My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.

Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex­cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.

See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.

That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.

But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. To explain why, I want to spend a few minutes talking about a novel that many of you may have read, Heart of Darkness. If you haven’t read it, you’ve probably seen Apocalypse Now, which is based on it. Marlow in the novel becomes Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen. Kurtz in the novel becomes Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. But the novel isn’t about Vietnam; it’s about colonialism in the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam. Marlow, not a military officer but a merchant marine, a civilian ship’s captain, is sent by the company that’s running the country under charter from the Belgian crown to sail deep upriver, up the Congo River, to retrieve a manager who’s ensconced himself in the jungle and gone rogue, just like Colonel Kurtz does in the movie.

Now everyone knows that the novel is about imperialism and colonialism and race relations and the darkness that lies in the human heart, but it became clear to me at a certain point, as I taught the novel, that it is also about bureaucracy—what I called, a minute ago, hierarchy. The Company, after all, is just that: a company, with rules and procedures and ranks and people in power and people scrambling for power, just like any other bureaucracy. Just like a big law firm or a governmental department or, for that matter, a university. Just like—and here’s why I’m telling you all this—just like the bureaucracy you are about to join. The word bureaucracy tends to have negative connotations, but I say this in no way as a criticism, merely a description, that the U.S. Army is a bureaucracy and one of the largest and most famously bureaucratic bureaucracies in the world. After all, it was the Army that gave us, among other things, the indispensable bureaucratic acronym “snafu”: “situation normal: all fucked up”—or “all fouled up” in the cleaned-up version. That comes from the U.S. Army in World War II.

You need to know that when you get your commission, you’ll be joining a bureaucracy, and however long you stay in the Army, you’ll be operating within a bureaucracy. As different as the armed forces are in so many ways from every other institution in society, in that respect they are the same. And so you need to know how bureaucracies operate, what kind of behavior—what kind of character—they reward, and what kind they punish.

So, back to the novel. Marlow proceeds upriver by stages, just like Captain Willard does in the movie. First he gets to the Outer Station. Kurtz is at the Inner Station. In between is the Central Station, where Marlow spends the most time, and where we get our best look at bureaucracy in action and the kind of people who succeed in it. This is Marlow’s description of the manager of the Central Station, the big boss:

He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold. . . . Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can’t explain. . . . He was a common trader, from his youth up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a . . . a . . . faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. . . . He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him—why? . . . He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion made one pause.

Note the adjectives: commonplace, ordinary, usual, common. There is nothing distinguished about this person. About the 10th time I read that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. And the only reason I did is because it suddenly struck me that it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager—and I’m sorry to say this, but like so many people you will meet as you negotiate the bureaucracy of the Army or for that matter of whatever institution you end up giving your talents to after the Army, whether it’s Microsoft or the World Bank or whatever—the head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going, and beyond that, as Marlow says, her position had come to her—why?

That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.

I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.

Finally—and I know I’m on sensitive ground here—look at what happened during the first four years of the Iraq War. We were stuck. It wasn’t the fault of the enlisted ranks or the noncoms or the junior officers. It was the fault of the senior leadership, whether military or civilian or both. We weren’t just not winning, we weren’t even changing direction.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

Now some people would say, great. Tell this to the kids at Yale, but why bother telling it to the ones at West Point? Most people, when they think of this institution, assume that it’s the last place anyone would want to talk about thinking creatively or cultivating independence of mind. It’s the Army, after all. It’s no accident that the word regiment is the root of the word regimentation. Surely you who have come here must be the ultimate conformists. Must be people who have bought in to the way things are and have no interest in changing it. Are not the kind of young people who think about the world, who ponder the big issues, who question authority. If you were, you would have gone to Amherst or Pomona. You’re at West Point to be told what to do and how to think.

But you know that’s not true. I know it, too; otherwise I would never have been invited to talk to you, and I’m even more convinced of it now that I’ve spent a few days on campus. To quote Colonel Scott Krawczyk, your course director, in a lecture he gave last year to English 102:

From the very earliest days of this country, the model for our officers, which was built on the model of the citizenry and reflective of democratic ideals, was to be different. They were to be possessed of a democratic spirit marked by independent judgment, the freedom to measure action and to express disagreement, and the crucial responsibility never to tolerate tyranny.

All the more so now. Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last few years understands that the changing nature of warfare means that officers, including junior officers, are required more than ever to be able to think independently, creatively, flexibly. To deploy a whole range of skills in a fluid and complex situation. Lieutenant colonels who are essentially functioning as provincial governors in Iraq, or captains who find themselves in charge of a remote town somewhere in Afghanistan. People who know how to do more than follow orders and execute routines.

Look at the most successful, most acclaimed, and perhaps the finest soldier of his generation, General David Petraeus. He’s one of those rare people who rises through a bureaucracy for the right reasons. He is a thinker. He is an intellectual. In fact, Prospect magazine named him Public Intellectual of the Year in 2008—that’s in the world. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton, but what makes him a thinker is not that he has a Ph.D. or that he went to Princeton or even that he taught at West Point. I can assure you from personal experience that there are a lot of highly educated people who don’t know how to think at all.

No, what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance, and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.

It wasn’t always easy for him. His path to where he is now was not a straight one. When he was running Mosul in 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne and developing the strategy he would later formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and then ultimately apply throughout Iraq, he pissed a lot of people off. He was way ahead of the leadership in Baghdad and Washington, and bureaucracies don’t like that sort of thing. Here he was, just another two-star, and he was saying, implicitly but loudly, that the leadership was wrong about the way it was running the war. Indeed, he was not rewarded at first. He was put in charge of training the Iraqi army, which was considered a blow to his career, a dead-end job. But he stuck to his guns, and ultimately he was vindicated. Ironically, one of the central elements of his counterinsurgency strategy is precisely the idea that officers need to think flexibly, creatively, and independently.

That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.

Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

You and the members of the other service academies are in a unique position among college students, especially today. Not only do you know that you’re going to have a job when you graduate, you even know who your employer is going to be. But what happens after you fulfill your commitment to the Army? Unless you know who you are, how will you figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life? Unless you’re able to listen to yourself, to that quiet voice inside that tells you what you really care about, what you really believe in—indeed, how those things might be evolving under the pressure of your experiences. Students everywhere else agonize over these questions, and while you may not be doing so now, you are only postponing them for a few years.

Maybe some of you are agonizing over them now. Not everyone who starts here decides to finish here. It’s no wonder and no cause for shame. You are being put through the most demanding training anyone can ask of people your age, and you are committing yourself to work of awesome responsibility and mortal danger. The very rigor and regimentation to which you are quite properly subject here naturally has a tendency to make you lose touch with the passion that brought you here in the first place. I saw exactly the same kind of thing at Yale. It’s not that my students were robots. Quite the reverse. They were in­tensely idealistic, but the overwhelming weight of their practical responsibilities, all of those hoops they had to jump through, often made them lose sight of what those ideals were. Why they were doing it all in the first place.

So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

But let me be clear that solitude doesn’t always have to mean introspection. Let’s go back to Heart of Darkness. It’s the solitude of concentration that saves Marlow amidst the madness of the Central Station. When he gets there he finds out that the steamboat he’s supposed to sail upriver has a giant hole in it, and no one is going to help him fix it. “I let him run on,” he says, “this papier-mâché Mephistopheles”—he’s talking not about the manager but his assistant, who’s even worse, since he’s still trying to kiss his way up the hierarchy, and who’s been raving away at him. You can think of him as the Internet, the ever-present social buzz, chattering away at you 24/7:

I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt. . . .

It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.

“The chance to find yourself.” Now that phrase, “finding yourself,” has acquired a bad reputation. It suggests an aimless liberal-arts college graduate—an English major, no doubt, someone who went to a place like Amherst or Pomona—who’s too spoiled to get a job and spends his time staring off into space. But here’s Marlow, a mariner, a ship’s captain. A more practical, hardheaded person you could not find. And I should say that Marlow’s creator, Conrad, spent 19 years as a merchant marine, eight of them as a ship’s captain, before he became a writer, so this wasn’t just some artist’s idea of a sailor. Marlow believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.

“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.

So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.

Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today. And when I say “revolutionary,” I am deliberately evoking the American Revolution, because it was a result of precisely this kind of independent thinking. Without solitude—the solitude of Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and Thomas Paine—there would be no America.

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

I know that none of this is easy for you. Even if you threw away your cell phones and unplugged your computers, the rigors of your training here keep you too busy to make solitude, in any of these forms, anything less than very difficult to find. But the highest reason you need to try is precisely because of what the job you are training for will demand of you.

You’ve probably heard about the hazing scandal at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain that was all over the news recently. Terrible, abusive stuff that involved an entire unit and was orchestrated, allegedly, by the head of the unit, a senior noncommissioned officer. What are you going to do if you’re confronted with a situation like that going on in your unit? Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?

How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?

These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they’re 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it’s too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.

How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, many check in with online news sources, aggregate sites, incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s true of us, their parents, as well.

But how do we start to measure effects—of this and everything else? The outer look of things stays much the same, which is to say that the outer look of things has not caught up with the often intangible transformations. Newspapers are still sold and delivered; bookstores still pile their sale tables high. It is easy for the critic to be accused of alarmism. And yet . . .

Information comes to seem like an environment. If anything “important” happens anywhere, we will be informed. The effect of this is to pull the world in close. Nothing penetrates, or punctures. The real, which used to be defined by sensory immediacy, is redefined.

FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF HINDSIGHT, that which came before so often looks quaint, at least with respect to technology. Indeed, we have a hard time imagining that the users weren’t at some level aware of the absurdity of what they were doing. Movies bring this recognition to us fondly; they give us the evidence. The switchboard operators crisscrossing the wires into the right slots; Dad settling into his luxury automobile, all fins and chrome; Junior ringing the bell on his bike as he heads off on his paper route. The marvel is that all of them—all of us—concealed their embarrassment so well. The attitude of the present to the past . . . well, it depends on who is looking. The older you are, the more likely it is that your regard will be benign—indulgent, even nostalgic. Youth, by contrast, quickly gets derisive, preening itself on knowing better, oblivious to the fact that its toys will be found no less preposterous by the next wave of the young.

These notions came at me the other night while I was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which has as its premise the active presence of angels in our midst. The scene that triggered me was set in a vast and spacious modern library. The camera swooped with angelic freedom, up the wide staircases, panning vertically to a kind of balcony outcrop where Bruno Ganz, one of Wenders’s angels, stood looking down. Below him people moved like insects, studying shelves, removing books, negotiating this great archive of items.

Maybe it was the idea of angels that did it—the insertion of the timeless perspective into this moment of modern-day Berlin. I don’t know, but in a flash I felt myself looking back in time from a distant and disengaged vantage. I was seeing it all as through the eyes of the future, and what I felt, before I could check myself, was a bemused pity: the gaze of a now on a then that does not yet know it is a then, which is unselfconsciously fulfilling itself.

