  

Yes. He still does. He thinks his film is one of the best films ever made.

What are your feelings about nonfiction writers who take liberties with facts?

I think this is the single most interesting question facing nonfiction writers today. All description – all literary description of real events – is a distortion. Always. Something can be factually accurate and be less representatively true than something that somewhat distorts the facts. For example, if you ignore the truly representative details about a person, but describe them in other ways, you can distort the picture of them more intensely than if you were to make up a detail about them that more clearly demonstrates who they are.

I’m also concerned with the motive behind the distortion; it matters what the writer is trying to do.  It also matters who is being written about and what information is being distorted.  For example, I wrote a book about a trip I took to Vietnam with my father, and there are some discussions between my father and me in the book, that are said to have happened in one city, but they really happened in another. And I could do that, I think, because that’s my material and it’s my dad’s material, and I told him I would be doing this and he agreed. I think that is my material to shape.  The conversations happened, they’re real, but I’m putting them in a context that is accurate to our relationship and accurate to our experience but is not factually accurate. And I totally stand by having done that.  I don’t think I committed any grave sin.

When I’m writing about people – about Chuck Lorre or Jim Harrison or Werner Herzog – I’m dealing with people I don’t know well, whose lives and reputations are at stake.  In that case, the writer needs to have a totally different standard of factual accuracy. When you can sort of play faster and looser with facts is a very different question depending on your relationship to the person you’re writing about. Personal essayists have a much, much wider range of veracity to play around in, because they’re writing about their own experience, their own memories.  The way you remember your own life is often not the way other people would say it really happened, but those memories are yours, and there’s a difference between lying about yourself and representing yourself in a way that feels true to you.

We can tie ourselves in knots over what are actually pretty basic questions of intent and effect. In my career writing nonfiction, I’m sure I’ve slipped in details – nothing big, nothing that anyone would ever call an outright lie – but something I’ve adjusted. I’m sure every nonfiction writer does things like that. It’s a natural product of your memory. The really weird thing that I’ve noticed is when you write about an experience, the version you write actually becomes your memory: It replaces the memory. What this suggests is that detail tends to trump the reality of what happened. For these reasons, nonfiction fundamentalists, I call them, kind of drive me nuts.

It seems to be that sometimes these disputes are about actually problems of titles and categorization. When you have someone like John D’Agata, who’s saying repeatedly that he’s not a journalist, it can be a frustrating conversation to watch. If he says a story isn’t fact-checkable, how is it salable to publish a book about how that story isn’t fact-checkable?

Yeah, it’s strange. He’s very open about it.  But, at the same time, it gets difficult when he’s writing about a poor kid who jumped off a building and killed himself, as he does in his book “About a Mountain.”  But, I taught that book last year, and he very wonderfully and very intelligently takes us through the public argument about how long radiation will remain deadly to human beings, and he just goes through and finds all these lies. Outright lies people in positions of real authority had put out there about how long it takes radiation to stop killing us. And we’re getting upset about details of how long the kid fell?  The book makes its own point, internally, really elegantly, which is about the kinds of lies we let ourselves be told by people in positions of power versus the kinds of lies an artist will tell for better effect.  And the lies we get mad about are the latter?  That seems nuts. That’s what I love about that book.  The book is a much better argument for his position than anything he says outside of it.

You’re very interested in discussing what an incredible amount of luck is involved in artistic success. 

Well, the thing I would say is that luck is the single most important quality – even more important than talent.  Because not everyone that’s talented is lucky, and not everyone that’s lucky is talented. I tried to explain in “Unflowered Aloes” [one of the book’s essays, about a plant that may live as long as 100 years without flowering, or might never flower at all] that I’d always assumed the opposite: I thought good stuff does eventually break out and bring success. I’m old enough now that a number of people that I came up with as a writer – some of them much more talented than I was – have just sort of stopped writing, and I find that really haunting.  It’s actually very hard to deal with sometimes because it just makes your own relative success seem that much more tenuous and that much more inexplicable. And you actually have a kind weird sort of survivor’s guilt: Why do I get to keep going?  And, if you really let that stuff get on you, you can completely freak yourself out and shut yourself down.

