Novelists have long been attracted to the subject of an older married man and his much younger girlfriend. It’s ideal literary material: Not only does the pairing push many, many people’s buttons, it creates stories that inevitably seep past the boundaries of the relationship itself, raising provocative questions about sex and power, aging and mortality, inequity and exploitation.

The potential for the relationship to end in tragedy has always been clear. The woman faces obvious danger, both emotionally and, sometimes, physically — where would crime fiction be without the dead-young-mistress scenario? — but just as often it’s the man who comes to ruin. In Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie,” for example, George Hurstwood, the well-respected manager of a fashionable Chicago restaurant, abandons his wife and children to run away to New York with Carrie Meeber, a pretty shopgirl and aspiring actress who senses that he can help lift her station. Once Carrie achieves a career on the New York stage, she loses interest in him. Meanwhile, by barely perceptible degrees, Hurstwood descends the social ladder, ending up committing suicide in a flophouse.

In recent literary fiction, the emphasis is less on lurking tragedy and more on the way in which the relationship is a transaction in which both parties pursue their own agendas. The man may seem to have more leverage, but the seesaw doesn’t always tilt in predictable ways. In Lodge’s “Thinks,” for example, we see two versions of the married-man/younger-woman scenario, and in both cases the man pays a heavier price than the woman.

In one of the novel’s subplots, Lodge’s hero, Ralph Messenger, an English scientist with an international reputation, is known as a womanizer, but his sexual taste runs toward mature women. In fact, when he lands in bed with a young research assistant after he gives a seminar in Prague, it’s partly out of boredom, partly out of habit and completely due to her machinations.

Ralph has pegged Ludmila as one of the many desperate young women trying to make a go of it in the new Czech Republic, shrewdly and cynically aware that their future depends on cozying up to powerful men: “I imagine these young women all over Prague,” he says, “living at home in cramped apartments in crummy concrete tower blocks, sharing a bedroom with a younger sister, a bathroom with the whole family, with no privacy, no money, just one really good dress in the wardrobe and a figure which they tend carefully like a priceless plant, knowing their prospects depend on not getting to look like their mothers.”

Ludmila is assigned to show Ralph around the city, and he realizes right away that she expects him to sleep with her. He’s not especially turned on by her — he finds her too thin and small-chested — but by the end of the evening, he makes a move and they have perfunctory sex. He suspects she has faked her orgasm. “No, it was definitely not a lay to remember with any great satisfaction,” he concludes.

Just as he thinks he’s done with the whole sorry episode he realizes that it’s payback time: “I’d carelessly mentioned the conference at the end of May and when she was getting dressed to go home she asked me if she could give a paper because then she could apply to the British Council for a travel grant.” He lies and tells her the program is full, but that she can present a poster, a less prestigious option that involves posting one’s research findings in a common area of the conference. “I could hardly say less having just fucked her,” he realizes.

But when the conference rolls around, Ralph nonetheless tries to blow Ludmila off, telling her that there’s no room even for her poster. It’s only after a slew of increasingly insistent e-mails, which end with an outright threat to “write all about what we did in Prague together and post it on the Internet,” that he sends her an acceptance letter.

What has Ralph gotten out of the deal? Nothing but a night of forgettable sex and a chance to be blackmailed into granting a professional “favor.” He’s not really a lecher: It’s less his predatory instinct than his essential good nature that prevents him from seeing this coming and passing up sex with the calculating Ludmila. She, in turn, has traded her body for a shot at professional advancement, but given the still-desperate Eastern European milieu she lives in, it’s hard to know whether to revile or applaud her for it.

“Thinks” also includes a more familiar scenario: the married man who habitually pursues younger women, deceiving his wife and leaving the striving young girlfriends angry and confused once the thrill wears off and he’s over them. The wife in this case is Helen Reed, a 40-ish novelist who is visiting Ralph’s university, recently widowed and still grieving for her beloved husband, Martin. She’s teaching a fiction-writing workshop, and one of her students, a sullen girl named Sandra Pickering, turns in a story with a male character who bears a striking resemblance to Martin. Helen discovers that Sandra had an affair with Martin when she was his intern at the BBC and had based her main character on him before she knew that Helen would be her teacher.

Anyone who reads Lodge’s novels knows that in his fictional universe, committing adultery is not necessarily a terrible offense; but for adultery to avoid being foolish and destructive, it has to pass a moral smell test involving factors such as maintaining absolute discretion, choosing a partner who’s not one’s obvious underling and protecting one’s spouse from humiliation. Quite simply, the Martin-Sandra adultery stinks. Not only did all of his colleagues know about it and keep it from Helen, but Sandra was left bitter and disillusioned when he replaced her with another young woman.

There’s a breathtaking cost for the way Martin has conducted himself: His very memory is desecrated. He will not be remembered with love by his family. His long marriage is, in a sense, erased. “I had been completely deceived,” Helen writes in her journal. “If he were still alive I would divorce him. But death has divorced us already.”