SUDDENLY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE a world in which many interactions formerly dependent on print on paper happen screen to screen. It’s no stretch, no exercise in futurism. You can pretty much extrapolate from the habits and behaviors of kids in their teens and 20s, who navigate their lives with little or no recourse to paper. In class they sit with their laptops open on the table in front of them. I pretend they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen. Whenever there is a question about anything—a date, a publication, the meaning of a word—they give me the answer before I’ve finished my sentence. From where they stand, Wenders’s library users already have a sepia coloration. I know that I present book information to them with a slight defensiveness; I wrap my pronouncements in a preemptive irony. I could not bear to be earnest about the things that matter to me and find them received with that tolerant bemusement I spoke of, that leeway we extend to the beliefs and passions of our elders.

AOL SLOGAN: “We search the way you think.”

I JUST FINISHED READING an article in Harper’s by Gary Greenberg (“A Mind of Its Own”) on the latest books on neuropsychology, the gist of which recognizes an emerging consensus in the field, and maybe, more frighteningly, in the culture at large: that there may not be such a thing as mind apart from brain function. As Eric Kandel, one of the writers discussed, puts it: “Mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, much as walking is a set of operations carried out by the legs, except dramatically more complex.” It’s easy to let the terms and comparisons slide abstractly past, to miss the full weight of implication. But Greenberg is enough of an old humanist to recognize when the great supporting trunk of his worldview is being crosscut just below where he is standing and to realize that everything he deems sacred is under threat. His recognition may not be so different from the one that underlay the emergence of Nietzsche’s thought. But if Nietzsche found a place of rescue in man himself, his Superman transcending himself to occupy the void left by the loss—the murder—of God, there is no comparable default now.

Brain functioning cannot stand in for mind, once mind has been unmasked as that, unless we somehow grant that the nature of brain partakes of what we had allowed might be the nature of mind. Which seems logically impossible, as the nature of mind allowed possibilities of connection and fulfillment beyond the strictly material, and the nature of brain is strictly material. It means that what we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.

“And if you still think God made us,” writes Greenberg, “there’s a neuro­chemical reason for that too.” He quotes writer David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (!): “Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories. . . . This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes us humans to religious thought.” Of course one can, must, ask whence narration itself. What in us requires story rather than the chaotic pullulation that might more accurately describe what is?

Greenberg also cites philosopher Karl Popper, his belief that the neuroscientific worldview will gradually displace what he calls the “mentalist” perspective:

With the progress of brain research, the language of the physiologists is likely to penetrate more and more into ordinary language, and to change our picture of the universe, including that of common sense. So we shall be talking less and less about experiences, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, purposes and aims; and more and more about brain processes. . . . When this stage has been reached, mentalism will be stone dead, and the problem of mind and its relation to the body will have solved itself.

But it is not only developments in brain science that are creating this deep shift in the human outlook. This research advances hand in hand with the wholesale implementation and steady expansion of the externalized neural network: the digitizing of almost every sphere of human activity. Long past being a mere arriving technology, the digital is at this point ensconced as a paradigm, fully saturating our ordinary language. Who can doubt that even when we are not thinking, when we are merely functioning in our new world, we are premising that world very differently than did our parents or the many generations preceding them?

What is the place of the former world now, its still-familiar but also strangely sepia-tinged assumptions about the self acting in a larger and, in frightening and thrilling ways, inexplicable world?

LET ME GO BACK to that assertion by Linden: “Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories. . . . This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes us humans to religious thought.” What a topic for surmising! I would almost go so far as to say that it is a mystery as great as the original creation—the what, how, and whither—the contemplation of how chemicals in combination create things we call narratives, and how these narratives elicit the extraordinary responses they do from chemicals in combination. The idea of “narrative creation” carries a great deal in its train. For narrative—story—is not the same thing as simple sequentiality. To say “I went here and then here and then did this and then did that” is not narrative, at least not in the sense that I’m sure Linden intends. No, narration is sequence that claims significance. Animals, for example, do not narrate, even though they are well aware of sequence and of the consequences of actions. “My master has picked up my bowl and has gone with it into that room; he will return with my food.” This is a chain of events linked by a causal expectation, but it stops there. Human narratives are events and descriptions selected and arranged for meaning.

The question, as always, is one of origins. Did man invent narrative or, owing to whatever predispositions in his makeup, inherit it? Is coming into human consciousness also a coming into narrative—is it part of the nature of human consciousness to seek and create narrative, which is to say meaning? What would it mean then that chemicals in combination created meaning, or the idea of meaning, or the tools with which meaning is sought—created that by which their own structure and operation was theorized and questioned? If that were true, then “mere matter” would have to be defined as having as one of its possibilities that of regarding itself.

We assume that logical thought, syllogistic analytical reason, is the necessary, right thought—and we do so because this same thought leads us to think this way. No exit, it seems. Except that logical thought will allow that there may be other logics, though it cannot explicate them. Another quote from the Harper’s article, this from Greenberg: “As a neuroscientist will no doubt someday discover, metaphor is something that the brain does when complexity renders it incapable of thinking straight.”

Metaphor, the poet, imagination. The whole deeper part of the subject comes into view. What is, for me, behind this sputtering, is my longstanding conviction that imagination—not just the faculty, but what might be called the whole party of the imagination—is endangered, is shrinking faster than Balzac’s wild ass’s skin, which diminished every time its owner made a wish. Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum. Each time we get another false inkling of agency, another taste of pseudopower.

READING the Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well.

This idea of the novel is gaining on me: that it is not, except superficially, only a thing to be studied in English classes—that it is a field for thinking, a condensed time-world that is parallel (or adjacent) to ours. That its purpose is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself. Enhancement. Deepening. Priming the engines of conjecture. In this way, and for this reason, the novel is the vital antidote to the mentality that the Internet promotes.

This makes an end run around the divisive opposition between “realist” and other modes of fiction (as per the critic James Wood), the point being not the nature of the representation but the quality and feel of the experience.

It would be most interesting, then, to take on a serious experiential-phenomenological “reading” of different kinds of novels—works from what are seen now as different camps.

MY REAL WORRY has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking, the kind that would depend on a machine-drive harvesting of facts toward some specified end. Ideally, of course, we have both, left brain and right brain in balance. But the evidence keeps coming in that not only are we hypertrophied on the left-brain side, but we are subscribing wholesale to technologies reinforcing that kind of thinking in every aspect of our lives. The digital paradigm. The Google article in The Atlantic was sub­titled “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” ominous in its suggestion that brain function is being altered; that what we do is changing how we are by reconditioning our neural functioning.

For a long time we have had the idea that the novel is a form that can be studied and explicated, which of course it can be. From this has arisen the dogmatic assumption that the novel is a statement, a meaning-bearing device. Which has, in turn, allowed it to be considered a minor enterprise—for these kinds of meanings, fine for high-school essays on Man’s Inhumanity to Man, cannot compete in the marketplace with the empirical requirements of living in the world.

This message-driven way of looking at the novel allows for the emergence of evaluative grids, the aesthetic distinctions that then create arguments between, say, proponents of realism and proponents of formal experimentation, where one way or the other is seen as better able to bring the reader a weight of content. In this way, at least, the novel has been made to serve the transitive, goal-driven ideology.

But we have been ignoring the deeper nature of fiction. That it is inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine, where memory and sensation can be deployed, intensified through the specific constraints that any imagined situation allows.

THE QUESTION comes up for me insistently: Where am I when I am reading a novel? I am “in” the novel, of course, to the degree that it involves me. I may be absorbed, but I am never without some awareness of the world around me—where I am sitting, what else might be going on in the house. Sometimes I think—and this might be true of writing as well—that it is misleading to think of myself as hovering between two places: the conjured and the empirically real. That it is closer to the truth to say that I occupy a third state, one which somehow amalgamates two awarenesses, not unlike that short-lived liminal place I inhabit when I am not yet fully awake, when I am sentient but still riding on the momentum of my sleep. I experience both, at times, as a privileged kind of profundity, an enhancement.

READING A NOVEL involves a double transposition—a major cognitive switch and then a more specific adaptation. The first is the inward plunge, giving in to the “Let there be another kind of world” premise. No novel can be entered without taking this step. The second involves agreeing to the givens of the work, accepting that this is New York circa 2004 as seen through the eyes of a first-person “I” or a presiding narrator.

Here I have to emphasize the distinction, so often ignored, between the fictional creation “New York” and the existing city. The novel may invoke a place, but it is not simply reporting on the real. The novelist must bring that location, however closely it maps to the real, into the virtual gravitational space of the work. Which is a fabrication.

THE VITAL THING is this shift, which cannot take place, really, without the willingness or intent on the reader’s part to experience a change of mental state. We all know the sensation of duress that comes when we try to read or immerse ourselves in anything when there is no desire. At these times the only thing possible is to proceed mechanically with taking in the words, hoping that they will somehow effect the magic, jump-start the imagination. This is the power of words. They are part of our own sense-making process, and when their designations and connotations are intensified by rhythmic musicality, a receptivity can be created.

The problem we face in a culture saturated with vivid competing stimuli is that the first part of the transaction will be foreclosed by an inability to focus—the first step requires at least that the language be able to reach the reader, that the word sounds and rhythms come alive in the auditory imagination. But where the attention span is keyed to a different level and other kinds of stimulus, it may be that the original connection can’t be made. Or if made, made weakly. Or will prove incapable of being sustained. Imagination must be quickened and then it must be sustained—it must survive interruption and deflection. Formerly, I think, the natural progression of the work, the ongoing development and complication of the situation, if achieved skillfully, would be enough. But more and more comes the complaint, even from practiced readers, that it is hard to maintain attentive focus. The works have presumably not changed. What has changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both.

All of us now occupy an information space blazing with signals. We have had to evolve coping strategies. Not merely the ability to heed simultaneous cues from different directions, cues of different kinds, but also—this is important—to engage those cues more obliquely. When there is too much information, we graze it lightly, applying focus only where it is most needed. We stare at a computer screen with its layered windows and orient ourselves with a necessarily fractured attention. It is not at all surprising that when we step away and try to apply ourselves to the unfragmented text of a book we have trouble. It is not so easy to suspend the adaptation.

WHEN READING Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, I am less caught in the action—there is not that much of it—than the tonality. I have the familiar, necessary sense of being privy to the thoughts (and rhythmic inner workings) of Hans, the narrator, and I am interested in him. Though to be accurate I don’t know that it’s as much Hans himself that I am drawn to as the feeling of eavesdropping on another consciousness. All aspects of this compel me, his thoughts and observations, the unexpected detours his memories provide, his efforts to engage in his own feeling-life. I am flickeringly aware as I read that he is being written, and sometimes there is a swerve into literary self-consciousness. But this doesn’t disturb me, doesn’t break the fourth wall: I am perfectly content to see these shifts as the product of the author’s own efforts, which suggests that I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension. It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source or location. Sometimes everything else seems a contrivance that makes this one connection possible. It is what I have always mainly read for.

This brings me back to the old question, the one I have yet to answer convincingly. What am I doing when I am reading a novel? How do I justify the activity as something more than a way to pass the time? Have all the novels I’ve read in my life really given me any bankable instruction, beyond a deeper feel for words, the possibilities of syntax, and so on? Have I ever seriously been bettered, or even instructed, by my exposure to a theme, some truism about existence over and above the situational proxy-experience? More, that is, than what my own thinking has given me? And how would this work?

