“I realize you don’t need drugs to have a perfectly miserable time,” Wurtzel sniffs in a recent interview. “I lost my life as it is now,” along with her clothes, furniture, CDs, needles, tweezers, razor blades, Ritalin, cocaine and whatever else she keeps around the house to remind her that pain — personal, psychic pain — is the sine qua non of her existence. Wurtzel’s cat, Zap, also made it out of the house that day, as his mistress ran for her life in a rain of pumice and ash.

You should know that Zap is the only creature on Planet Earth who loves Elizabeth Wurtzel exactly as she is, whether “fucked-up” or “clean,” and despite the abuse she’s subjected him to since she first brought him home and made him her sidekick. Zap follows her around the house whenever she deigns to be there, licking her heels, kissing her face and gazing at her with his big, beautiful eyes. When she moves from one New York apartment to another, however, midway between treatment centers, psychiatrists, love affairs and television appearances, “Zap sits in the back of the car, by the window on top of the seat, panting and screaming, his tongue drooping and spittle dropping out of his mouth, petrified.”

Whether it’s Zap or the spittle that’s scared to the point of immobility, Wurtzel is too busy and too important to explain in “More, Now, Again.” If she had a heart, she’d buy him a companion, but that would be too risky: Zap might decide that happiness lies with a fellow feline, and then where would Wurtzel be? Her agent, former editor and full-time mentor, Betsy Lerner, has warned her that she’s beginning to act “like an addict” again, and this fills her with delicious apprehension — “addiction” being the next step up from “depression,” if you look at it, as Wurtzel does, mainly in terms of book sales and gigs on “Politically Incorrect.”

“You’re not on drugs,” Lerner advises, “but the whole approach you’re taking to this is not unlike how you dealt with it when you were.”

Wow! Wurtzel finds it “really unnerving” to think that she’s a permanent, hopeless mess, despite her newfound sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous — I use the term loosely, since Wurtzel would rather submit to the boot and the rack than be anonymous about anything — and despite the fact that Lerner has happily packaged and sold her in the past as “the Howard Stern of the page, the Hunter Thompson of the young feminists … Editing Elizabeth Wurtzel is like editing a hurricane, like producing Courtney’s albums, like mainlining sticky blue ink.”

Well, I doubt it. If you mainlined sticky blue ink you’d be dead in a second, and the one thing about Elizabeth Wurtzel is that none of her troubles ever kill her. This is guaranteed. In fact, nothing gets her very far from the telephone, where her family, friends, old lovers and current well-wishers are always ready to buck her up, tell her she’s beautiful, remind her that she’s talented, sell her drugs and fill her prescriptions to specification. Daphne Merkin called “Prozac Nation” “the saddest, funniest and, ultimately, most triumphant book about youthful depression I’ve come across,” which will give you a good idea of what it’s about — what all of Wurtzel’s books are about: a neurotic, smart, sexy, rich, self-obsessed Jewish girl, with a compulsion to pluck the hair out of her legs while high on one thing or another.

“I can start tweezing at night,” Wurtzel writes in “More, Now, Again,” “not look up for what seems like minutes but is really much longer, and when I finally stop to take a break, the sun is shining.” Addicts of a different era went to the races at moments like this, but not Wurtzel, who prefers to watch soap operas, rail against the death penalty and shoplift small items from department stores: “It is not sunrise, or even the morning — it is sometime in the afternoon. I have not stopped for a sip of water, to change the channel on the TV … or even to cut up new lines, because I keep a pile next to me from the time I settle down to do my tweezing. I prepare for this activity as other people would put together a picnic basket or take towels to the beach — this is my recreation.”

It’s a dumb metaphor, of course, because most people who take towels to the beach do it only in order to dry themselves off after swimming, or to lie on the sand, whereas Wurtzel, in “More, Now, Again,” imagines that every word she utters and every thought that pops into her head is fraught with meaning and portent. And still her new book goes nowhere: When she enters “recovery” for the first (third? fourth? ninth?) time, getting gooey all of a sudden about God and “spirituality,” you know she doesn’t mean a word of it, and you just wonder how long it’ll take her to get tired of the game and go back to being the overage adolescent she is.