In “Thinks,” the older men who pursue these relationships come out looking weak and lazy at best, heedless and egotistical at worst; the younger women seem slightly pathetic, deluded and grasping. But perhaps Lodge’s biggest point is that while these affairs may seem like secret, private matters, they’re inevitably part of a larger network of relationships; they have repercussions that spiral far beyond what either party imagines. No one gets what they think they’ll get out of it.

Philip Roth’s latest novella, “The Dying Animal,” tries to isolate the relationship, pull it out of its social context and examine it as if it were some sort of scientific specimen, reduced to its very emotional essence. But even Roth’s deeply internalized method can’t escape the overwhelming sense that this pairing is a transaction in which each side is hoping for a good deal. For Roth, it all boils down to a power game — one that, taking place as it does largely in the head of a neurotic, vain, cranky man in his 60s, has a decidedly creepy feel to it.

Roth avoids the ethical complications that adultery adds to the pairing: His 62-year-old protagonist, David Kepesh, a noted cultural critic with his own television show, is long divorced and has renounced matrimony as an oppressive institution. Not only does he have no marriage to lose, he’s also not seeking the thrill of sex with someone other than his wife — he has plenty of lovers. The younger woman, a reserved 24-year-old Cuban-American named Consuela Castillo, also defies the stereotype: She has no career ambition and does not want to be seen in public with him; she’s not looking to Kepesh as a shortcut to fame or career advancement. She’s awed by his deep cultural knowledge, but seems to want only to be in the presence of it, not to use it to further her own goals.

As Kepesh describes it, despite being 38 years her senior and formerly in a position of institutional authority over her — he “finds” her when she takes a college course that he teaches because it provides him with nubile candidates for affairs — he is in no way in control of the relationship. Consuela, he believes, soon realizes that it does “not accord with the facts” to behave like a “youthful student,” that is, as if “it was the elderly teacher who was in charge.”

In fact, the scales at first appear to tip in Consuela’s direction. What she gets from Kepesh is the chance to have her body worshiped, to be with a man who just can’t get enough of her jumbo breasts, a man who is enthralled with her unselfconscious ease in her body and her straightforward sexual nature — and who doesn’t expect her to enjoy his body in any similar way. What’s more, he conjectures, his status as a man of worldly authority makes her feel powerful, albeit in a secondhand way: “To have gained the total interest, to have become the consuming passion, of a man inaccessible in every other arena, to enter a life she admires that would otherwise be closed to her — that’s power, and it’s the power she wants.”

Kepesh becomes obsessive about Consuela, but she remains cool and somewhat detached. “She didn’t desire me, never desired me,” he laments. “She experimented with me, really, to see how overwhelming her breasts could be.” What’s more, she challenges his sense of himself as a sexual outlaw, someone determined to remain unattached yet sexually active, to “master the discipline of freedom.” With Consuela, for the first time, he feels chained. She’s not cruel, just semi-indifferent to everything about him except how he makes her see herself. “There’s no relief from the longing and my sense of myself as a supplicant,” he complains. When she ends the affair, he’s in agony. He spends eight years masturbating over memories of her.

Then she reappears in his life with awful news: At 32, she has breast cancer. Roth plays this situation for its rather heavy-handed tragic irony — alas, even the most sublimely perfect boobs are made of mortal flesh — but also as a way to even the score between the lovers. “Her sense of time is now the same as mine, speeded up and more forlorn even than mine,” Kepesh says in a tone that, while mournful, also comes across as slightly exultant. “She in fact has overtaken me,” he concludes, and it’s hard not to hear in this an old man reassuring himself that at last he’s triumphed over his young lover — she now will be the first to die. He has won in the deadly serious game of “trading dominance, the perpetual imbalance” that he insists is the nature of all sexuality.

Or has he? Roth seems to want to use Consuela’s reversal of fortune as an opportunity for Kepesh to reexamine his commitment not to fall in love, not to give himself over to another person. Early in the book, as he’s trying to understand why he has become obsessed with Consuela, Kepesh hints that he might finally be interested in giving up his joyless “freedom” and forming an attachment to someone: “This need. This derangement. Will it never stop? I don’t even know after a while what I’m desperate for. Her tits? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it’s worse than that — maybe now that I’m nearing death, I also secretly long not to be free.” “The Dying Animal” ends with Consuela phoning Kepesh to ask him to come to her, and he does, while a voice warns him not to go: “If you go, you’re finished.”

“The Dying Animal” uses the motif of the younger woman and the older man in an interesting way: The novella suggests that only a simple-minded but physically ravishing much younger woman can produce the precise emotional contortions that are required for a certain type of powerful, intelligent man to form a lasting romantic bond — and that it can only happen after her beauty is jeopardized, leaving her bereft of the only source of power she had.

Why any woman would assent to such an arrangement is another question, one that Roth can make us forget only by detaching the noun “young woman” from the phrase “with her whole life in front of her.” Barbara Shulgasser-Parker’s recent novel, “Funny Accent,” tries to come at the situation with a more realistic premise, and if her novel is any indication, it all looks considerably different from the woman’s side.