I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions. This reading, more than anything else I do, parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life, which is ever associative, a shuttling between observation, memory, reflection, emotional recognition, and so forth. A good novel puts all these elements into play in its own unique fashion.

WHAT IS THE POINT, the value, of this proxy investment? While I am reading a novel, one that reaches me at a certain level, then the work, the whole of it—pitch, tonality, regard of the world—lives inside me as if inside parentheses, and it acts on me, maybe in a way analogous to how materials in parenthesis act on the sense of the rest of the sentence. My way of looking at others or my regard for the larger directional meaning of my life is subject to pressure or infiltration. I watch people crossing the street at an intersection and something of the character’s or author’s sense of scale—how he inflects the importance of the daily observation—influences my feeling as I wait at the light. And the incidental thoughts that I derive from that watching have a way of resonating with the outlook of the book. Is this a widening or deepening of my experience? Does it in any way make me better fit for living? Hard to say.

What does the novel leave us after it has concluded, resolved its tensions, given us its particular exercise? I always liked Ortega y Gasset’s epigram that “culture is what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we’ve read.” We shouldn’t let the epigrammatical neatness obscure the deeper truth: that there is something over and above the so-called contents of a work that is not only of some value, but that may constitute culture itself.

HAVING JUST THE OTHER DAY FINISHED Netherland, I can testify about the residue a novel leaves, not in terms of culture so much as specific personal resonance. Effects and impacts change constantly, and there’s no telling what, if anything, I will find myself preserving a year from now. But even now, with the scenes and characters still available to ready recall, I can see how certain things start to fade and others leave their mark. The process of this tells on me as a reader, no question. With O’Neill’s novel—and for me this is almost always true with fiction—the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What—I ask it again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact; that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it. Also, there are different kinds of memory access. You can shine the interrogation lamp in my face and ask me to describe Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I will fail miserably, even though I have listed it as one of the novels I most admire. But I know that traces of its intelligence are in me, that I can, depending on the prompt, call up scenes from that novel in bright, unexpected flashes: it has not vanished completely. And possibly something similar explains Ortega’s “culture is what remains” aphorism.

In a lifetime of reading, which maps closely to a lifetime of forgetting, we store impressions willy-nilly, according to private systems of distribution, keeping factual information on one plane; acquired psychological insight (how humans act when jealous, what romantic compulsion feels like) on another; ideas on a third, and so on. I believe that I know a great deal without knowing what I know. And that, further, insights from one source join with those from another. I may be, unbeknownst to myself, quite a student of human nature based on my reading. But I no longer know in every case that my insights are from reading. The source may fade as the sensation remains.

But there is one detail from Netherland that did leave an especially bright mark on me and may prove to be an index to everything else. O’Neill describes how Hans, in his lonely separation from his wife and child (he is in New York, they are in London), makes use of the Google satellite function on his computer. “Starting with a hybrid map of the United States,” he tells,

I moved the navigation box across the north Atlantic and began my fall from the stratosphere: successively, into a brown and greenish Europe. . . . From the central maze of mustard roads I followed the river southwest into Putney, zoomed in between the Lower and Upper Richmond Roads, and, with the image purely photographic, descended finally on Landford Road. It was always a clear and beautiful day—and wintry, if I correctly recall, with the trees pale brown and the shadows long. From my balloonist’s vantage point, aloft at a few hundred meters, the scene was depthless. My son’s dormer was visible, and the blue inflated pool and the red BMW; but there was no way to see more, or deeper. I was stuck.

At the very end of the novel, Hans reverses vantage. That is, he pursues the satellite view from England—he has returned—looking to see if he can see the cricket field where he worked on Staten Island with his friend Chuck Ramkissoon:

I fall again, as low as I can. There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there. There’s no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I’m just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently, with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all—have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere.

I find this obsession of his intensely moving, a deep reflection of his personality; I also find it quite effective as an image device. To begin with, the contemplation of such intensified action-at-a-distance fascinates—the idea that one even can do such a thing. And I confess that I stopped reading after the first passage and went right upstairs to my laptop to see if it was indeed possible to get such access. It is—though I stopped short of downloading what I needed out of fear that bringing the potentiality of a God vantage into my little machine might overwhelm its circuitry.

This idea of vantage is to be considered. Not only for what it gives the average user: sophisticated visual access to the whole planet (I find it hard to even fathom this—I who after years of flying still thrill like a child when the plane descends in zoom-lens increments, turning a toy city by degrees into an increasingly material reality), but also for the uncanny way in which it offers a correlative to the novelist’s swooping freedom. Still, Hans can only get so close—he is constrained by the limits of technology, and, necessarily, by visual exteriority. The novelist can complete the action, moving right in through the dormer window, and then, if he has set it up thus, into the minds of any of the characters he has found/created there.

This image is relevant in another, more conceptual way. The reality O’Neill has so compellingly described, that of swooping access, is part of the futurama that is our present. The satellite capability stands for many other kinds of capabilities, for the whole new reach of information technology, which more than any transformation in recent decades has changed how we live and—in ways we can’t possibly measure—who we are. It questions the place of fiction, literature, art in general, in our time. Against such potency, one might ask, how can beauty—how can the self’s expressions—hold a plea? The very action that the author renders so finely poses an indirect threat to his livelihood. No, no—comes the objection. Isn’t the whole point that he has taken it over with his imagination, on behalf of the imagination? Yes, of course, and it is a striking seizure. But we should not be too complacent about the novelist’s superior reach. For these very things—all of the operations and abilities that we now claim—are encroaching on every flank. Yes, O’Neill can capture in beautiful sentences the sensation of a satellite eye homing in on its target, but the fact that such a power is available to the average user leaches from the overall power of the novel-as-genre. In giving us yet another instrument of access, the satellite eye reduces by some factor the operating power of imagination itself. The person who can make a transatlantic swoop will, in part for having that power, be less able, or less willing, or both, to read the labored sequences that comprise any written work of art. Not just his satellite ventures, but the sum of his Internet interactions, which are other aspects of our completely transformed information culture.

AFTER ALL MY JIBES against the decontextualizing power of the search engine, it is to Google I go this morning, hoping to track down the source of Nabokov’s phrase “aesthetic bliss.” And indeed, five or six entries locate the quote from his afterword to Lolita: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” The phrase has been in my mind in the last few days, following my reading of Netherland and my attempts to account for the value of that particular kind of reading experience. “Aesthetic bliss” is one kind of answer—the effects on me of certain prose styles, like Nabokov’s own, or John Banville’s, or Virginia Woolf’s. But the phrase sounds trivial; it sounds like mere connoisseurship, a self-congratulatory mandarin business. It’s far more complicated than any mere swooning over pretty words and phrases. Aesthetic bliss. To me it expresses the delight that comes when the materials, the words, are working at their highest pitch, bringing sensation to life in the mind.

Sensation . . . I can imagine an objection, a voice telling me that sensation itself is trivial, not as important as idea, as theme. As if there is a hierarchy with ideas on one level, and psychological insights, and far below the re-creation of the textures of experience and inward process. I obviously don’t agree, nor does my reading sensibility, which, as I’ve confessed already, does not go seeking after themes and usually forgets them soon after taking them in. What thou lovest well remains—and for me it is language in this condition of alert, sensuous precision, language that does not forget the world of nouns. I’m thinking that one part of this project will need to be a close reading of and reflection upon certain passages that are for me certifiably great. I have to find occasion to ask—and examine closely—what happens when a string of words gets something exactly right.

WE ALWAYS HEAR arguments about how the original time-passing function of the triple-decker novel has been rendered obsolete by competing media. What we hear less is the idea that the novel serves and embodies a certain interior pace, and that this has been shouted down (but not eliminated) by the transformations of modern life. Reading requires a synchronization of one’s reflective rhythms to those of the work. It is one thing to speed-read a dialogue-rich contemporary satire, another to engage with the nuanced thought-world of Norman Rush’s characters in Mating. The reader adjusts to the author, not vice versa, and sometimes that adjustment feels too difficult. The triple-decker was, I’m theorizing, synchronous with the basic heart rate of its readers, and is now no longer so.

But the issue is more complicated still. For it’s one thing to say that sensibility is timed to certain rhythms—faster, slower—another to reflect that what had once been a singular entity is now subject to near-constant fragmentation by the turbulent dynamic of life as we live it. Concentration can be had, but for most of us it is only by setting oneself against the things that routinely destroy it.

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.

In the 1920s and 1930s Nabokov, always a prodigious worker, was at his most prolific, although writing mostly for the small and shrinking audience of the Russian emigration, which Soviet propaganda caricatured as reactionary and effete. By the time of his arrival in the United States in 1940, he had a huge backlog of acclaimed Russian works, which he urgently wanted to appear in English, but not until Lolita made him famous in 1958 did publishers seek his Russian output. His son, Dmitri, recently graduated from Harvard, was just then becoming old enough to serve as his principal translator. By the 1960s a stream of old work joined the steady flow of new work to make a flood. His books began to appear with exhilarating but almost exhausting rapidity, despite his slow, superscrupulous habits of composition: 15 new or thoroughly revised books appeared in the decade before his death. Six of these volumes were translated by Dmitri—who was by this time an opera singer and, to his parents’ relief, no longer a race car driver—in conjunction with his father.

Nabokov had the first inkling of what became The Original of Laura in 1973, but needed to finish Look at the Harlequins! (1974) and, driven by a sense of personal honor, revise and virtually rewrite the translation of Ada for his French publisher after his translator had a breakdown. At age 76, Nabokov’s intense work on the translation, from 5 A.M. each morning, drained him, as did, over the next two years, severe falls, operations, and infections. As a result he could not finish The Original of Laura before his death in 1977. Although he had asked his wife, Véra, to destroy the manuscript should it be left uncompleted, she could not bring herself to do so.

Two years after Nabokov’s death, Simon Karlinsky published the correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, which offered the first real insight into Nabokov’s casual human side, and Véra Nabokov published Stikhi, his selected Russian verse. That year, I finished my Ph.D. on Nabokov at the University of Toronto, and Véra, after reading my thesis, invited me to visit her in Montreux, Switzerland, where she and her husband had lived since 1961. I had already begun research on a bibliography that would record the circumstances and processes of Nabokov’s composition and publication. It could also therefore serve as a kind of biography and as compensation for the dearth of fact and the glut of error in Andrew Field’s 1973 bibliography and his 1977 biography. In June 1979 I stopped in Montreux for four days, quizzing Véra, long past her usual bedtime, about the composition and publication of her husband’s works.

I traveled home to New Zealand, where I had a university teaching job, and two months later she wrote asking if I would sort out Nabokov’s archive for her. Would I? Would I? I did, during breaks from the university over the next two years. I also persuaded her to allow me to see the papers Nabokov had given to the Library of Congress between 1959 and 1963, an archive he had stipulated should remain closed for 50 years.

Even after his death, Nabokov’s past hard work was continuing to expand his literary legacy: Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983). Soon after beginning to catalogue the archives, I rediscovered “Volshebnik,” a long story that we might now call “The Original of Lolita,” which was published in Dmitri’s translation as The Enchanter in 1985.