I stress luck as often as I do when I’m talking to students and in “Magic Hours” because it’s the ultimate form of egalitarian reassurance.  Luck can basically hit anyone. It’s not quite like buying a scratch-off lotto ticket because you do have to work really hard to get lucky as an artist, but at the same time, our lives are subject to so many freak accidents and so many completely random occurrences that to be lucky enough to be able to work as a professional writer and get paid for it, and to think that you got there just because you’re so wonderful, that confidence will eventually just make you lazy and uninteresting.  And it’s unreasonable arrogance.

Reading about poor Herman Melville was so heartbreaking: to think that the one of the two or three people who invented the modern novelistic form spent the last 25 years of his life thinking he was a total failure, and thinking that no one would ever read his books again.  If that doesn’t keep every writer alive up at night, both with a kind of optimism about what is possible, but also with a kind of very stern reality check, I don’t know what could. Getting an internship at Harper’s magazine when I was a Peace Corps dropout, having gone to a kind of middle-tier American university, not having had any great accomplishments in life, and lucking into this literary world that I fantasized being a part of, that experience just really made my life.  I’m constantly mindful of that. And I think that knowledge keeps you from getting lazy and it keeps you from getting complacent.  And those are the two biggest dangers, other than alcohol, facing a writer.

In writing about Melville you mention that in his day there was also, as there is in the New York Times Book Review today, what you call a “single, inexplicably important organ of criticism.” (In his time it was Athenaeum.) There is now so much online criticism and there are pockets of the Internet where you can have your own community.  Does that change how publications can affect a career? 

Yes, definitely.  I write in my essay on the poet and novelist Jim Harrison that I caught the very tail end of the kind of traditional literary world that was even around when Harrison was coming up in his career. The New York Times Book Review is still, obviously, a hugely important magazine, but the path that was there to being a writer as recently as 15 years ago just doesn’t exist anymore.  It’s all torn up.  I have no idea what’s coming, I have no idea what a viable path for a young writer really even is today. I struggled with that constantly talking to my students; I just didn’t know what to tell them they should do. But people like Blake Butler of HTMLGiant (Blake was my student, by the way) are making new vehicles for the work.  I think that’s really healthy and I hope there’s more of it.

It’s true that writers are not going to make as much money as they used to. Is that going to mean there are fewer good books, that there are fewer writers?  That I don’t know. But John Updike said, later in his life, that maybe it was just an accident that his generation got to make a living being artists at all. But I have to believe that as much as things change, something really cool and interesting will rise up.  I never want to be the kind of person that assumes that just because the way I’m used to things stops, that life now sucks.  I never want to be one of those people.

Benton may now be an emblem of populism, but he came from decidedly patrician stock. He was born in Missouri in 1889 and named after his uncle, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton — who fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 and served six terms in the upper house, a Western Democrat who opposed slavery from the beginning. The painter’s father served in Congress too. Maecenas Benton, known as “the Colonel,” was elected to the House when Tom was 8, and in Washington the boy saw paintings for the first time: not anything in the national museums, but the immense murals in the Library of Congress.

Benton had a glacial relationship with his father. “They only spoke to squabble,” Wolff writes. “Tom was smug; the Colonel was unforgiving.” It took years for young Benton to convince his family to let him study art, first at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later in Paris. In Chicago he took boxing classes, roughed up fellow students, and declared in his letters home that he was a born genius. But in Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein and much of the rest of the avant-garde, doubt set in. “I was merely a roughneck with a talent for fighting, perhaps, but not for painting,” he later told an interviewer.