“And then The New York Times calls to ask me to write an op-ed piece,” she writes at the end of her book. If anyone ever asked her to write about something besides herself she’d wither and blow off the vine. She’s the Suzanne Somers of literary letters, self-created, self-maintained and “loved” at some inexplicable level of folderol and hype. If it makes her unhappy to hear this, I can only say, “Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands.”

Only twice comes that cry of the mother which one hears as without one’s self — at Birth and at Death — for when I felt in mine those little cold hands that would never again press mine in return I heard my cries — the same cries as I had heard at their births. Why the same — since one is the cry of extreme joy and the other of sorrow? I do not know why, but I know they are the same. Is it that in all the Universe there is but one Great Cry containing Sorrow, Joy, Ecstasy, Agony, the Mother Cry of Creation?

For the next three days, Isadora never slept or changed her clothes. Two doctors stayed at the studio, urging her to rest and offering her sedatives, which she refused. Singer was so distraught that he checked into a clinic. In London, Mrs. Patrick Campbell wrote George Bernard Shaw: “Such a day one would have loved only to have thought of life and happiness. I open the paper to read of Isadora Duncan’s heart rending sorrow — poor Singer — poor Ellen Terry, poor Gordon Craig — poor all of us that have hearts to ache.”

Before dawn on Sunday, April 20, students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts arrived in Neuilly and covered Isadora’s garden and trees with white blossoms — “all the white flowers they could find in Paris,” Mary wrote. “Owing to the peculiarly distressing nature of the accident,” said the New York Times, “nothing that has happened in a long time has so touched the hearts of Parisians …. All Paris is in mourning.” Hundreds of Isadora’s friends and acquaintances streamed through the studio on Sunday and Monday to offer their condolences. Patrick’s toy wagon, a gift from Jean Cocteau, still sat in the courtyard, along with his pet goat, which wandered the grounds “looking for its master,” according to reports. Maurice Ravel approached “that unfortunate house” trembling and afraid: “It is too frightful and so unfair!” Outside, Bourdelle was seen pacing back and forth, holding his head in his hands, “muttering wildly.” Mary persuaded him to come in, where he fell on his knees and, weeping, lay his head in Isadora’s lap.

“She looked at him as the Mother of God might have looked,” Mary wrote. “I can’t explain just what it was. She was in the most exalted state, as though some great spirit of pity had taken possession of her and she was sorry for the whole world.” Word reached her that the chauffeur, Morverand, had been arrested on charges of “culpable homicide.” She immediately sent a letter to the Paris public prosecutor, asking for his release. “I wish to assure you that I do not bear him ill will,” Isadora wrote. “He is a father, and I need to know that he has been released to his family before I can regain some measure of calm …. It is for the peace of my soul that I make this appeal for pity.” Morverand was let go without penalty.

Now, it’s the car. Something to do with the starter — namely, it won’t. A year has passed. “Isadora” is printed, published, shipped to the stores, and the car dies on cue, just when I need to get around and just when a small wad of money comes in from an old royalty account. It’s time for new wheels, even if they’re old ones (which they’ll have to be). My mother says I’ve got “an 11th-hour kind of life,” and a lover I once had in Paris called me a jusqu’au-boutiste — loosely translatable as a “whole-hogger,” and a compliment from a Frenchman, I think. At least, that’s how I chose to take it: 1993 was a difficult year.

I should be grateful; it could be worse. Isadora Duncan died just a few days after finishing her autobiography, “My Life,” in 1927 — strangled by her long silk shawl, as everyone knows, during a joy ride on the French Riviera. Then her first biographer, Allan Ross Macdougall, dropped dead of a heart attack in Paris on the day he mailed his manuscript to New York. True story: He was having lunch at the Cafi de Flore and just keeled over at the table, a fate we might all wish for ourselves — but not now, s’il plait aux dieux, not when “Isadora” is finally out of the box.

Macdougall — Dougie, they called him — makes a quick appearance in Nancy Milford’s new biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay; they were friends, and Macdougall edited Millay’s “Letters” after her death in 1950. What people don’t know is that when she died on the stairs at Steepletop, her house in upstate New York, Millay was holding a copy of “Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France,” the book Macdougall had written 20 years earlier with Irma Duncan, one of the dancing “Isadorables,” Isadora Duncan’s students.