Although I had free access to the Montreux archives and controlled access to the Library of Congress Nabokoviana, I could not see the materials that Véra guarded in her bedroom: Nabokov’s letters to his parents and to her, his diaries, and The Original of Laura. I kept pressing her for access, especially to the letters to his parents. To my repeated requests she eventually replied, “Why do you need to see the letters if you are doing only a bibliography? If you were writing a biography, of course I would show you everything.”

I suppressed a great gulp. I knew she and her husband had felt betrayed by Field’s biography, and I knew at first hand of Véra’s intense privacy. About to start my second year of teaching and just building a classroom repertoire, I could not begin a biography without extended time off. Back in New Zealand, I applied for a fellowship on the basis of the Nabokov bibliography, won it, and wrote to Véra reminding her of her promise to show me everything. She agreed to condone my working on a biography.

In late 1981 I returned to Montreux to begin. Several months later, I discovered at the bottom of a pile of otherwise empty boxes behind a wardrobe a box full of manuscripts of Nabokov’s Cornell lectures on Russian literature regarding authors other than those discussed in Lectures on Russian Literature. Véra had been perturbed all along that this material seemed lost. “EUREKA!” I wrote in huge capitals on a note I left for her to find the next morning. I am now editing these lectures with my former student, Stanislav Shvabrin. They range from saints’ lives to Vladislav Khodasevich, whom Nabokov considered the greatest 20th-century Russian poet. They cover the literary material that he knew best, that he devoured as a boy, studied at Cambridge, and was brought to Cornell to teach. In the lectures, Nabokov opens up the whole range of Russian literature, injecting all his passion and imagination into discussions of Pushkin or digressions on literature, art, and life. The lectures should be published in three years or so.

By the time I unearthed this treasure, Véra had already let me see Nabokov’s diaries and his letters to his parents. But it was not until I returned to Montreux in the winter of 1984-85, after she had seen the first chapters of my biography and realized she would not regret trusting me, that she allowed me oblique access to Nabokov’s letters to her. She would not let me read or hold them, but sat at the small round dining table in her sitting room while I sat opposite. In her 80s, still coughing and husky from a recent cold, she read aloud from the letters into my tape recorder, session after session, skipping endearments and anything else she thought too personal, an­nouncing “propusk” (“omission”) at each cut.

Late in 1984 Véra had told me she would “of course” eventually let me see The Original of Laura, but she made such promises mainly to silence my persistence. In February 1987 she at last agreed to my entreaties. My awe at holding Nabokov’s manuscripts had long passed. For seven years I had been cataloguing and rearranging them for Véra and transcribing and indexing them for my own purposes, letting myself into the archive room and the “library” in the Nabokov rooms of the Montreux Palace Hotel’s Cygne wing, often working there from morning till after midnight.

Véra placed the small box of index cards—Nabokov’s usual medium for composition since about 1950—on the maroon-and-silver striped period sofa in her small living room, and positioned herself on the matching sofa two meters away. I was allowed to read the manuscript once only, her sharp eyes fixed on me like a drill, and to take no notes. I also had to cede her the right to refuse anything I might write about the novel that depended on this single noteless reading. The conditions could hardly have been worse.

Not long afterward, on Dmitri’s next visit to Montreux, Véra and Dmitri asked me what I thought they should do with the manuscript of The Original of Laura. I said, to my own surprise, “Destroy it.” How glad I am now that they ignored my advice and that their attachment to Nabokov’s work overrode even their respect for his last wish.

In 1950 Nabokov would have burned another manuscript, that of a still-incomplete book entitled Lolita, if Véra had not stopped him on his way to the incinerator. Of course Nabokov, Véra, Dmitri, and the whole world have good reason to be thankful that that didn’t happen. But he finished Lolita, and he came nowhere near finishing The Original of Laura. So why am I now thankful about this publication?

The Original of Laura could have been published badly, as if it were a new Lolita or at least a new Pnin. Instead it was better published than I could have imagined. Subtitled “A Novel in Fragments” on the cover and “(Dying Is Fun)” on the title page, the index cards now bound into book form rightly flaunt their unfinishedness. Readers should not expect a new story to rival Lolita’s intensity or a new character to match Pnin’s pathos, but instead glimpses of a famously demanding writer still challenging his readers and himself, in his late 70s, with death closing in.

What troubled me so much when I first read The Original of Laura and recommended that the text be destroyed? And what has changed so much in my sense of the novel that I welcomed its publication?

All my initial dissatisfactions have been echoed in the responses of gifted reviewers like Martin Amis, John Banville, Jonathan Bate, John Simon, Alexander Theroux, and Aleksandar Hemon.

My first disappointment was that the fragments remain just that. I knew that Nabokov had had the idea for the novel almost four years before his death and that when he still had more than 14 months to live Véra had reported that he was “about halfway” to completion. I had expected much more than I found. Reading and understanding need trust. The embryonic nature of the text sapped my trust, especially when I could read it only once under Vera’s wary eyes. For reviewers, their reluctance to trust an inchoate Nabokov text was compounded by their suspicion of the rationale for its publication.

My second regret was that there were no sympathetic characters and no characters that loom large in the imagination like other Nabokov protaganists, such as Luzhin, Humbert, Pnin, Kinbote, or Van Veen.

The third was that the narrative driveshaft seemed broken. In Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, Nabokov reinvents fiction without forfeiting the pleasures of plot. The Original of Laura has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s hard to see how readers would have been impelled from one to the next even if the novel had been completed.

The fourth was the recurrence of unpleasantly heartless sex, as in Transparent Things, and the fifth, the recurrence of a Lolita theme. Nabokov had recycled the name of Lolita, or much more, in Pale Fire, in Ada, and in Look at the Harlequins! In The Original of Laura he introduces a character called Hubert H. Hubert, the partner of Flora’s mother. When his hand touches 12-year-old Flora’s legs under the bedclothes, she kicks him in the groin. Do we really need a fourth reprise of Lolita, even with this twist?

The sixth disappointment was that the hero has a problem too strange to engage the imagination. Luzhin’s love of chess haunts even readers who cannot play the game. Humbert’s desire for Lolita compels readers despite their feelings about child-rape. But in Nabokov’s last completed novel, Look at the Harlequins!, Vadim Vadimych’s maddening problem is merely that he can’t imagine turning around to walk the other way along a street, an act that he can readily perform in real life but that sends his imagination spinning—and a problem that has always failed to turn my imagination. In The Original of Laura, Philip Wild wants to find out how to will his own body dead, inch by inch, from his feet upward, so that dying becomes fun, and a reversible relief from the itch of being. Most of us surely think about death, and most of us have times when we wouldn’t mind rewriting our bodies, but Philip Wild’s obsessive quest to erase his body seems far from an ordinary human preoccupation.

My seventh concern was the novel’s style. In a 1974 review a stern young Martin Amis had greeted Look at the Harlequins!: “[its] unnerving deficiency . . . is the crudity of its prose. . . . In the book’s 250-odd pages I found only four passages that were genuinely haunting and beautiful; in an earlier Nabokov it would be hard to find as many that were not.” I too was sadly disappointed by Look at the Harlequins! and wondered if it marked an irreversible decline in Nabokov’s powers. Yet he still sparkled in interviews and introductions. As Nabokov’s biographer, I sweated in 1987 as I picked up the first of the Laura index cards: would I be able to describe Nabokov’s invention as undimmed, or would the manuscript confirm a decline? My fraught first reading, alas, bore out my fears. Above all, I felt that whatever might have become of the novel, the cards that survived fell far short of Nabokov’s standards and should be destroyed as he wished.

If you have not yet bought The Original of Laura you will now be thinking that you need not bother. Read on: I want to change your mind. And rest assured that I’m not someone who approves of whatever Nabokov writes. I have sometimes been harsher than anyone on those of his works I think not up to his high standards.

My estimation of The Original of Laura has changed dramatically. It’s not another Lolita or Pale Fire, but it could have been, and already is, another fascinating Nabokov novel, and a priceless entry into his workshop. What’s changed my mind? Not reading under impossible conditions. Not reading with wrong expectations. Reading for what’s there and not for what’s missing. Rereading. Trusting more. Re-rereading, and trusting still more.

My first disappointment was that the novel was so fragmentary, so unfinished. It still is, but there’s a strong beginning, a vivid middle, a wry end, and an already intricate design. The more I reread, the more I think that Nabokov may indeed have been nearly halfway to another short novel like The Eye or Transparent Things.

My second was with the characters. True, none is sympathetic, but the heroine Flora is deliciously unlikable, and her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild, is an unforgettable presence from his tartan booties and his ingrown toenails to his Buddha-like bulk to his brilliant brain trying to erase his feet.

My third lay with the plot. But if there’s little plot tension there’s also headlong action from reckless Flora and comic inertia from Wild’s repeated self-erasures. Perhaps one in two of Nabokov’s novels lacks a powerful plot impetus. Unless I’m mistaken, as you know by now I can be, The Original of Laura would have offered different pleasures from those of suspense: the contrasts of helter-skelter narration and meditative stasis, and the puzzles of who has created, and who has obliterated, whom.

Three problems down, three to go. You’ll still be far from persuaded.

My fourth: the frequent focus on sex, and the replay of the Lolita theme. Why I thought the former disappointing on first encounter I now can’t imagine. I now find Nabokov’s descriptions of sex here hilariously unappetizing, prodigiously unsatisfying emotionally and often physically comic in their painful shortcomings. Just forget the tension of Lolita or the ecstatic, “passionate pump-joy” release of Ada; forget, above all, the romance of first love in Speak, Memory or in Mary. In The Original of Laura, he writes:

Flora was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity to a coeval, a handsome ballboy at the Carlton Courts in Cannes. Three or four broken porch steps—which was all that remained of an ornate public toilet or some ancient templet—smothered in mints and campanulas and surrounded by junipers, formed the site of a duty she had resolved to perform rather than a casual pleasure she was now learning to taste. She observed with quiet interest the difficulty Jules had of drawing a junior-size sheath over an organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving a backhand slap at the decisive moment. Flora let Jules do everything he desired except kiss her on the mouth, and the only words said referred to the next assignation.

Nabokov has focused on sex before, but never has he shown it so divorced from feeling. But he surely amuses and appalls us in a new way with the sexual activity he depicts.

My fifth concern yielded even greater surprises. Nabokov evokes Humbert Humbert not to replay Lolita but to mislead our expectations. Mr. Hubert H. Hubert lost a daughter at 12, run over by a truck. He sees her in a sense resurrected in Flora, Daisy’s age when she died, and wants to be nearer Flora than she wants him to be; wants, even, to brush her hair with his lips. But as far as I can see, his feelings toward her are only those of the father of the lost daughter whom Flora keeps reminding him of. Flora, who knows about sex but not about love, misreads his intentions, as do readers misled by Nabokov’s expert deception. The real link to Lolita we should make from Hubert H. Hubert is not to Humbert crushing Lolita under his memory of Annabel Leigh, but to the Kasbeam barber, whose appearance Nabokov in his essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” identifies as one of “the nerves of the novel . . . the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted,” a sentence that, he reports, cost him a month of work:

In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.