At 30, Benton’s career seemed stalled. He had moved to New York at the explosive birth of Modernism, and the art world orbited around the twin poles of Marcel Duchamp (who lived in Benton’s building) and Alfred Stieglitz (who, lamented Benton, advocated art with “no real function”). For an artist with more classical aspirations, he seemed not just out of place but reactionary, and this despite his serious commitment to Marxist theory. When he wasn’t fighting with painters, such as his eternal bête noire Stuart Davis, he was fighting with lovers — one woman ended up stabbing him. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Benton finally had his breakthrough: Like his hero Tintoretto, he started making dioramas and painting from three-dimensional models, a practice he’d stick with to the end of his career. “He finally felt connected to a practical tradition,” says Wolff, for Benton “never trusted that aesthetic innovation legitimized itself.”

You can see the efficacy of those dioramas in his breakthrough painting “People of Chilmark,” a torrent of bodies in the surf, which is on view in “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties,” a spectacular exhibition now at the Dallas Museum of Art. But they come through even clearer in his murals, where his volumized figures obtain massive scale. His first murals, for the New School in New York, were done “in return for the price of the eggs” used in the tempera, but soon they were everywhere: in the state capitol of his home state of Missouri; in Harry Truman’s library, where the former president called him “the best muralist in our country”; even in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Benton was a bruiser, but in Wolff’s hands he can seem positively tender at times. He was happily, passionately married (a double portrait of him and his wife, Rita, is also on view in “Youth and Beauty”), and his students idolized him — one in particular. Jackson Pollock left Wyoming at 18 to study under Benton in New York, and his relationship with his teacher progressed from love and emulation to codependence and, finally, a kind of Oedipal rejection. He was already drinking heavily in his student years, and Benton, Wolff acknowledges, “was not the best role model for the defiant Pollock.” But he kept Pollock afloat in his early years in New York, helping him find work and inviting him to stay at his home in Martha’s Vineyard. It didn’t take long, though, until Pollock started showing up unannounced, empty bottle of gin in hand. At one point Benton had to bail him out of jail.

In 1940, grieving for a friend who’d just died, a drunken Pollock took a knife to most of his early work, slicing his Bentonesque canvases to scraps and tossing them out the window. The rest is history, if by “history” you mean the oversimplified view that Benton’s regionalism was just a last gasp before a Pollock-led triumph of American abstraction. But Wolff’s biography, like the exhibition “Youth and Beauty,” helps us see that art history is not a linear succession of avant-gardes, but a mess of personalities and ideas that can never be fully untangled. And at our current political and economic crossroads, when a populist impulse has roared back to life, we may finally be in a position to look at Benton with the same attention we’ve lavished on his most famous student.

Cory MacLauchlin’s “Butterfly in the Typewriter” tells two stories: that of John Kennedy Toole and that of his great novel. That the stories are distinct is the tragedy, as every Dunces nut knows — because after the cackling with your new friend and the crossfire of quotation and misquotation, one of you will inevitably frown and say: “You know the guy killed himself…?” It’s a bemusing and terrible fact: “A Confederacy of Dunces,” so vigorous, so hilarious, winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, came into the world as an orphan, its publication midwifed by Walker Percy (more of him later) but its progenitor already dead by his own hand, gassed in his car on a Louisiana roadside.

What went wrong? One of the ghastlier byproducts of suicide is its reversal of chronology: the life thus terminated is viewed, essentially, backward. In the early chapters of “Butterfly in the Typewriter,” which detail Toole’s precocious but not particularly remarkable New Orleans childhood and adolescence, this produces intermittently the sensation of going the wrong way down a one-way street. We read that the young Toole was a good dancer, loved the stage, wrote interesting high school essays, was ambivalent with girls, etc., and we feel anxious and unable to concentrate. Sequential, horizontal narrative seems a mistake, somehow.

But MacLauchlin conveys the information ably and diligently. And it’s worth knowing, for example, that Toole’s father, John, suffered from an unspecified mental illness that involved talking incessantly and walking around the house in his underwear. Or that, while teaching at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute, Toole encountered “a mustached medievalist” named Bobby Byrne, who assigned Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy” to every class he taught, loved hot dogs, and — perhaps as a consequence of the latter — suffered tremendously from gas. (“Ill-timed flatulence,” MacLauchlin calls it, leaving the reader to wonder what well-timed flatulence might be.) Presented thus with his lead character, Toole grabbed the gift with both hands, and “Confederacy’s” Ignatius J. Reilly — a bloating Boethian — was born.