“It was under her head on the stairway,” Macdougall told a friend, “and was spattered by her poor post-mortem blood. The bloody part was torn off by her sister Norma before she gave the book to me; and erased from the top of it … I imagine Edna was going to take the book upstairs to consult when she [wrote] to the Guggenheim Foundation, backing my request for a fellowship to do the Isadora life. That, alas, was never done; and the Guggenheim people would not take the intention for the deed.” Dougie himself died penniless in 1956, and his biography of Isadora wasn’t published until four years after that, just a skeleton of the work he meant to produce.

So, you see, I’m lucky. I signed to do Isadora’s biography 10 years ago, in another world, nation, century, millennium and life. My agent worked me like a dog on the proposal — he kept sending it back. It’s good, he’d say, but not good enough; more of this, less of that. I came down to New York from Vermont to meet some big editors, but ultimately decided to stay with Little, Brown. For a moment, I felt golden and secure. But I had two secrets no one knew about. The first was that I was dying of AIDS. The second was that I knew nothing about Isadora Duncan; nothing at all.

DUNCAN, ISADORA (1877-1927) A pioneer of modern dance, she adopted an emotionally expressive free form, dancing barefoot and wearing a loose tunic, inspired by the ideal of Hellenic beauty.”

– Hutchinson Dictionary of the Arts

Come away! her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous world! Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows! Learn to be young always! Learn to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world’s history! Storm through into your dreams! Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret!

– Robert Edmond Jones, “The Gloves of Isadora”

I had to have something to work on, you see. I needed a job and an explanation, not for myself — I was too depressed, much more than I knew — but for other people when they asked: “What are you doing? What are you working on now?” I’ve always hated the question, even when I know the answer. “Oh,” I’ll say, “one thing and another,” or, “You know, it’s just beginning to take shape, and I don’t dare discuss it!” That always works.

In fact, when I began the research for “Isadora,” my lover had just died of “AIDS-related complications.” (I’ll call him the Phantom, because he swore he’d haunt me if I ever wrote about him, and if anyone could do it, he’s the one.) I had nothing to do but ward off panic. An editor, one of the only people in publishing I saw socially, as it were, mentioned Isadora Duncan over lunch. I had a lot of different lives at that time. I was driven, dashing, never stopping, always leaving. I had a separate life in London from the one in New York, a third life in Paris, a generic life for traveling, a gay life, a writing life, a life for tea with duchesses and a life in Vermont — “home,” where I grew up, went to college, got married and divorced, wrote my first book, met the Phantom and lost him in 1,170 days.

Probably, I should have told them all — publishers, editors — about my health condition, my sero status, before I contracted to write another book. It might even have helped to tell my agent — ex-agent, that is, because, when I finally got sick and fell apart, it was much more difficult to do. I still feel ashamed. It’s the same thing I felt toward old friends when I “came out,” a retroactive guilt over secrets I’d kept and things I should have said, but didn’t. For comfort, I remind myself that I was born on the cusp of gay liberation — “Write that down,” I say — too young to have played a part in the glorious days of Stonewall, too old to have grown up except in fear of discovery and exposure as a faggot — the worst fate an American boy could meet with on this earth.

So, fuck you — it took a while to adjust. And no sooner had one hurdle been cleared than another rose up to take its place, higher and even more threatening. I’d been frightened of AIDS since 1981, when those first poor fools in the Village began to drop. “Thank God we’re not in New York,” I said at the time, and I wasn’t alone: “We’re not in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami” — wherever. 1983, 1984, April, May of 1985 — was it only then that I understood, struck dumb with terror in the middle of traffic on Quai Voltaire, after a side trip to the sauna? “Darling,” a friend remarked, pointing to a boy we’d had sex with together, “if she doesn’t have it, nobody does” — something like that. And still I ran, had nightmares and ate flesh in the darkest of dark rooms. Death, somebody said, wasn’t the worst thing that would happen to me, only the last.

By the time I got tested in 1989 my counts were already down, and they started me right away on AZT. I went to Egypt, then Austria — or it may have been Spain and Denmark. I do remember Romania: I was there on assignment, monitoring the first post-communist elections and looking at the murdered Ceaucescus’ solid-gold toilet fixtures. Amsterdam, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Monte Carlo — always, if I could, I went through Paris, where, on my 40th birthday, I had every hair on my body taken off by Tunisian ipileurs. Every single one, apart from a little tuft in the pubic region that was meant to rise out of my Speedo — “pour la plage, Monsieur.” I have no explanation for this episode, except that I wanted to see someone else when I looked in the mirror.