In this novel of human erasures, Daisy’s death has not been erased for the father who remembers his lost child so painfully, so hopelessly. Nabokov has hidden under our noses the beating core of tenderness in this apparently heartlessly hard novel: Flora as potential Daisy, not as Lolita, is one of this novel’s “secret points.”

My sixth problem was Philip Wild’s obsession with willing his own death. Wild’s quest is certainly singular. But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild wishes both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes references to both) and to eliminate the self. In Wild’s case, life has pained him, with his vast bulk, abscessed toes, writhing gut, and the “anthology of humiliation” his life has been since he married Flora. The word anthology derives from the Greek for “collecting flowers,” but in Wild’s case, his Flora casually plucks and casually or viciously jettisons other men.

Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we, but he is no Pnin. All of us might wish at times we could control our own death or restoration but Nabokov surely presents Wild’s as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life. The only transcending of death Nabokov could imagine wanting would take the self through death to a freer realm of being but not deny its accumulation of experience: “I am ready to become a floweret / Or a fat fly,” John Shade writes in Pale Fire, “but never, to forget.” In Ada, Van Veen explains “the worst part of dying”: “the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away!”

For many over many millennia, but never more than for Nabokov, transcending death has seemed somehow akin to escaping earth’s gravity. Fat Philip Wild flopping over on erased toes succumbs to gravity more grotesquely than ever. And his whole obsessive quest seems an apotheosis of self and of stasis, a self-fixated and self-enclosed attempt to circumvent the limits to the self that death imposes. To the extent that Nabokov imagines passing through death—and that’s to a very considerable extent—he sees it as a transition that hurtles the self into a state retaining accumulated selfhood but no longer subjected to “the solitary confinement of the soul.”

Wild conjures up an image of an “I,” “our favorite pronoun,” on his mental blackboard, its three bars representing his legs, torso, and head, and sees his autohypnosis as akin to successively rubbing out each bar. Images of erasure or self-deletion pervade the whole novel, in ways that reveal Nabokov’s customary care in constructing and concealing his patterns. To take one example: Wild feels delight and relief at erasing his agonizing ingrown toenails. Flora by contrast wipes not a mental blackboard but her own flesh: she requires her menfolk to withdraw before ejaculation, and promptly wipes the semen off her groin, or as the novel once phrases it, her “inguen.” How many people know this word means groin? Ingrown-inguen: Nabokov covertly links Wild erasing his own life, rubbing out his toes, with Flora briskly wiping off the possibility of new life. The Roman Flora was a fertility goddess, Nabokov’s Flora, a sterility goddess.

Art can offer a kind of immortality, a different promise of transcending death. But not here, not in this novel. Flora’s grandfather, a painter of once-admired sentimental landscapes, falls forever out of favor: “What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as ‘April in Yalta’ or ‘The Old Bridge’?” His son, a photographer, films his own suicide, his being rubbed out. The photographer’s wife, Flora’s mother, a ballerina known only as Lanskaya, finds her art fading as her body ages. Flora herself becomes the subject of a kiss-and-tell novel, My Laura, which aims not to immortalize but to expunge her: “The ‘I’ of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her.” The laurel was associated with literary immortality because its leaves last so long after they detach. Flora, so eager to be deflowered, remains alive at the end of the novel; unlike her husband, obsessed with his own death, she ends The Original of Laura refusing to look at the novel My Laura lying on her lap and at what a friend recommends as “your wonderful death . . . the craziest death in the world.”

We come to my seventh concern, the novel’s style. For an older and still sterner Martin Amis, this by itself would be decisive. In 1999, for the centenary of Nabokov’s birth, the oldest of the five journals devoted to him, the Nabokovian, decided to stage a Nabokov write-alike contest. A panel of judges selected three submissions, which appeared along with what were announced as two “never before published pieces of Nabokov’s prose”—both from The Original of Laura—that readers were informed Dmitri had supplied. Subscribers were invited to pick the original Nabokov. Delightfully, most picked a passage by Charles Nicol, an academic and writer who had been publishing superb work on Nabokov for more than 30 years, and no one picked the passages from The Original Of Laura. Nobody picked Nabokov as the one who wrote most like Nabokov.

What does that tell us? It indicates that even Nabokovians either misconstrue Nabokov’s style or underestimate how new it can be from work to work. We can recognize on sight many hallmarks of his style when we see them “on site,” and we can find many of them already on his construction site for The Original of Laura. But we have not sufficiently recognized how much Nabokov also modifies his style and reweights particular features in each work. To take his best English works, the high, controlled elegance of Speak, Memory differs radically from Lolita’s neurotic twitchiness, and both from Pale Fire’s would-be cloudless craziness; and all three differ from Ada’s rococo supersaturation—and all four from The Original of Laura.

That no one picked the Laura passages in the write-alike contest does not suggest that Nabokov isn’t writing up to par here but, on the contrary, that he’s playing his usual game of changing or reinventing his game subtly to suit the special world of the work.

Nabokov has a reputation for being a great prose stylist, perhaps even the greatest. The Original of Laura makes me want to rethink what constitutes the distinctively Nabokovian: not just elevated prose, a recondite lexicon, elegant quicksilver sentences, minute precision of visual detail, pointed allusion, foregrounded verbal combinatory play, lucid elusiveness. His style may be most extraordinary not so much as prose but as story. Unlike “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” the 13 words of the opening sentence of The Original of Laura would win no place in dictionaries of quotations and no prizes as prose. I won’t quote them yet, but taken out of context, the first sentence offers plain words that muffle even their plain declarative force with a doubled concession—but as storytelling, the sentence astounds. It does more as story than we had any right to expect of a first sentence, until now.

All his writing life Nabokov stressed transition as the most demanding skill in storytelling: transition among the focal modes of fiction—character, description, report, speech, or reflection. He sought new ways to shift from one to another, new ways to speed up the shifts or slow them down or highlight or veil them. He wanted both to extend the possibilities in narrative at every moment and to show readers how nimbly their minds can move from present to past or future, from outside a character to inside, from here to there, from actual to possible or impossible, counterfactual or suppositional. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009), I marshal the evidence that we have evolved into a storytelling species, and that the main reason we have done so is because stories improve still further the social cognition and hence the shifts in perspective that had already reached such a high level in our species. From childhood pretend play to adult fiction, we speed up the capacity of our minds to leap beyond our here and now by taking on new roles, sidling and sliding this way and that through time, space, minds, and modalities, thanks to the intense doses of social information we deal with in fiction. No one has taken this further than Nabokov does in his last novel. Narratologists and novelists alike will focus on the opening chapter of The Original of Laura as proof of the new finds still to be made in fiction.

The Original of Laura starts with an answer, but we never learn the question, and we never quite keep up with the pace of the story. It reminds me of the myth of Atalanta and the golden apples. At top speed it picks up a stray fact, darts aside, nonchalantly drops one subject, gathers up an­other, and still races ahead—unless it slows down, and all but stops, with Philip Wild, as he tries again and again to erase himself.

Nabokov not only re­writes narrative texture but from novel to novel reshapes narrative structure. As you read the first chapter of The Original of Laura, look for the unprecedented way Nabokov makes the narrator imply himself and conceal or erase himself throughout—while Laura disregards her new lover, dumps an old one, and ignores her husband.

Do not expect in The Original of Laura the high lyricism of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. Instead look for how much Nabokov does once again by inverting what he values most, but, as always, in a new way. He inverts love as a path to self-transcendence (through procreation, through the tender attunement to lovemaking, through sharing a life with another) in Flora—as sterility goddess wiping the sperm off her groin, in her heartless promiscuity, in the “anthology of humiliation” she offers her husband. Art becomes not a way to self-transcendence here but, rather, the vengeful obliteration of others or the skulking effacement of the tattletale self. Nabokov sees death as a possible release from the confines of the self, not an erasing of the self like Philip Wild’s or an evasion of its limits like Flora’s.

Nabokov offers us—in the suppleness and speed of our imaginations as he sends us hurtling along the black trails of his story—a route beyond the rapacity of the sexual self in Flora or the stagnation of the cerebral self in Philip and, if we invert his inversions, what he famously called “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

I began with Nabokov’s compulsiveness as a writer and the scope, therefore, not only of his published oeuvre but also of the archive he left behind. A few months ago, the world caught up with his final fiction, with the one novel he tried to write when his health would no longer allow him to work compulsively or even steadily. But for decades before he began The Original of Laura he was writing at full intensity. What else remains to discover in Nabokov’s literary leavings?

Another single-correspondent collection of letters even finer than the Nabokov-Wilson Letters or Letters to His Sister (his favorite sister, Elena Sikorski) looms. The letters to Véra that she would not let me see, but only hear and record in her expurgated version, are being prepared in a volume to themselves, transcribed and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina, former deputy director of the Nabokov Museum at St. Petersburg, and by me, with Dmitri Nabokov adding the final polish and familial tone. They should appear in 2011.

The next correspondence to appear will be Nabokov’s letters to his family, especially to his parents. Like Letters to Véra, these will be published in both English and Russian volumes, as will a next collection of his letters to Rus­sian friends and publishers—usually much more intense and intimate than his comparable letters in English. Allow another six years for these two.

After the two volumes of my biography were published in 1990 and 1991, the next major parts of the legacy to appear were in 1995, in the Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, with a dozen early additions, translated by Dmitri, to the stories Nabokov had himself chosen to collect. Dmitri has since updated the collection with translations of new stories discovered in a uniquely surviving newspaper in Poland (“Easter Rain”) and in an unfinished draft in the archive (“Natasha”).

Dmitri, now 75, has slowed down with age from his four Ferraris to a wheelchair. But alongside his editing and translating his father’s fiction, he has been enjoying translating his father’s poems for more than 20 years, including a very successful recent version, not yet published, of “A University Poem,” his father’s longest Russian poem. A Collected Poems seems about two years off. Meanwhile, Nabokov scholarship has powered ahead elsewhere: in a 10-volume scholarly Russian edition; in the Pléiade edition of Nabokov in France (begun in 1986, volume 2 is only now about to be published); and in a 25-volume, lightly annotated German edition.

I have recently edited, with Stanislav Shvabrin, Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry (2008), which gathers all Nabokov’s translations from Russian verse except the ones already published in books to themselves, the anonymous medieval Song of Igor’s Campaign and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. With the forthcoming lectures, we will have three volumes of Nabokov’s translations of Russian verse and, soon, two or three volumes of his Cornell lectures on Russian literature, plus the two volumes of Eugene Onegin annotations: seven or eight volumes from the man who makes a natural bridge between literature in Russian and English.

Another project now under way I have wanted to undertake for 20 years: a volume of Nabokov’s hitherto uncollected interviews, reviews, and essays, to be called Think, Write, Speak—after the opening sentence of Nabokov’s foreword to his own collection, Strong Opinions: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

In some of the many interviews The Original of Laura has provoked, I have sometimes illustrated the reasons for my reversal in terms of the excitement I now feel at the opening of the novel and its narrative novelty. David Gates, in The New York Times Book Review, quotes me and asks: “Does Boyd mean the device of beginning a novel in medias res, with a character answering a question we don’t get to hear? Virginia Woolf did the same thing in the first sentence of To the Lighthouse.” True, Woolf’s landmark novel does begin “‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” The suddenness of that opening, and its clear announcement of a planned excursion, magnificently sets up the thwarted expedition to the lighthouse.