“Funny Accent” concerns a 32-year-old woman who has spent her youth attracted only to much older men. Anna, the novel’s protagonist, was subject, from the age of 13 on, to the sexual attentions of her parents’ old friend Misha; he drew her into closets and behind plants at every opportunity for bouts of kissing, fondling and undressing. They never actually had sex, and by the time she is in her late teens that’s a source of frustration. At 22, full of romantic imaginings, she flies home to see him and finally consummate their relationship, but he nervously demurs and sends her away. She’s mortified.

“Funny Accent” chronicles the revenge the adult Anna takes on Misha as well as her attempts to overcome her propensity for getting involved with men old enough to be her father. Her triumph comes when she is able to turn down a marriage proposal from Sydney, a 65-year-old friend to whom she has long been attracted. (“In ten years, I’ll be a forty-two-year-old widow with a ten-year-old,” she thinks.)

Shulgasser-Parker is not as accomplished a novelist as Roth and Lodge are and lacks their subtlety, but her oversimplification of her heroine’s inner life makes it all the more clear that in her mind, the younger woman in such relationships is after something that’s primarily psychological, not just an exchange of “goods” — sex — for access to power. What Anna looks for when choosing the men in her life is the chance to work through the aftermath of being messed with emotionally and sexually at a tender age.

Wherever the authors’ sympathies lie (with Shulgasser-Parker it’s with the woman, with Roth it’s with the man, and Lodge balances the two), these literary May-December affairs illustrate that while the relationships often are transactions, they’re transactions in which the negotiations are usually unspoken and indirect. That’s where the potential for tragedy comes in. If there are rules, no one enforces them, and when one party doesn’t get the satisfaction he or she expects, the consequences can include not just a broken heart but blackmail or even violence.

Monica Lewinsky, for example, demanded a job at Revlon only after her naive dreams of a lasting liaison with President Clinton were bitterly dashed and she’d given him the nickname the “Big Creep.” Perhaps Chandra Levy would have a similarly disillusioned tale to tell. Then there’s the cost to society when a professor like Kepesh teaches a university class solely to provide himself with a well-stocked pool of potential sexual conquests. Or when a politician regards an educational institution like the government’s internship program as his own personal nookie farm. Maybe we can chalk it all up to “the chaos of eros,” as Roth’s protagonist believes. But the price for these mismatched clandestine romances is not always clearly marked, and in the end, you never know who’ll wind up paying.

When it comes to the prevalence of the illness, improbably large numbers get thrown around: According to Andrew Solomon, author of the new book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” chronic depression afflicts more than 19 million Americans. If you’re not among that group, it’s easy to be skeptical; the seemingly functional relative, friend or acquaintance seeking treatment for depression is still often viewed as a self-absorbed, neurotic malingerer or morally weak pill popper. According to Solomon, 60 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 1998 alone. Are the people who take these pills dupes of the pharmaceutical industry, or genuine sufferers looking for relief?

Part of depression’s public relations problem stems from the fact that it’s an exaggerated form of common experiences — grief, hopelessness and fear about the future. The line between ordinary depression, which is part of being human, and what’s now called “clinical depression,” which if left untreated can ravage a life in big and small ways, isn’t always a clear one.

The widespread perception of depression as a “disease of affluence” doesn’t help either. Many see it as a sickness that only seems to afflict the well-off and whiny. What used to be called “melancholia” has always been with us, but “depression” in its present form only appeared on the scene, after all, in the middle of the 20th century, after life became cushy and stoicism (or what some would call moral backbone) went out of fashion. Is there perhaps something about our godless, impersonal, materialistic society that has caused middle-class people’s brains to short-circuit somehow? Or perhaps depression is the equivalent of the “neurasthenia” that afflicted wealthy women at the turn of the 20th century but has since disappeared as a medical diagnosis: A sort of mass hysteria through which the idle and self-indulgent convince themselves that they are “sick” and need special attention.

One thing that Solomon’s exhaustive and eloquent book makes abundantly clear is that, despite depression’s well-to-do and lily-white public image, it’s not true that serious depression is largely a province of the privileged. The rise of antidepressants may be a phenomenon of affluence, but depression itself is not. In fact, Solomon argues, since clinical depression is often the brain’s response to trauma, physical hardship and a persistent lack of self-determination in one’s everyday life, we shouldn’t be surprised that poor people actually suffer from it more often than do the middle class and rich. The overwhelming obstacles encountered during a life spent in poverty can breed passivity, and passivity, or “learned helplessness,” is “a precursor state of depression.”

“Checking for depression among the indigent,” as Solomon puts it, “is like checking for emphysema among coal miners.” A chronic sense of despair may strike a poor and barely educated person as a fitting response to a life vulnerable to both the caprices of impersonal forces and sudden violence. “If this is how all your friends are,” one therapist told Solomon, “it has a certain terrible normality to it. You attribute your pain to external things and, believing these externals can’t change, you assume that nothing internal can.” That’s no doubt why welfare recipients have a rate of depression three times the national average, according to Solomon.