- — – — – — – — – — -

Category: Film/Stage: She married into the Singer sewing machine fortune in 1909, although while unmarried she’d already caused a sensation in New York by performing pregnant in flowing, revealing Greek robes. When her children drowned in a car that rolled into the Seine, she left Singer and eventually married the poet Sergei Esenin, who left her after she bared her breasts and called them graceful art. For ten points, name this controversial performer who seduced a sports car driver minutes before catching her red silk scarf on the rear wheel and strangling herself in 1927.

– College Bowl Quiz, 1996

All wrong, all of it. In the first place, Isadora never married Paris Singer. Secondly, it was a shawl that killed her, as I said before, not a scarf — a big red shawl with foot-long fringes. And when her children drowned, she cut off her hair and threw it in the sea. “When real sorrow is encountered,” she said, “there is, for the stricken, no gesture, no expression. Like Niobe turned to stone.”

I left Vermont — for good, I thought — after signing for “Isadora,” got an apartment in the city and enrolled in a clinical trial at Bellevue: ACTG 175, the grandmother of AIDS combination therapy. It was a blind study; I took thousands of pills, but it turned out later I was on AZT the whole time, and the rest were placebos. Lucky for me, because when new drugs came along, it meant I’d developed resistance to only one medication. It meant I was in it for the even longer haul. And I did most of the research for “Isadora” in three frantic years.

From the beginning, I felt rushed and pushed. This is going too fast, I said, but only to myself. It was no one’s fault — my life was too fast, both because I made it so and because I was living, secretly, on borrowed time. Secrecy speeds up the clock. You’ve got to do it while you can, while you can — this played over and over in my head.

My contract with Little, Brown, much amended since, called for final delivery in 1995. I knew all along it couldn’t be done, even assuming that the author would live and be well enough to try.

“Isadora was no nonentity,” said George Bernard Shaw, “as I found when I met her” — an understatement only a giant could make. Artist, dancer, philosopher, radical, courtesan, teacher, divinatrice — when she wrote her own book in 1927, she told her publishers it would take at least 300,000 words and should be published in two volumes: “First: Memoirs of Youth. Second: Maturity. Kindly pardon me as I again repeat that the quality of my writing depends entirely on whether I have capital to write the book in peace of mind.” She didn’t, and stopped in the middle. American writer Glenway Wescott, in Nice that year with his lover, Monroe Wheeler, recalled:

She told me that it was the only thing she had ever done just for money, and she was ashamed, and having spent the money she could not give it up. It was worse than I knew, she said. Not only was the style poor and stilted, there was bad grammar in it. There had been many objections to her dancing, but there had been no bad grammar in that; and she wept. So I promised to come on the next Wednesday or Thursday and have a look. But when that day came she was dead, in the strangest automobile accident I ever heard of.

I didn’t crack until 1994, when I stopped caring what kind of drugs I was taking and nearly died of pneumonia at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I don’t remember how I got admitted to such a place; I lived nowhere near it, and I was delirious when my closest friend brought me there. The doctors said later that I had “the same pneumonia that killed Jim Henson,” creator of the Muppets, and that when I came in I was “six to eight hours from death.” I wondered how they knew. Only 25 more T cells lost and I’d have tipped over into “full-blown” AIDS. I had an affair with my roommate, who was full-blown already. We smoked cocaine and had sex standing up, hooked to IVs, wheeling our bags around.

When I left the hospital, I had another book that I’d agreed to write — short book, long story — and I got it done, by golly! I wrote, drove, scrambled, flew, drank, snorted, smoked, took pills, ran wild and broke friendships, whole alliances, to get it done. I honestly believe this saved my life, hard though it was for my family and friends to witness. “He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect,” says the poet Cavafy. “Half the house will have to come down.” Or Heraclitus, speaking of Greeks: “It is the opposite which is good for us.”

Few understood what I was up to, and neither did I until after the fact. I only knew that I had to keep going and I didn’t care how it was done. Rumors flew, some partly true and the rest mostly false. When I was suddenly dumped from a high-paying magazine gig, where my earlier work had earned me nothing but mash notes from its blond, boyish, stinking-rich editor — “Marvelous! Fabulous! You’re a genius! Brilliant!” — I gave up on New York, crawling back to Vermont. It took a long time to get back on my feet, and I only began to feel some confidence again after my health rebounded on protease inhibitors and I met John Hannah, the man I love and live with now. And escaped drowning myself by the skin of my teeth.