But Nabokov’s openings are still more extraordinary, from “In the second place, because he was possessed by a mad hankering after Russia” (“The Circle”) to “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” to the parodic mistranslation and reversal of Tolstoy’s famous first sentence of Anna Karenina in the first sentence of Ada, to the bizarre address from a dead narrator to a living character at the start of Transparent Things: “Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person. Doesn’t hear me.”

And here’s the opening sentence of The Original of Laura: “Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too—at least, after a fashion.” After those other famous first lines, what is it that strikes me as just as remarkable about this succession of individually unremarkable words?

The first word, “Her,” a third-person possessive pronoun, already implies a female possessor we do not know and cannot identify as the narrator. “She” comes along at the third word (“she answered”), but she remains unidentified.

Over the last couple of centuries, fiction has tended to shorten exposition and even to begin in medias res. For that reason, direct speech as a more immediate and dramatic entry has become increasingly common in 20th-century fiction. But indirect speech implies a narrator doing the reporting, and usually follows the narrator’s establishment of the character’s identity. Here we have neither the identity of the character nor the confident establishment of the narrator. Over the next few sentences the volubility of the still-unnamed woman continues to hold the narrator at bay.

As the Japanese Nabokovian Tadashi Wakashima has also explained, we can infer what provokes “her” response: a preceding “I am a writer.” “She” then answers: “My husband is a writer, too—at least, after a fashion.” Later in the long first paragraph we discover that “she” is Flora, that she is at a party, that she is drunk, that she “wished to be taken home or preferably to some cool quiet place with a clean bed and room service.” Within another paragraph she has been offered and has eagerly accepted the apartment of friends, and has begun to undress there to make love with someone whom she has picked up at the party, someone whom we cannot see clearly. As the lovemaking scene enfolds us and unfolds itself, we recognize Flora’s sexual partner as the narrator, yet we also see that he avoids identifying or describing himself or reporting his actions as his, by dint of referring to them only through non-finite verbs. The narrator, we infer, is the writer whom Flora has just met at the party, when she is already drunk, when she has asked what he does, when he has replied, and when she in turn answers, in the opening line of the novel. There she refers disparagingly to her husband—the very husband this new lover will return her to late in the chapter, after dawn, to add another rank flower to his “anthology of humiliation.” She refers to her husband’s being a writer, a profession she casually insults four short sentences later, despite being already in the process of picking up this other self-effacing writer—who in writing this very scene, in these very words, in his roman à clef My Laura, has his revenge on her heartlessness.

No one has ever packed so much story into the choice of the opening word (“Her”), the opening mode (indirect speech), the opening declaration and its antecedents and its consequences in terms of narrative action, narrative voice, and narrative aim. At the same time as he manages all this, Nabokov also shows the narrator effacing himself, and deleting Flora as he portrays her (before killing her off fictively later in My Laura) mentioning her husband as “a writer of sorts,” whose “mysterious manuscript” itself recounts how he erases himself, in another doomed attempt at transcending, or expunging, the self.

After reading Martin Amis’s negative review of The Original of Laura on the day we were to appear in New York on the eve of the novel’s publication, I gave him a printout of a review I had written for publication later that week. Handing it back, he had to say he disagreed with my claim that the opening shows Nabokov “at the peak of his powers.” I stand by, and I can now explain, my claim.

The Original of Laura will be almost the last new Nabokov fiction we will ever see. But there are hundreds, even thousands, more pages to come of Nabokov in full flow, and not dammed up by death.

But something has happened. I am in my third year of graduate school, and I have fallen in love. I have fallen for pronouns. It’s hard to shut me up about them.

Before we can understand a word, we first have to retrieve its meaning from memory. Most of the time, this happens quickly—so quickly we call it automatic—but sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes the word is good and dusty. Say my lab manager says, “Sally saw Rosemary Clooney on the bus today!” I’ll quickly retrieve some meaningful representation for Sally and saw and bus and today, but Rosemary Clooney might throw me. I retrieve her a bit at a time, one piece leading to another. She sounds familiar. She’s a singer, right? Isn’t she George Clooney’s aunt? Then I remember Rosemary Clooney, George’s aunt, died several years ago. “No way,” I reply, that bit of idiomatic speech rolling off my tongue effortlessly. “She’s been dead for years.”

And here we’ve come to a pronoun. My lab manager delves into memory for representations of dead and years, and finds them, no problem. Delving for she, my lab manager comes back up with a representation of Rosemary Clooney. But she doesn’t always mean Rosemary Clooney. Sometimes she means Sally or Hillary Clinton or the girl I ate lunch with on the first day of seventh grade. She could be anything that can be referenced as a single female—even a ship or a country. But my lab manager knows, straight away, that she is Rosemary Clooney. Pronouns involve that extra step, that discourse mining, that sensitivity to intent and likelihood: that matchmaking. Right here, right now, who is she?

Perhaps you are beginning to see why I am obsessed.

By definition, pronouns only contain vague information, like first-person or plural. In order for something this vague to effectively retrieve a word’s meaning, there has to be a whole lot of context. Imagine all the words contained in your mind as a vast pool of fish. Look carefully and you’ll see that each fish is different from all the others. If you had a hook selective enough, you’d be able to control which fish you catch. But pronouns are not selective hooks. Pronouns are sweeping nets. You have to cast your net shallowly in the hopes that you catch the one noun the pronoun refers to. That’s what context does: it pushes what’s relevant to the surface of the mind.

There are plenty of psycholinguists out there trying to figure out what counts as context. The real answer would be everything. A more helpful answer would be a bit narrower: syntactic things like part of speech and parallel structure matter, as do pragmatic things, like how the world works and what message a speaker intends to convey. Say my lab manager says, “Sally invited Rosemary Clooney to a dinner party! She said, ‘Yes!’” She references Rosemary Clooney and not Sally, since invitations lead to responses. This is context at its most straightforward.

Most psycholinguistic work on pronouns has used third-person pronouns like he and she. This is because psycholinguists prefer straight­forward problems that make it easy to design experiments; the first- and second-person pronouns require context of a different sort. A person must know the speaker, as well as the listener, for the referents of I or you to be retrievable. Fortunately, language-acquisition researchers (who often speak with psycho­linguists and occasionally even conference with them) have looked at these problematic pronouns, and to interesting effect. I and you are challenging for children to learn: some children go through a stage where, not understanding you’s speaker-specific meaning, they hear their mothers say, “Do you want a cookie?” and respond “You want cookie! You want cookie!” How charming! Interestingly, some deaf children learning American Sign Language make the same mistake. Fluent speakers of ASL point to themselves to indicate I. It’s as iconic as a sign can get. But that young ASL learner will point at his mother until she hands him a cookie. It’s hard not to envy the language-acquisition researchers the adorableness of their subjects.

And there are plenty of other types of pronouns, all with their own contextual obligations (read: experimenter headaches). Sometimes people use pronouns that are unheralded, meaning they don’t refer to anything that has been mentioned previously in conversation. These pronouns generally need the most context to be understood. Often, as is the case with knowing the relationship between I and you, this context is nonlinguistic. If I say “He’s on fire!” when my cat is on fire, it is pretty obvious that he refers to the cat. I don’t even have to point. Anyone listening to my speech and witnessing the event will have enough context to know who I’m saying is on fire.

The next day, the postdoc I share an office with listens to my story about buying a catnip candle so that I could watch my cat roll endearingly on the carpet while the scent wafted across the room, and how it didn’t quite turn out that way, how instead my cat pounced on top of the candle and the fur on his belly instantly broke into flame. When I say all this and four hours later the postdoc sees me and shakes his head and says, “They should be illegal,” I know that by they he means catnip candles. Unheralded, see? The source of that blazing belly has seared itself so prominently on both our minds that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned to be there.

There are also pronouns that don’t mean anything at all. Dummy pronouns, they’re called, and we come across them all the time (you read one in the previous sentence). They’re those pronouns that exist only because the English language demands that each sentence contain a subject: the it in “It’s raining” or the there in “There is a shed in my back yard.” (Note: the there only works as an example of a dummy pronoun if I am not pointing to a shed, and am nowhere near my back yard.) (Note: most linguistic examples have caveats like this, making the linguist’s life frustrating: “You’re right,” linguists will inevitably find themselves saying at some point. “If the bartender is also drinking bourbon while she mixes drinks for a patron wearing a yellow shirt and standing directly to her left, and if all of this is happening on a Tuesday, well yeah I can get that meaning.”)

One thing we psycholinguists have learned is that using pronouns correctly is a lot of work. A person has to strike a balance between referencing something and not beating other folks over the head with it. Striking this balance requires quite a bit of attention. And when attention goes, so does proper pronoun use.

I ask a professor how Corey’s comprehensive exams went. The professor says something like, “Well, Corey’s a bright guy. I don’t think he studied as much as he could have, but overall he did fine.” But if I ask a professor how Corey’s comprehensive exams went while also asking the professor to rehearse a five-digit number in her head, she will say something like, “Well, Corey’s a bright guy. . . . don’t think Corey studied as much as Corey could have. . . . but overall Corey did fine.” It takes work to keep track of when to use a pronoun; work that we can do easily—automatically—when we’re not keeping track of anything else, but work that becomes damn near impossible if we have to keep rehearsing 9-1-0-7-4 over and over again in our heads. Try it on your friends. Try it on your spouse. Try it on your parents, but only if they’re not too old, because once their memories are shot they’ll be using a lot more pronouns. Not because they’ve become exceptional at keeping track of when the referent has last been named, but because they’ve lost track of the referent altogether.

I‘m lucky. At a large research university, I have plenty of participants (never “subjects,” at least in print) at my disposal. For at least a hundred hours each term I have other people’s lives to exploit as shamelessly (but ethically) as I would like.

I try to run participants during the first few weeks of a term when they’re plucky and ambitious, the sort of undergraduates who like to stay on top of things, who won’t try to fit all seven research hours in on the last possible day, who aren’t likely to rearrange the keyboard to spell [F][U][C][K] [ ] [T][H][I][S] or to accidentally “lock” themselves in the testing rooms by pulling at the doors instead of pushing. I run group after group, sometimes several groups at once, then go back to my desk to make sure that the data are going where they ought and that no software bug needs last-minute eradication. Then, once the numbers start looking funny, once the ceiling is judged by participants to be as likely to smile as the child and response times get painfully long—or impossibly short—I breathe a huge sigh and try to see what it is, exactly, that I’ve collected. If an experiment works, if the numbers look and smell and feel so gorgeously simple that I actually trust them, I’ll sit at my desk long after my adviser has left for home, after the postdocs and other graduate students have called it a day and the lab manager has shut down her computer. I’ll sit staring at those numbers as if they’re a message from somewhere so close I can feel its heat.