We don’t hear those people’s stories. Poor depressed people suffer in silence, often without a full understanding of what’s happening to them. More educated and economically stable depressed people realize what’s wrong, get the best available care and usually get better. Depression, as Solomon puts it, “is a thing that a certain class has the luxury of articulating and addressing.”

It’s these articulate middle-class people who have become the public face of the disease. That media-savvy spokespeople like Solomon have helped create a thriving cultural cottage industry around depression is, to say the least, ironic. The most isolating of illnesses, a disorder that turns its sufferers into notoriously self-absorbed shells of their former selves, is taking on all the hallmarks of a cultural movement, one in which writers play a key role. Since William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” appeared in 1990, the publishing industry has offered us many depression memoirs — 1999′s “Where the Roots Reach for Water” is just one example. This season, Solomon’s book is joined by an anthology, “Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression,” edited by Nell Casey, which includes essays by Lauren Slater, Kay Redfield Jamison and Martha Manning. Depression’s new literary visibility is not limited to the written word, either. In a recent sold-out event sponsored by the hip New York series called the Moth (in which writers and actors tell lightly rehearsed stories), an upbeat crowd packed the nightclub Nell’s for “An Evening of Stories on Depression,” at which Solomon was the final speaker.

Solomon is himself a sort of poster child for many of the contradictions in this new trend: He has been through extreme, debilitating depression, but he’s living what looks to be a very visibly fabulous lifestyle, in which he gets plenty of attention as a result of his illness. He’s a writer who lives in Manhattan (author of the novel “A Stone Boat” and a nonfiction book, “The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost”) and has published his work in the New Yorker, including an account of his first breakdown in 1999 that received a flood of mail and became the germ of “The Noonday Demon.” He’s also independently wealthy — the heir to a pharmaceuticals fortune — and frequently refers to his Yale and Oxford degrees. His media appearances include a recent turn in the New York Times Home section in which he showed off the grand, landmark townhouse he has lovingly decorated in an eclectic style that includes “silk brocaded sofas, doges’ lanterns, Russian paintings, polar bear rugs and Chinese dragon robes”; he lives there with his “staff of two.”

“The Noonday Demon” presents itself as a be-all and end-all on depression. There are fact-filled chapters on treatments (Solomon is, no surprise, vehemently pro-antidepressant, though he advocates using them along with talk therapy), suicide, addiction, how depression affects different populations and more. Solomon fills plenty of pages of “The Noonday Demon” with the details of his own illness — he’s been through three breakdowns and now depends on a perpetually evolving regime of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication to stay well — and his expensive, globe-trotting search for the best possible care.

But however unlikely a champion he may appear to be, Solomon deserves credit for devoting much of his book to the experiences of poor depressed people, such as Lolly Washington of Prince George’s County, Md. Lolly bore her first child at 17, was raped shortly after that and bore the rapist’s child as well, then married a physically abusive man under family pressure and had three more kids in two-and-a-half years.

Her major depression arrived soon after. Solomon quotes her own description of what it was like: “I’d had a job but I quit because I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to get out of bed and I felt like there was no reason to do anything. I’m already small and I was losing more and more weight. I wouldn’t get up to eat or anything. I just didn’t care. Sometimes I would sit and just cry, cry, cry. Over nothing. Just cry. I just wanted to be by myself. My mom helped with the kids, even after she got her leg amputated, which her best friend accidentally shot off around then. I had nothing to say to my own children. After they left the house, I would get in bed with the door locked. I feared when they came home, three o’clock, and it just came so fast. My husband was telling me I was stupid, I was dumb, I was ugly. My sister has a problem with crack cocaine, and she has six kids, and I had to deal with the two little ones, one of them was born sick from the drugs. I was tired. I was just so tired.”

By chance, Lolly became part of a Georgetown University study of indigent depressed women: She’d gone to the hospital to get her tubes tied and was spotted by someone screening for study subjects. It took pestering and several visits at home to persuade her to enroll in the study, which entailed therapy and group-support sessions. Once she did, her depression lifted very quickly. Solomon reports that Lolly’s is one of the many “Cinderella-like” stories he encountered among poor depressed women given basic mental-health care: Four months later, she’d left the abusive husband, found a new job and moved the kids to a new apartment. “If it wasn’t for Dr. Miranda and that,” Lolly says of her therapist, “I’d still be at home in bed, if I was alive at all.”

The stories Solomon tells of depression among the poor are not all so open and shut. Mental-health care, whether it’s getting and filling a prescription or showing up for weekly therapy appointments, requires the kind of regular routine that many poor people find impossible to sustain. Emily Haunstein, a therapist who works with rural indigent women in southern Virginia, describes a typical patient’s situation to Solomon: “When she has to come to the clinic on Monday, she asks her cousin Sadie, who asks her brother to come and get her to bring her in, while her sister-in-law’s sister takes care of the kids, except if she gets a job that week, in which case her aunt can cover if she’s in town. Then the patient has to have someone else come and pick her up, because Sadie’s brother goes to work just after he drops her off. Then if we meet on Thursday, there’s a whole other cast of characters involved. Either way, they have to cancel about 75 percent of the time, leaving her to make last-minute arrangements.”