- — – — – — – — – — – -

So Dougie is to issue a Biography of Isadora. Well, well — well — That’s easy — the difficulty is to write it as it deserves — as Montaigne or Byron would have written it.

– Edward Gordon Craig

I’ve kept that quote out of the book — wouldn’t you? Isadora wanted Cervantes for her biographer, and William Faulkner, after reading her memoirs, said that “Shakespeare himself could hardly have done that volume justice.” Nevertheless, I had to write something, sooner or later. Six chapters came out in 1996 — awkward, nervous and woefully incomplete, as I also felt myself to be in those days.

After six, I stopped. Was it money again? I don’t remember. Certainly it always came to that when my editor called. I’d told her everything by that time; she’s a brick, but every now and then she did have to ask — where was the book? I didn’t know. I began to get well on the new drugs, which were expensive and, frankly, mind-blowing, and about which I wrote a great deal. I took on the mantle and persona of “Lazarus” for a small but national audience, wrote columns about AIDS, went to Washington, that sort of thing. Being a spokesman for survival tired me pretty quickly and I quit it abruptly, angrily, “swearing never to desert Art for love again,” as Isadora put it — whereupon I met John, who now answers all questions of that kind. We like to say that we met sneaking cigarettes under the bridge to the 21st century.

In 1998 I went back to the book, buffed up my chapters and finished number seven, “Myth,” which follows Isadora Duncan to Athens and Bayreuth, where she turned the Wagner Festival on its head in 1904 and earned a reputation, not yet deserved, for licentiousness and debauchery. She was just about to meet the love of her life, English stage designer Gordon Craig, when my whole family came together in crisis, after my sister Barbara’s two daughters, who had been kidnapped by their father 20 years before, surfaced in Florida with their delinquent parent and refused to have anything to do with Barbara, or with the rest of us.

Before all the world, in a media circus, my sister was accused of crimes against the children she had lost, while their abductor, Stephen Fagan, now a convicted felon, became a hero in the eyes of many. I became “Kurth family spokesman,” a role with special perils, and one I found I couldn’t write about after the first shock and outrage had passed. I tried — I would have forsaken Isadora for it. But what came out was only bile, ugliness and obsession. I lost 18 months of work in that ordeal, and if those poor girls ever think again — but I won’t say it. I wrote about the death of Isadora’s children in a condition of perfect pain. “No,” she replied, when friends inquired if they could help, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing to do.”

By the time Y2K came and went without disaster, I’d written as far as “South America,” Chapter 19. Then I had another collapse, and another pneumonia, when 52 pills a day began to poison my body and mind and I broke with the doctor I once trusted — the same doctor who’d treated the Phantom in his final days. Hands down, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I thought I’d die doing it — I thought it would kill me.

Now, I take seven pills for HIV, two in the morning and five at night, and suffer from the side effects my life-saving drugs entail. My hands and feet are numb and cold from neuropathy, my legs are weak and I have dangerously high cholesterol — I could die at any minute! AIDS, terror, airplanes, anthrax. “Always fire and water,” said Isadora, “and sudden fearful death.”

Five years ago, when I started on HAART — “highly active antiretroviral therapy” — I gave a talk on National Public Radio. I spoke about “the tranquility of hopelessness” and “the torments of optimism,” as if I really knew something about them. But if I have any advantage over other people, after 12 years of this awful thing, it’s that I’m used to being pitched forward, hurled into the next stage of life. And that’s exactly how it came: a summer night, a car in wrong gear, a dock with no rail, bottomless grief and presto! — I’m in the lake over my head.

Be aware that you can’t open a car door underwater — the pressure is too great. Try not to have electric windows, because if they aren’t down already, at least a little bit, as mine were, your goose is cooked. And remember that the mind plays tricks: I could have sworn I was floating in the air when it happened, looking down on my own demise. I know that I dove back into the water three times after I shimmied out, trying to pull the car up by its fender, and that when I finally realized it couldn’t be done, I was laughing — hysterically, in shock, but laughing, just the same. Heraclitus: “If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult.” In a certain way — and it took until now, believe me — I’ve never been afraid of anything again.