Toole began the book in 1963 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he was serving Uncle Sam by teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. A year later it was finished, and the novice author had entered into a dialogue with Robert Gottlieb, star editor at Simon and Schuster. This is where the trouble begins, and not coincidentally where MacLauchlin’s book kicks into gear. With the utmost courtesy Gottlieb prevaricated, hemmed and hawed over the manuscript, made a number of sensitive suggestions, coached and counseled Toole. The total effect of his professional attentions was to unnerve and finally unbalance the fragile writer. Their back-and-forth makes grim reading: “There must be point to everything you have in the book,” warns Gottlieb in one letter, “a real point, not just amusingness forced to figure itself out.” Months pass, and Toole gives up. “The only sensible thing to do, it seems to me,” he writes to Gottlieb in January 1965, “is to ask for the manuscript. Aside from some deletions, I don’t think I could really do much to the book now — and, of course, even with revisions you might not be satisfied.” The strain of being reasonable was too much for Toole. He fainted in Gottlieb’s office. He became convinced that George Deaux, a successful Simon and Schuster author, had plagiarized him. He drifted away.

After his death it was left to Toole’s mother, the formidable Thelma, to wage a one-woman war on behalf of the unpublished novel. In time her cause would be assisted by Walker Percy, to whom much credit goes: I hadn’t realized until I read “Butterfly in the Typewriter” quite how hard the good doctor worked to get Toole’s book into print. Thank him silently (or blame him) the next time a stranger accosts you with a glad light in his eyes, wanting only to talk about “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

Dyer is mining Merleau-Ponty for insight into what schizophrenia might feel like, which in turn offers insight into what the three protagonists of “Stalker” must be feeling as they cross over into “the Zone,” a depopulated, militarily guarded, surreal landscape that seems to hold the truth of existence within it. Dyer’s invocation of Merleau-Ponty shows us why he has become a leading, celebrated critic/artist: he speaks eruditely about the most challenging of subjects in an Everyman’s language. He never condescends, and he’s unpretentious, but he gives readers the impression that they are receiving the finest insight available. For the past two decades he has delivered subtle, acute reflections on art in an original, engaging voice, actively pioneering a mode of writing that blends autobiography, criticism, and travel narrative. In this hybrid genre Dyer stands alongside writers as varied as Nicholson Baker, John Berger, and Roland Barthes, their work all flowing out of the insight that all art is really commentary on other art.

Dyer has written a whole lot of commentary, and some of it is indeed art. Last spring he released a career-spanning volume of collected criticism that recently earned a National Book Critics Circle Award; before that he published very good books on photography, D. H. Lawrence and jazz. “Zona” is his self-professed “amplification and expansion” of “Stalker,” which he assures us is his favorite film of all time. The format of “Zona” is simplicity itself: Dyer traces the plot of the movie from beginning to end, skipping over the parts he finds uninspiring, lingering over those that strike him deeply, riffing heavily throughout. Although the form of “Zona” implies just one viewing of the film, reading the book actually feels like many: it comes across as a pastiche of the scores of times Dyer has watched “Stalker,” plus the scores more times when something in his life made him reflect on the film.