Nevertheless, poor depressed women are better off than poor depressed men. Male depression in general is harder to spot, Solomon says, because men tend to deal with the feelings of depression “not by withdrawing into the silence of despondency, but by withdrawing into the noise of violence, substance abuse, or workaholism.” Indigent men’s depression shows up in ways that “put them in jail or the morgue more often than in depression treatment protocols” like the one that saved Lolly Washington.

The links between poverty and depression aren’t just a problem in the U.S., either. Solomon also traveled to Greenland to study the illness among the closeknit Inuit, who, he says, have a depression rate as high as 80 percent. Greenlanders have universal free healthcare, education and unemployment benefits. But they also live in a freezing climate in which the sun disappears entirely for three months each winter, everyday life is filled with stories of suicides, tragic deaths in snowstorms and iceberg-filled seas, and the traditional culture has a “taboo on talking about yourself.”

Solomon reports that a few of the Inuit women he met have begun talking about their problems with therapists and each other and have found some relief. One Inuit woman told him “she had found the cure for sadness, which was to hear of the sadness of others.”

All this appears to bolster Solomon’s claim that the salutary effect of talking about depression holds true even outside the confessional climate of contemporary America. But is it possible that in this country, where the prevalence of everything from memoirs to talk shows to support groups sometimes makes the topic of depression (and antidepressants) seem inescapable, we’ve gone too far? Will all of this attention help suffering people feel better and function better, or will it encourage them to stay permanently depressed, or at least permanently identified with depression, as a “community” clustered around the disorder flourishes?

These are knotty questions even an exhaustive book like Solomon’s can’t answer. For his part, he preaches a two-part gospel: First, antidepressants, about which his only ambivalence concerns the sexual side effects they produce (delayed or nonexistent orgasm and lowered libido, in most people), and talk therapy — on a grandly ambitious scale.

It’s the second half of his agenda that’s more intriguing: an activist anti-depression movement akin to the environmental movement. “We must start doing small things to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution,” Solomon writes. “We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or something in between) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world’s joy — for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too.”

In a way, Solomon’s book, like his life, embodies the contradictions of depression’s new high profile. It’s the work of a man who meets the stereotype of the seemingly idle, pampered depressed person, the sort of perpetual patient who talks at length and in detail about himself and his problems. It would be all too easy to dismiss him out of hand. And yet it takes someone like Solomon — articulate, well connected and never bored with the minutiae of a disease that, let’s face it, tends to make its victims tragically boring — to be the kind of tireless advocate and booster that depressed people require. Certainly less well-off sufferers need every last iota of the energy they recover from the disease just to put their lives back together. By helping the “disenfranchised,” as Solomon hints, the rich and aimless depressed may find yet another kind of cure. And if the floodlight directed on depression’s more privileged victims dispels some of the darkness surrounding the less glamorous ones, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

How to get along with the family is a problem that has launched countless blueprint-for-life self-help franchises. Like most of Tannen’s books, this one is clearly aimed at that market — it’s got a strong whiff of the cheery, studiously inoffensive, bullet-pointed formula about it. But that doesn’t mean that the wisdom in it is banal.

Tannen’s conclusions are based on carefully gathered empirical evidence and sound linguistic principles — and lest we forget that she’s not some self-appointed expert, she lets us see bits of her transcriptions and analyses of thousands of hours of tape-recorded conversations, showing us her painstaking method at work. And while Tannen will never be celebrated for elevating the self-help genre to something approaching the literary — check out Peter Kramer’s improbably elegant “Should You Leave?” if you don’t think that can be done — she does succeed in passing on some impressive, eminently useful insights into the kinds of wounds, dilemmas and impasses that have kept novelists in business for centuries.

So what if you have to wade through some painfully predictable metaphors (the family is a “pressure cooker in which relationships roil”; “the seeds of family love” sometimes “yield a harvest of criticism and judgment”) to get to the point. And so what if the names she invents to protect the identity of her study subjects tend toward the fossilized: Dick, Sally, Betty. Tannen’s central idea, and the way the book illustrates it in action, are worth it: When we talk to people close to us, we give and receive not only “messages,” the literal meaning of whatever words are spoken, but also “metamessages,” which communicate to us something about the relationship between the two speakers. That’s where we get into trouble when we talk to family members.

The book’s title captures a classic example of these dual levels at work: A mother who precedes a statement to her grown daughter with “I only say this because I love you” is getting ready to say something that the daughter will interpret as intrusive and critical, but that the mother will see as an attempt to help. Tannen quotes one women who says that whenever she hears that phrase from her own mother, “I know she’s going to tell me I’m fat.”

The mother thinks she’s expressing love and concern for her daughter’s health or well-being, but the daughter hears something more like “There’s something wrong with you.” The same goes for statements disguised as questions, such as “Do you really need another piece of cake?” or “Did you notice they also have salmon?” — asked by a wife who claims she’s “just watching out for” her husband. Many examples of weighted phrases Tannen points out are so automatic that we probably don’t even hear ourselves saying them. A seemingly innocent “I’m counting on you,” for example, sends the message that the request needs special reinforcement because the person being asked to pitch in cannot really be trusted.