- — – — – — – — – — – -

I still haven’t filled out Little, Brown’s author questionnaire, quite simply because I don’t know how to answer: “Besides writing, what activities are you currently engaged in? Do you have any suggestions for promoting your book? Any personal media contacts? Is there anything in your book that you consider ‘newsworthy’?” Among the few reviews I’ve seen so far, one’s good, one’s bad and one’s dumb. The usual, but I don’t know what it means anymore — I’ve been away too long. When Fay Weldon recently announced that she’d taken money from Bulgari to promote its jewels in a novel, I suggested tying a Hermes scarf to every copy of “Isadora” and selling them together. For some reason, my editor never got back to me on that.

And there’s no ending to this story, either — you’ll have to forgive me. On a good day, I can look at my finished work, all 652 pages of it, and thank my stars it got done at all. Still, I make no sudden moves. I don’t ride in sports cars; I wear no shawls or scarves. “I do not doubt that someday someone will discover an instrument which will do for sight what radio does for hearing,” Isadora wrote, “and we will discover that we are surrounded, not only by sounds, but also and invisibly, to our eyes, by the presence of all that is no longer. The music and the voices that we hear do not cease to exist but travel in space indefinitely and in time attain other stars … Each word we speak, each gesture we make continues in the ether on an immortal voyage … In this survival only I believe, and that is sufficient.”

“Things start where you don’t know and end up where you know,” Spanbauer begins. Contradictions — truth and lies, the power of opposites — drive the novel. The “Shy Hunter” of Spanbauer’s title is Will Parker — “a white male six foot two one hundred and ninety pounds, thirty one years old, brown to blonde hair, hazel eyes, big butt, big legs, big nipples, should be bigger in the chest and arms. Big spirit, big body, big nose, crooked bottom teeth” — who leaves a stifled existence in the Pacific Northwest for New York in search of an old friend (and his first male lover), Charlie 2Moons, last seen on his way to a graduate writing program at Columbia.

A white boy, Will was raised on an Indian reservation in Idaho, son of a hostile, dimwitted “rodeo clown” and a mother who loses her mind after the death of a child. In history, ethnicity and sexuality, Will is neither here nor there, not gay, not straight, not bi, though experienced in all three realms, with some tragic incest thrown into the bargain. Nicknamed “Horse Dick,” Will has his “mother’s nerves,” a surfeit of regret and a talent whose fame precedes him - he can roll a cigarette with one hand. Pertinently, Will is impotent, helpless before the reality of his passions and the plague that commences to kill off his new friends and lovers in New York (or “Wolf Swamp,” as it’s called by Will’s first acquaintances in the city, Clyde True Shot and Ruby Prestigiacomo, “a heroin-addicted hippie” and drag queen with a burgeoning case of Kaposi’s sarcoma).

“The other day, Fiona said, when you were rolling that cigarette, when you told us you can’t fuck, you were beautiful, real, and completely present.” Fiona is Will’s trainer and muse at the Theater Row restaurant where he lands a job, and where he first sees in plain light the man he comes to love: “Rose,” a hulking, gorgeous African-American, practically drowning in bracelets and spangles, whose battle with AIDS forms the emotional heart of “In the City of Shy Hunters.” To tell more would be a disservice to Spanbauer, a master narrator and stylist. Will’s story unfolds as he searches, finds, loses and then discovers what he wants: “To be brothers. To always respect and love each other and always tell each other the truth and to keep each other’s secrets and to never regret” — a goal as true as it is impossible, for Will and for everyone.

Twenty years of AIDS? Skip the statistics and read this book. There won’t be another one like it.

Our next pick: A collection of stories straight from the bar at the Tip Top Lounge

The disappearance of sauces and the democratization of dining in America are Kuh’s topics in this, yes, delicious little book. It will leave you hungry for more of everything it has to offer, culinary and literary. Writing about “The Formidable Mrs. Child” — that’s Julia — and her landmark 1961 primer, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Kuh presents his thesis in a nutshell: “The pursuit of gastronomy in this country was about to be transformed. No longer would it be the domain of the grande langouste but rather that of the frantic hostess in a Pucci caftan mopping at the flop sweat as she peered through the Pyrex oven door to see if the soufflé aux crevettes was rising.”