Occasionally Dyer’s riffs on “Stalker” are amazing. In a six-page footnote (there are many lengthy footnotes in this book), Dyer digresses through “the subject of quotation within film,” zeroing in on a hilarious set piece in the Turkish film “Distant.” In this set piece the intellectual Mahmut is visited by his “clodhopping” cousin Yusuf, but the two men can’t decide what to watch on TV. As Dyer puts it, “Mahmut is not about to compromise his high aesthetic standards just because a dull-witted cousin has come to stay.” The film that Mahmut forces Yusuf to watch turns out to be none other than “Stalker,” but eventually the latter gets bored and goes to bed, upon which Mahmut promptly switches from “Stalker” to porn. Yusef later comes down, and Mahmut, “who has not budged, who is not jerking off, whose fly is not even open, just about has time to flip to a broadcast channel.” Eventually the men settle on a kung fu flick, and now it is Mahmut who gets bored. He switches the TV off, thus ending the scene. “If you wanted a definition of deadpan,” glosses Dyer, “you could do a lot worse than choose this sequence to illustrate your point.” After taking us through this “joke in all its precise levels of denotation,” Dyer goes on to make his case that Austrian director Michael Haneke also quotes “Stalker” in his post-apocalyptic film “Time of the Wolf,” albeit in a distinctly different manner. Dyer concludes that Haneke “can allude to “Stalker” without doing so — and, by the same token, can’t not do so.” This is classic Dyer: a premise opened up through a hilarious anecdote that deconstructs itself charmingly, then an expansion of the premise that zeroes back to the subject at hand, leaving us sighing in quiet wonder. Here is Dyer’s signature capacity to make a work of art his own without diminishing the source material, nor seeming diminished.

Alas, for all the talent Dyer brings to this book, it never becomes anything more than a series of pleasant riffs. “Zona” recalls Roland Barthes’ book “S/Z,” wherein the French poststructuralist takes readers word by word through Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” Richard Howard has referred to “S/Z” as “the most sustained yet pulverized meditation on reading I know in all of Western critical literature,” and “Zona” similarly foregrounds the act of watching film. Dyer’s constant movement in and out of “Stalker” mirror Barthes’ movement through “Sarrasine,” implying that “Zona” is more a book about watching film than about watching Tarkovsky. The problem is that Dyer never makes this purpose — if this is indeed the purpose of the book — central enough to be persuasive. In fact, nothing comes to ground this book — it registers only as Dyer meandering through the film. To compare to “S/Z” once again: Barthes shatters “Sarrasine” into exactly 561 fragments, classifying each one into one of five different categories and examining them as under a microscope. He takes a text and submits it to his method, in the process dredging out insights that feel substantial enough to strike to the core of what reading and writing are about.

“Zona,” by comparison, feels like an improvisation. This is obviously Dyer’s aim — at one point he even flatly states that he considered dividing “Zona” into 142 sections, one for each shot in the film, but he realized this would not be true to his experience of watching and remembering the film. Fair enough, but in previous, similarly chaotic works, like “Out of Sheer Rage” and “The Ongoing Moment,” Dyer attains a palpable sense that the book is about something, despite his ad hoc method. Those books mesh with the idiosyncrasy of Dyer’s enthusiast personality; they receive their persuasiveness from the very intimacy and literariness of a voice that makes art from its commitment to not being scientific.

But with “Zona” Dyer has misfired. Too much of its prose is flabby, too many of its conclusions are easily won. Perhaps it was a mistake to follow the film on a linear course instead of rearranging the material to suit his argument, as he did in “Out of Sheer Rage” and “The Ongoing Moment.” Lacking a structure to give them greater force, Dyer’s riffs, though generally interesting, feel insubstantial and are easily forgotten. Dyer himself seems to recognize this. Toward the end of the book, wondering whether his exercise in “summary” has been worthwhile, Dyer writes, “whether [this summary] will add up to a worthwhile commentary, and whether this commentary might also become a work of art in its own right, is still unclear.” He goes on to make a case for commentary as a valid pursuit on the level of writing novels, but at this point it feels too little, too late. In Dyer’s strongest work he never makes the case for commentary as an art because the books themselves are the best argument that could be made. Here one senses his uncertainty surrounding the project, his occasional quips and self-inflicted insults feeling not like good old Dyerian braggadocio but the faltering steps of a writer who has not found his form. Sometimes art leaves us with a sense of its grandeur but also with an inability to articulate just what we find so grand, no matter how hard we try, nor how articulate we’ve been elsewhere.