Families are inherently hierarchical, and family members’ pecking order inevitably turns these seemingly innocuous messages into fightin’ words. Tannen calls this the “control continuum”: Equality among all family members is an ideal that can never be reached, and family members use their positions to jostle for the right to make demands and have them met. A woman in her late 20s is preparing Thanksgiving dinner for her family. As she gets together the ingredients, her mother asks, “Oh, you put onions in the stuffing?” The daughter explodes, accusing her mother of criticizing everything she does. The mother retorts, “I just asked a question. What’s got into you? I can’t even open my mouth.”

Who’s right? Well, both. The daughter is overreacting to a small comment, but the mother did imply a lack of confidence in the daughter’s ability to handle the dinner — as the person higher up in the hierarchy, the mother’s words carry extra weight. Most children want approval from parents, no matter how old they are. Tannen’s advice to parents is to accept that they have to act to some degree “like guests” in their adult children’s homes, but that they should think of that not as stifling themselves but as “acknowledging the special power you have as parents and choosing to wield it with discretion.”

Alongside the “control continuum” is the “connection continuum.” Family members have to figure out the right balance between closeness and distance –feeling “protected and safe” but not “overwhelmed and suffocated.” The two continuums frequently overlap, which is what makes it hard to decipher all the metamessages at play in a conversation. Often, what you may think is a gesture of connection (“Wait, I want to come with you, but I won’t be ready for half an hour”) can come across to the other person as a power move (“You may be eager to get going, but I’m going to make you wait”).

As in all of Tannen’s books, there are a lot of pointers in “I Only Say This” that sound like they could, if followed, actually help people get along better. “Pay attention to metamessages” is Tannen’s main piece of advice, and whenever possible “metacommunicate”: Be as explicit as possible about what you want to communicate to the other person. (What Tannen doesn’t acknowledge is that that requires knowing exactly what you want from other people, which is another skill entirely.) Don’t say “I’m counting on you,” say “I’m not completely confident that you’ll do it,” and the ensuing conversation will have a whole different tenor.

And keep in mind that “living together means coordinating so many tasks that it’s inevitable that family members will have different ideas about how to perform those tasks.” If you think your way is better, don’t have an argument, make an argument — string together coherent thoughts that attempt to bring the other person around to your point of view. But realize that the person may simply not care about the same things you do, and you may have to let some things go. In general, the book’s many examples suggest that those hostility-tinged rhetorical questions that don’t really allow for a dignified answer — “What are you, crazy?” “So I’m just like a stranger to you, then?” “What did I just say?” — are always a bad idea and should be purged immediately from your repertoire.

Tannen is also big on apologizing, which, she concedes, is something women care deeply about but men tend to strenuously avoid. Just do it, she says, in a chapter cleverly titled “I’m Sorry, I’m Not Apologizing.” She doesn’t subscribe to the view that women apologize too much, thereby conveying a lack of self-confidence. She thinks that apologies “work their magic in myriad ways,” including getting the person you’re apologizing to to admit his own fault.

There are also ways to get the same effect without the ritual humiliation that men seem to think an apology entails. Focusing on the effect of the action rather than on the intention — “I’m sorry it turned out that way” rather than “I’m sorry for what I did” — can be one solution. (It did seem to work when the U.S. tried it during the recent spy plane impasse with China: “I’m sorry for the death of the pilot” — though that seemed a bit weaselly, too). She also suggests explaining rather than excusing your actions: “An excuse is an explanation that implies you didn’t do anything wrong; because you had a good reason, it wasn’t your fault, or someone else made you do it. But an explanation that does not evade responsibility can be an effective element of a good apology.”

Every once in a while Tannen dips her toe into some deeper philosophical waters, as when she concludes the book with Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset’s idea of “exuberance” and “deficiency”: Everything we say is exuberant in that it conveys even more than we could have consciously planned to put there. Yet it’s also deficient in that there’s so much we yearn to say to other people that we never can. It’s especially true, and especially poignant, when it comes to the people in our families. One seemingly modest but potentially life-changing gift we can give them, then, is to try out Tannen’s style of careful, good-humored attention to the ways talking connects us.

At the center of the book are Ralph Messenger, director of a prestigious center for cognitive science and an expert on artificial intelligence and human consciousness, and Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist, just past 40, who turns up at Gloucester to teach a fiction-writing workshop. Ralph is married to Carrie, a wealthy American, but is known as a womanizer. Helen is still grieving for her husband, who died suddenly of an aneurysm. On the one hand, Helen is just another new, attractive female who appears on Ralph’s radar screen and so his interest in her is unremarkable. On the other hand, Helen and Ralph have a lot in common: As a novelist, she’s just as interested in the mysteries of human consciousness as he is, and the wildly different approaches of their chosen fields to this central enigma of existence are fodder for fascinating conversation.