You see, psycholinguists have devised—and continue to devise—a number of different tasks to get at how pronouns work. The one I use most often in my own research is the recognition-probe task. Essentially, the task presupposes that what is most prominent in a person’s memory while experiencing language is what the language is “about” at that time. Participants enter a little testing room and sit down at a computer. Short texts appear on the screen, and the participants are instructed to read them, presumably in preparation for a comprehension test. Participants are given a secondary task: to decide as quickly as possible whether they recognize test words that appear unexpectedly on the screen as words they’ve read in the text. If a pronoun’s referent is retrieved, participants should be better at responding “yes” to the referent if it appears as a test word in the recognition task. Say you’re a participant reading along and you come to this: Rosemary threw the jellyfish that hit Anne in the chest. While she laughed and laughed, Anne doubled over in pain. If Rosemary is correctly recovered as the referent of she, then responses to Rosemary as a test word should be faster and more accurate immediately after the pronoun than they would be otherwise. Other words, like jellyfish, should receive no such boost.

Other tasks involve reading-time measures like eye tracking, where an expensive machine actually records participants’ pupils while they read. From this video, researchers are able to reconstruct the eye’s saccades (eye movements) from word to word, and to calculate the amount of time a reader spends on a precise word (or even part of a word). Reading-time tasks presuppose, of course, that where the eyes linger is what the language is “about.”

Yet another task just asks participants straight-out how acceptable they find a sentence, a task that assumes that people’s judgments about the acceptability of a sentence presented in isolation will mirror how much difficulty they would have upon encountering the sentence in a more realistic setting. Researchers using this task tend to be interested in pronouns as freaks of nature, as sneaky critters that don’t play by the rules. For instance, it seems as though, while pronouns can easily take the place of nouns in a sentence, the opposite is not always true. Let’s say a fellow grad student points out, “The gardener who the agency which the neighbors recommended sent did a wonderful job around the pool.” I’d have no idea what he was talking about, and not just because graduate students do not have pools. Let’s say, instead, he proclaims, “The gardener who the agency which I recommended sent did a wonderful job around the pool.” With just the right inflections, I can almost hear him saying this: It’s bad, but it’s not as bad. Psycholinguists talk in terms like these. “Bad, but not as bad” is a notable thing for a psycholinguist.

Recently, psycholinguists have started to act on the pictures-of-the-brain-are-sexy phenomenon that has hit all areas of cognitive science like cats on candles. And at least one big pronoun study has come out of the madness. A team of researchers at the University of South Carolina scanned participants’ brains in an fMRI machine while reading them sentences that contained either proper nouns or their pronominal equivalents. Patterns of activity across the brain (as indicated by changes in blood flow) showed a number of differences in the two cases. Notably, when pronouns—but not proper names—were read, there was activity in areas of the brain associated with spatial processing.

The lead researcher has an interesting interpretation: listening to proper names, over and over again, can be disruptive. Each proper name will bring with it a host of associations—not all of them particularly relevant. Think about it. When you hear the name Emily Dickinson, you may not just retrieve aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life and work; you may also think of every Emily you’ve ever known, as well as the time you considered naming the family dog Emily. Or you may access a beloved high school English teacher, or the embarrassment you felt when you read a Dickinson poem aloud to your seventh-grade class and pronounced all of the dashes.

Words, the researcher suggests, are loaded, and pronouns may be a way of accessing a representation of the proper name that avoids the pitfalls of the proper name itself. It’s a way to maneuver (literally, it appears) around some of the association-juggling that language processing involves, to head straight for a placeholder instead. If his theory sounds crazy, consider this: speakers of ASL will sign a proper name the first time a person is brought up, and then point to a specific location in space, essentially assigning the proper name to that space. The person can then be subsequently referenced with a simple point to that space. In our brains, of course, the space is virtual, but its importance may be very real.

This brain stuff is relatively new to psycholinguists and hard to interpret. The fMRI procedure presupposes that blood flow to the brain means what we hope it means and isn’t a byproduct of something we just haven’t thought of yet. Still, results like this may eventually force psycholinguists to approach pronouns with a different metaphor. Change doesn’t come easily to psycholinguists. After all, we’re still weaning ourselves off the idea that sentences are represented in the mind as special trees that only branch to the right. If pronouns themselves should be treated as occupying a virtual space, can I really talk about them as if they delve into memory to “retrieve” a referent? Will I have to start talking about them as if they are hooks of the coat-rack variety?

One doesn’t have to be a psycholinguist to obsess over pronouns. Pronouns are talking trilobites, the last remnants of an Old English with a very different—and much richer—morphology. English used to always mark case: words were pronounced differently depending on their part of speech. Now the only words that still mark case are pronouns: I, we, he, she, and they when the pronoun appears as a subject; me, us, him, her, and them when it appears as an object. Second-person pronouns used to mark case, too, but ye, the pronoun marked for subject, is already obsolete. After all, we don’t really need case anymore. Word order takes care of everything. We know the relationship of a subject to a verb because of their respective places in a sentence. Still, pronouns are a way of looking back, or, perhaps more interestingly, a way of experiencing languages that rely more on morphological markings and less on word order.

Which brings me to the obvious yet disarming truth that English pronouns could just as easily be something else. In some languages, pronouns are optional; context permitting, they can be dropped out of the sentence entirely. In other languages, third-person pronouns—the  words like he, she, and they that are psycholinguists’ bread and butter—don’t even exist. Third persons are instead referenced with demonstratives like this or these. And in yet other languages, pronouns can carry information about the formality of the conversation, and even the social positions of its speakers.

To think about how odd this is, consider how much one type of information carried by some English pronouns—gender—can affect the way we communicate. Last year, arriving late to a departmental Christmas party, I was immediately greeted by a waifish 10-year-old with pale skin, delicate features, neatly braided long brown hair, and a stuffed clown fish. The girl solemnly informed me that her stuffed animal was dying of diphtheria. “Oh no!” I cried in mock horror. “Is your fish contagious?” Perhaps fearing I would launch into a speech about how young ladies should be careful around contagious fish, a fellow graduate student quickly interjected, “He’s sure the fish isn’t contagious. I asked him that same question.” And that is how I learned that the strange girl with the delicate features and the long braid was in fact a boy. How deftly pronominal information is delivered, and gleaned, by fluent speakers! How different the entire situation would have been were I a speaker of Hawaiian or Persian, where gender isn’t marked at all!

There is even evidence that linguistic markers of gender can shape the way we think. Not in big ways. Not in the ways that had so much of social science drooling in the ’60s. But in little ways, more like a nail file than a chain saw. A Stanford researcher presented bilingual English-Spanish and English-German speakers with a picture of a bridge. In Spanish and German, unlike English, even some inanimate objects are referenced with gendered pronouns.

In Spanish the word for bridge is marked masculine (and thus referenced with a masculine pronoun); in German the word is marked feminine. The researcher instructed the participants to describe the photograph. Then an independent group of participants rated all of the adjectives the bilinguals had written as either masculine or feminine.

German bilinguals consistently described the bridge with more feminine adjectives (elegant, beautiful), and Spanish bilinguals described it with more masculine adjectives (sturdy, dangerous). Here’s the kicker: instructions were given in English, descriptions were written in English, and the photograph of the bridge was just that—a photograph. This suggests that pronouns might be important, not just to how we use language, but to how we experience the objects in our world (although, as dear Steven Pinker points out, “Just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn’t mean he’s going to ask one out on a date”).

Lucky for me, there are plenty of pronouns in need of more study—the diectics (here, there), the reflexives (himself, themselves), the interrogatives (who, what), the possessives (his, mine), the indefinites (somebody, anything)—each with its own relatively unexamined life. Or, for the freshest pronoun around, I could always coin one myself.

In Baltimore, some teenagers already have: their candidate, yo, is a new gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun. As in Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt or Yo sucks at magic tricks. If yo sticks around—and if it spreads—maybe we can put the ever-awkward he or she to rest forever. And what would that mean? What consequences could that have for how we think about our world? Empirical question. Send in the psycholinguists.

At the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., the 24-year-old Lewinsky spent almost 12 hours with members of Starr’s team. Soon after the marathon session began, Lewinsky asked, “Should I have a lawyer?” Michael Emmick, a deputy to Starr, said to her, “If you want a lawyer, you can get a lawyer.” But he also said, basically, the fewer people who know about our deal, the better—if you decide to take it. Lewinsky told Emmick that she had hired a lawyer named Frank Carter to draft her affidavit, but Emmick didn’t call Carter or tell Lewinsky to. She turned her question into an assertion: “I want to call my attorney,” she said. Hours after Lewinsky first made the request and after she had repeated it at least five other times, an FBI agent finally called Carter’s office. He had left for the evening, his answering service explained, but could be reached if there was an emergency. The agent didn’t try to track him down.

According to Jo Ann Harris, a former assistant attorney general who was in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division for two years during Clinton’s first term, there were “serious problems” with the efforts by prosecutors to steer Lewinsky away from calling her lawyer. To begin with, Lewinsky was a witness in a developing criminal matter, so it reflected “poor judgment” to have contacted her without first approaching Carter. Then, once she asked to call him, the prosecutors should have stopped questioning her. Harris’s judgment mattered because it was based on extensive scrutiny of the brace for Robert Ray, Starr’s eventual successor as independent counsel. Ray gave her the assignment as a result of an internal Justice Department inquiry, which, Ray concluded, left him “no choice but to investigate his own office” and determine whether “it had crossed the line in discouraging Lewinsky from contacting her attorney.”

The Harris report is one of the revelations in Ken Gormley’s 789-page account of the eight-year, $64-million investigation into alleged wrongdoing by Bill and Hillary Clinton and others. The inquiry began with a focus on business deals related to a bank called Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association, trans­actions made to recoup losses from a failed get-rich-quick purchase of 230 acres overlooking Arkansas’ White River. The land got shorthanded, infamously, as Whitewater. So did the inquiry, though it was vastly expanded to cover the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster; former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell’s defrauding of his Rose Law Firm partners of almost half a million dollars; Bill Clinton’s alleged misconduct in the civil suit against him for sexual harassment brought by Paula Jones; and, of greatest consequence among still other matters, alleged perjury, suborning of perjury, and obstruction of justice by Clinton and others about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Harris expected her findings to be published as part of Ray’s final report to Congress. He proposed including them as an attachment. But an unnamed lawyer in Ray’s office (presumably one Harris criticized for exercising “poor judgment”) convinced the three federal judges overseeing Ray’s work to keep Harris’s findings from the public by marking them “sealed.” Harris, now a scholar-in-residence at Pace Law School in New York State, disclosed them to Gormley anyway. She was convinced that “American citizens were entitled to know” about them because, in addition to being important, “the final bottom line” of her inquiry was “crystal clear.”

Except that it wasn’t.

As Gormley recounts, Harris concluded that, in trying to lure Lewinski as a cooperative witness, Starr’s team did something Harris would not have done: “I wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole.” In continuing to press Lewinski while not letting her call her lawyer, they had likewise failed to do what Harris would have done: “The minute she says, ‘Can I call my lawyer?’ you stop,” Harris instructed. “And when she says it for the sixth or seventh time, you really stop.” Yet, because the rules of the Justice Department applied to Starr’s investigation and were “all over the place” about whether his team should have confronted Lewinsky as it did, Harris found that no one made a “clear violation” of department policy during the brace.