That Kuh, a Paris-trained chef, can keep his sense of humor, in a profession in which the atmosphere in most kitchens starts with hysteria and moves up from there, is a small miracle of personality. That he made me feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel, waging a last, reckless gamble to rescue la table from the hoi polloi, is a measure of his skill as a writer. For the time it takes to read Kuh’s book, we’re all cafe society.

“The Last Days of Haute Cuisine” opens with the arrival in New York of Henri Soulé, formerly maître d’hôtel at the Café de Paris, who ran the French restaurant at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, and stayed on as proprietor of Le Pavillon — “the Michelangelo, the Mozart and the Leonardo of the French restaurant in America,” as the New York Times described Soulé in his obituary. In Soulé’s rise and fall, Kuh detects “many of the conflicts that have taken place in the heart of the American restaurant business” over the past 50 years, “between access and restriction, between being true to one’s national identity or its Americanized version, between the food that one loves to eat and that which one needs to serve” in order to make money. That all cuisine, haute and otherwise, finally moved to Hollywood seems somehow preordained: The story of restaurants isn’t the story of food, after all, but the story of image.

“The new ideal would become rusticity, not faux sophistication,” Kuh observes. “At its worst, this is our own age’s version of continental cuisine, in which dishes with mahi mahi, miso, gnocchi, and Thai basil pesto have become as clichéd as steak Diane ever was (and a lot less wine-friendly).” On Kuh’s evidence, the unrelieved solemnity of contemporary American menus — “Spenger’s Tomales Bay bluepoint oysters on ice,” “Cream of fresh corn soup, Mendocino style, with crayfish butter” “Big Sur Garrapata Creek smoked trout steamed over California bay leaves” — can be traced to 1976 and Alice Waters’ original “Northern California Regional Dinner” at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. Add to this the replacement of the snobbish waiter with the friendly waitperson, appearing at your table every two or three minutes to see if “everything’s OK,” and you have the Bobo feeding factories of our time. (Unlike their French progenitors, American restaurants don’t want you to linger.)

Moving through Kuh’s often personal narrative are the biggest names in American food trends, starting with Restaurant Associates — “RA” — whose success with a restaurant in Newark Airport after World War II led to a daring break with French tradition and a “modified Rothschild style” at the Four Seasons in New York. (“The RA brain trust knew that here they couldn’t just stick sparklers into the food as at the Newarker,” Kuh observes. “This wasn’t Newark; this was Park Avenue.”) Not surprisingly, James Beard emerges as the single most influential figure in American cookery of the last century, but Julia Child took the mystery out of petits pois and tarte aux fruites, and M.F.K. Fisher, mourning the suicide of her husband in 1941, found solace and epiphany, “the glimmer of personal reconstruction,” in a simple bowl of Mexican beans. By the time Kuh meets up with Wolfgang Puck at Spago Beverly Hills — “I sensed he might actually get up and leave if I were to mention the words ‘smoked salmon pizza’” — you know for certain there’s no going back.

Henri Soulé and Le Pavillon were undone by the Kennedy clan during the 1960 presidential campaign, after Soulé overheard Joe Kennedy Sr. say something about “that lousy Frenchman.” Soulé got revenge by declaring, “loudly enough for the whole dining room to hear,” that Jack Kennedy had “not a chance” of winning the White House. “While we know that Soulé muttered something in French about how Kennedy’s son was not yet elected president and already he was acting like a dictator,” writes Kuh, “we don’t know the subtleties of the Gallic shrug” that accompanied his public insult: “Was it the slightly apologetic raising of the shoulders that a French post office clerk might offer, signaling that matters are out of their control? Or was it the vaguely affronted shrug that, together with palms held stiffly outward, signals that a Frenchman is nearing his emotional threshold? Or did Soulé actually find it necessary to employ the full shrug, which at its most perfected levels is performed with a pursed lip refinement that can only be effectively translated as ‘Screw you!’” One way or another, the Kennedys deserted Soulé for La Caravelle. Après ça, le déluge.

One thing doesn’t change, from Kuh’s account: There’s never been more than a handful of top-flight restaurants anywhere in the world. Unless you know them and can afford them, you’re better off eating pot au feu, as Soulé did, in the kitchen with the help. Trust the chef — in France, the customer is never right.