Lodge sets up the novel in a way that’s ingeniously suited to his subject: Ralph is conducting an experiment to try to determine the nature of thought, so he talks into a tape recorder freely and later transcribes the stream-of-consciousness ramblings; Helen, for her part, is an inveterate daily journal writer. So we get to observe their meeting and the progress of their acquaintance from each participant’s private point of view, as well as occasionally see them in chapters written from an objective third-person perspective. Hearing Ralph’s freely flowing thoughts, in particular, is hilarious, as he wanders in a perfectly believable way from sex to food to work to sex to an incident from the evening before to sex, and so on. Helen’s diary reveals her as a more reserved, ruminating character, less compelling (and at times less believable) than Ralph. But she becomes more interesting as the plot confronts her with opportunities to rethink things she thought she knew about herself and, at last, to come out of her paralyzing grief over her husband’s death.

Watching Ralph try to seduce Helen right under the nose of his wife is fun — somehow Lodge makes it seem not sleazy. There’s a generosity to Ralph’s sexuality, even in potentially eye-rolling situations, such as when he beds a graduate student at a conference in Prague. Everyone in “Thinks” is constantly striking his or her own moral bargains; in that episode, the much-younger woman who pursues a powerful older man is conniving for her own interest and gets just what she wants out of the deal. As for Carrie, Ralph’s wife, Lodge manages to make her an interesting character in her own right, much more than a passive victim of her philandering husband’s shenanigans. It helps, of course, that she holds the family purse strings and that Ralph couldn’t leave without a big drop in his standard of living, but if Lodge has to at times strain credulity to keep his playing field level, so be it.

In “Thinks,” as in his other books, Lodge’s academics hold our attention not just because he gives them complicated sex lives and good senses of humor but also because he shows how seriously they take their work. “Thinks” provides us not only with an engaging, accessible overview of scientific debates on human consciousness but also with a look at the ways in which the humanities and the sciences are trying to find a common language to talk about matters that concern both. Forget clichéd notions about the boredom of academic life — while Lodge pokes fun at the pretension, the slowness, the provincial attitudes and the stultifying bureaucracy of the university, he makes his characters’ actual work seem fascinating. The chance to have a life of the mind, after all, is one of the few benefits academics get (though many seem to squander it). In the end, we feel lucky to have spent some time thinking over the problems of consciousness and, of course, of how to go about life in general, in the company of characters as genuinely likable as Ralph and Helen.

Our next pick: Fifty-seven men held hostage with one extraordinary woman

These stringent, ruthlessly straightforward (yet never, thank God, “minimalist”) stories are set mostly in the late ’40s and ’50s, yet they’re perfect reading for right now, when we’re just starting to reacquaint ourselves with economic downturn and widespread economic anxiety, when our political discourse is insipid and our mass culture seems more vacuous than ever. In their measured, crystalline prose, Yates’ stories make us ask how we ever expected so much in the first place. They demolish all pretense, puncture all forms of bloat. Yates lays into his characters’ human flaws with a merciless precision. Yet he’s never simply cruel or bilious; he’s got his eye on something higher and finer. Somehow, once you’ve let him blow away your last vestige of hope in the redeeming value of humankind, you feel oddly cleansed, as if finally, now, you can start to think a few things that are true.

There’s not much left once Yates is done with postwar America. Self-interest, faithlessness and delusions of grandeur appear to have infiltrated every last corner of his characters’ lives. The family? Smothering, or chilly, or both in exactly the wrong ways. Marriage? A sadly deluded act, entered into for ridiculously flimsy reasons, proving in practice to be just a setup for the long indignity of divorce and alimony payments. Friendship? A pathetic, temporary attempt at a substitute for marriage and family, minus the alimony when things drift or break apart, as they inevitably will. The corporate world? A slow death of gray, soul-sucking, windowless busy work. Bohemia? A shabby, laughable stab at glory by those too untalented to create real art, too conceited to get a real job. Patriotism? A lazy longing for the dull, familiar pain of home. Love? Ha.

Dark as it is, Yates’ message is not nihilistic. He’s not saying that life is merely meaningless or unfair. In fact he metes out disappointment and failure and mortification to his characters with a marked sense of justice, even of decency. He’s an equal-opportunity humiliator — in his fictional universe a wealthy and powerful film director is no less self-deceiving than the lowliest clerk who dreams of the corner office; the beautiful fall on their faces as often as the ugly. As for writers, they may be the saddest of all Yates’ characters, with their refusal ever to admit to failure, their embarrassing secret fantasies of fame and honor, their vain, impotent hopes of being the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald, their bluster about “moving to Paris to write.”

As hard as he is on writers in general, Yates spares himself least of all. In fact it’s in the three stories that most clearly use autobiographical elements that Yates is at his fiercest and most devastating, as if he’s entered into a calm fury of anti-heroic truth telling. In “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired,” the theme is his mother’s epic self-deceptions, and the toll they took on her children. The story plunges us into an excruciating truth: that Helen, the narrator’s mother, whom he loves and who is his only source of comfort since she’s divorced his father and moved Billy and his sister out of their Westchester home into a Greenwich Village courtyard apartment, is a ridiculous character, a talentless, self-dramatizing wannabe artist in love with the idea of herself as a sculptor, definitely alcoholic, quite possibly mentally ill.

The story concerns a childhood incident that drives home the brutal reality that Billy’s mother is a bungler: Helen is given the chance to sculpt the head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it brings her not celebrity but mortification. (The connection is made through a neighbor, a man who’d “just lost his job as a reporter on the New York Post” — Yates’ stories are filled with men who’ve just been fired, or are about to be.) By the end of that first paragraph he has diagnosed his mother’s personality problems with a pitiless accuracy: “She was confident about everything she did in those days,” he says of her plan to achieve national notoriety through her sculpture of Roosevelt, “but it never quite disguised a terrible need for support and approval on every side.” Like many if not most of Yates’ characters, her heavy drinking is hard to separate from the rest of what’s off-kilter in her life; one night she passes out on 7-year-old Billy’s bed and leaves “a slick mouthful of puke” on his pillow.

Her sculpture of FDR turns out to be “too small. It didn’t look heroic. If you could have hollowed it out it would have made a serviceable bank for loose change.” Her long-anticipated presentation of the statue to the president at the White House is perfunctory: “It didn’t take long. There were no reporters and no photographers.” Then the kicker: At lunch with a friend of a friend she inadvertently learns that back home she is a laughingstock: “Last time I saw Bart,” her companion tells her of her children’s tutor, “he said ‘Charlie, the Depression’s over for me,’ and he told me he’d found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who’s paying him to tutor her kids.”

Helen’s tireless quest to shore up the image of herself as a sculptor is still going on in “Regards at Home,” but now Billy is 23; he’s called Bill and is an aspiring writer. This time Yates has not sculptorly but writerly self-deceptions in his cross hairs. When Bill’s girlfriend, Eileen, pegs his mother as an “art bum” — one of those people “on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it” until they “come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work” — he tries to defend her, but it comes out “weak and lame and overstated.” As much as he has begun to despise his mother’s refusal to “come to terms with reality,” her need to “make a romance out of” every failure and unnecessary hardship, he’s begun to exhibit some of the same traits. He finds himself making excuses to a work friend, “I held forth at some length, then, on how hard it was to get any real writing done when you were stuck in a full-time job. We’d been trying to save a little money so we could go live in Europe … but now, with the baby coming, there wasn’t much chance of that.”

Against all odds — against, really, his own self-deceptive nature — Bill does eventually make it to Paris, thanks to the urging of Eileen, who’s now his wife (but, of course, won’t be for too much longer, he lets us know). The decision to leave New York, to move far away, in particular, from his mother, allows him, finally, to “take up the business of my life.” It’s a happy ending, for a Yates story, but we’re not meant to make a romance out of it. Bill’s rueful voice as he relates these events and the self-knowledge that came along with them wouldn’t allow for any grandiose or sentimental predictions for his future.

In “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” Yates crafts a Hollywood parable out of his own experience. (He spent years there as a screenwriter, though none of his scripts was ever produced.) Patiently chronicling the months Jack Fields, who’s published one critically successful but financially unremunerative novel, spends stumbling through L.A., the story scrubs the rosy glow off the scene Jack finds there. The cast of characters is familiar: the arrogant 32-year-old superstar director, the rich divorcee whose Beverly Hills home is full of freeloading hangers-on. Friends and lovers drift together and apart with high passion but no discernible principles. The booze flows freely, of course, providing a fuzzy cover for the aimlessness at the heart of the characters’ ambition.

It would be easy to portray Jack as somehow better than these people, and corrupted by them. Instead Yates points out Jack’s own insecurities and pretensions — his “jolly, noisy” going-away party is “closely attuned to the jaunty image of himself that he always hoped to convey to others” — as well as his naked, naive desire for literary recognition, or at least significance. “What lay ahead of him … might easily turn out to be a significant adventure: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.”

What happens, of course, is that Jack’s illusions are crushed, one by one. The beach house he rents is just as dank, grungy and uninviting as his New York apartment; the secretary girlfriend, Sally, who at first seemed so smart and independent, turns out to be needy and manipulative, in thrall to the scarily superficial rich woman in whose palatial house she lives. The writing … we don’t hear much about the writing. It’s crammed in between hours he whiles away with his new L.A. friends, who are all clearly, like Jack — like Yates — alcoholics, with all the rationalizations, self-pity, histrionics and wasted hours that comes with.

What’s left after Yates has turned himself inside out for us like that — where’s the pleasure in reading it? Richard Russo, in his perceptive, heartfelt introduction to the collection, captures the appeal nicely. The excitement of reading Yates’ stories, he says, is in “the exhilaration of encountering, recognizing and embracing the truth. It’s not a pretty truth? Too bad. That we recognize ourselves in the blindness, the neediness, the loneliness, even the cruelty of Yates’ people, will have to suffice.”

I’d venture that there’s even more than that going on — a transaction between Yates and his readers that’s almost tender. He’s put himself on the line for us in order to deliver the truth as scrupulously, as selflessly, as he knows how, and even in the darkest moments there’s a feeling of something like grace hovering around his efforts.