Harris was moved to reveal her findings because, to her, it was profoundly unfair to federal prosecutors if the public got the impression that Lewinsky’s treatment reflected standard practice. Still, while her conclusion, like that of the internal Justice Department inquiry that preceded hers, was “none too kind,” she didn’t find that the “professional misconduct” was bad enough to amount to “wrongdoing.” Harris could point to no official rule or standard that lawyers had breached that warranted official sanction.

This element of the Monica Lewinsky sting—“the biggest moment in the history of the Starr investigation,” by Gormley’s reckoning—puts in a nutshell not the death of American virtue, which seems an overcooked title for this book, but another major passing that the Clinton-Starr battles confirmed: the dominance of a way of practicing law that allowed lawyers to believe they were members of an honorable profession.

Louis Brandeis championed this ideal a century ago, when he defined legal advocacy as being an independent buffer between the interests of a client and of society that fulfills an obligation to both. But Brandeis was pushing back in vain against the classic conception of advocacy that England’s Lord Henry Brougham articulated in 1820. It reigned in Brandeis’s era and prevails emphatically today: “An advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client.” The premise of our adversary system is that justice emerges from legal encounters most often when opposing parties are each vigorously represented. Zealous advocacy is a bulwark of our system. The legal scholar Stephen Gillers has explained about the American bar: “Lawyers lull the public into a view of the lawyer’s role as less client-centered and as more public-interested than it really is.” But, he went on, “the client is the center of the lawyer’s universe.”

In advocating for their clients, American lawyers can be conscientious about following rules of practice yet operate with a zeal that strikes non-lawyers as excessively confrontational and relentless. As a result of a series of revisions in the past generation that made them less stringent, the main rules governing lawyers require little of them not already laid out by the existing law that applies to everyone. According to Robert Gordon, the leading historian of American lawyers, the model of advocacy that now prevails in this country can be reduced to these scorched-earth tenets: “Lawyers should not commit crimes or help clients to plan crimes. They should obey only such ethical instructions as are clearly expressed in rules and ignore vague rules. Finally, they should not tell outright lies to judges or fabricate evidence. Otherwise they may, and if it will serve their clients’ interest must, exploit any gap, ambiguity, technicality, or loophole, any not-obviously-and-totally-implausible interpretation of the law or facts.”

In Gormley’s account, the Clinton-Starr saga serves as a case study in just how low American lawyers have sunk in their race to the bottom. That’s largely because of what the lawyers involved did or failed to do. But it’s also because of who they were. Independent Counsel Starr was a former federal-appeals-court judge, a former solicitor general of the United States, and, as a partner at the respected firm of Kirkland & Ellis, one of the most prominent lawyers who stood up for private clients in the Supreme Court. Robert Bennett, who represented Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was a major partner at the Skadden firm, a behemoth of corporate practice and among the most successful firms in the world. David Kendall, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer, was a widely admired partner at Williams & Connolly, the country’s premier litigation firm. They were and remain among the best of the best, so it is impossible to write off as outlier behavior the fierce and, for those on the receiving end on both sides, frightening antagonism that marked their lawyering.

In a case study revealing one hard-hitting practice after another, it was almost too perfect to have Bennett and Skadden centrally involved. Corporate takeovers helped transform American business and finance in the decade and a half before the start of the Clinton years. In the longest wave of mergers and acquisitions since the turn of the 20th century, they played a big part in creating the new era of finance-driven capitalism to which there has been such a backlash. Skadden’s development mirrored the change. It grew from a 75-lawyer firm with an outsized chip on its shoulder in 1975, into a 1,000-lawyer firm in 1990, with a style of lawyering so conspicuous that the firm’s name was used by other lawyers as a verb: to “Skaddenize.” Takeovers were powered by litigation. The litigation often involved using the process of pretrial discovery to embarrass adversaries and to play other forms of hardball. Skadden pioneered the use of these belligerent tactics in corporate mergers and acquisitions, and its prowess fueled the firm’s phenomenal growth. That colossal success led other major firms to follow its lead. Skadden did more than any firm to make rough lawyering respectable and the accepted standard for the American bar.

In the Clinton-Starr saga, however, while Bob Bennett was digging up dirt on Paula Jones, adding to his reputation as a master of hardball, Clinton was also Skaddenized by lawyers for Jones. They used their pretrial subpoena powers to gather allegations about Clinton’s sex life and evaded a gag order imposed to keep this material private. After Clinton finally admitted that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky, the legal writer David Margolick in The New York Times criticized Bennett for being too lawyerly, for having too much “faith in precedent, logic, and the primacy of winning in court,” when winning the case on the merits mattered much less than minimizing the mud that got slung at the president of the United States. In general, Margolick chastised the president’s lawyers for putting on a “highly legalistic defense” (Clinton and Lewinsky didn’t have sexual intercourse, so they didn’t have sex) that turned on “a tortured definition of sex” (“knowingly” engaging in or causing “contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person”). Yet Gormley’s book underscores that, while Clinton’s lawyers, Starr and his team of prosecutors, and lawyers for Jones and others all churned up a maelstrom in their bitter contest about this and other key points of disagreement, it was the clients who created the most havoc, despite the efforts of their lawyers.

Had Jones taken her lawyers’ advice and settled her case when Bennett offered to do so on Clinton’s behalf months before the Lewinski drama began and on all of the terms Jones had asked for in court, Lewinsky and her blue dress would not have become relevant to Starr’s investigation. Had Clinton not split hairs, dodged questions, and carefully lied in his deposition in the Jones case, his epic troubles would almost certainly have been less. They include his impeachment by the House of Representatives and the unsuccessful impeachment trial in the Senate; his extended struggle to avoid being forced to resign in disgrace, even after his victory in the Senate; and the acute strain on his marriage.

Were the plaintiff Jones and the defendant Clinton emboldened by their lawyers’ no-holds-barred advocacy to feel unbridled themselves? Mindful of legal rules that barely restrained their advocates, did the clients discount counsel that they restrain themselves in the legal process? Whatever the causes, the consequences were devastating. That seems especially so for Clinton, because he was president but also because he had sworn an oath as a lawyer. If he followed his own counsel, as Gormley is convinced, he tragically misled himself as a client. At the end of the investigation, Clinton admitted that he “knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers” in his deposition in the Jones case and agreed to have his law license suspended for five years.

As for Kenneth Starr, according to Benjamin Wittes in Starr: A Reassessment, the independent counsel viewed himself as the leader of a truth commission rather than a special prosecutor with a responsibility to apply the same standards the Justice Department is expected to use in any case where its job is to make a recommendation about whether the targets of an inquiry should be indicted. The truth, in his eyes, was his client, more so than justice. In Wittes’s view, Starr’s approach, based on an elementary misreading of the independent-counsel statute, was devastating in the extreme. Wittes summarized his conclusion in Legal Affairs magazine: “Starr’s interpretation of the independent-counsel statute burned into an inquisitorial fire that helped consume not only Clinton’s presidency, but also the law that Starr once hated and then remade in his own image. In the wake of Starr’s investigation and the Clinton impeachment, Congress allowed the independent-counsel law to lapse. Truth, it turned out, was not worth the consequences.”

This account of American lawyering is embedded in The Death of American Virtue rather than explicit. Gormley had the different ambition of capturing the sprawling Clinton-Starr saga in a historical narrative, which, despite the book’s reproving title, stops well short of reaching an overarching judgment. Given his book’s massive heft and notable attention to detail, he has succeeded in his aims more comprehensively than anyone else to date.

The book is full of compelling material. With a vote of 9–0, the Supreme Court allowed the Jones case to go forward by ruling that the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers doesn’t require federal courts to delay all private civil lawsuits against a president until the end of his term of office. The unanimous bench rejected the president’s request that the suit be postponed so it wouldn’t be a distraction from his public duties. Writing for himself and seven other justices, John Paul Stevens, jestering with an adverb to emphasize his certainty, asserted that the case was “highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount” of Clinton’s time.

Here’s what Gormley writes about that:

The night before the oral argument in the Supreme Court, Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger was pulling into his driveway after another grueling night of preparation, when his beeper sounded. The text message read: “Urgent, urgent, urgent.” When Dellinger called the Justice Department Command Center, an officer told him, “The president wants to talk to you. Immediately.” From inside his home, the solicitor general dialed the secret land-line number. He was instantly connected with President Clinton, who began discussing cases he had been reading concerning a governor’s immunity from civil suit—he wanted to make sure that Dellinger had every possible argument at his command. The president and his solicitor general spoke long into the night.

Dellinger later fell into bed, dreaming about the moment when he would stand up at the lectern to argue the historic Clinton v. Jones case, and wishing he could shout out to the justices: “You think this stuff isn’t distracting? You know what the president was doing last night into the late hours? He’s worrying about this litigation!”

Still, the book’s generally distasteful and often repellent subject—its necessary preoccupation with the dark side—sometimes makes for unpleasant reading. In addition, despite the intelligence, fortitude, and mastery that Gormley demonstrates, the subject sometimes seems an overwhelming choice for him. Gormley’s 1997 biography of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox helps explain why: While not free of criticism about its subject, Gormley’s Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation is largely warm and enthusiastic, a celebration of a noble hero. There is much less to celebrate in The Death of American Virtue, which may have been a source of discomfort for Gormley. In the Cox biography, his fair-minded treatment of the man’s shyness, rectitude, and sense of propriety contributed nicely to the overall portrait of a lawyer-statesman who believed in the need for old-fashioned restraint in the practice of law. In the Clinton-Starr book, although Gormley’s manifest fairness is similarly admirable, it led him to adopt an uneasy voice as a writer. The tone of evenhandedness he strives for is at odds with the wild gyrations of the story he recounts and the repeatedly offensive lack of restraint among characters of his who are lawyer-rogues. The book conveys confidence in what it has to report, but not in how.

As a result, it regularly goes on at length with comments from interviews that are meant to let the book’s main subjects speak for themselves (with the exception of Hillary Clinton, whose voice is noticeably absent) yet are usually predictable and self-serving. Gormley leaves the impression that he likes to be liked by the people he writes about. He is better suited to paying tribute to his subjects than holding them accountable or lacerating them, as some lawyers in the book deserve.

Gormley’s decision to tell the Clinton-Starr story and yet not to judge it parallels the choice that Starr made as independent counsel to emphasize the pursuit of truth rather than the quest for justice. Gormley’s job was different from Starr’s, and truth about history is invariably a source of light. Still, by stopping short of making an overarching judgment about the events it chronicles, The Death of American Virtue does not fully come to terms with its many-sided subject.

On the other hand, the book is plenty good enough to allow readers to reach some of their own conclusions. A critical one is this: Kenneth Starr’s insistent effort led him to the verge of bringing down the Clinton presidency, in large part because of Bill Clinton’s lies under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Indefensible as the lies were, the stress on truth exaggerated their importance in Starr’s protracted investigation. More than any other element, that fixation was responsible for the long, costly spectacle that, again and again, made zealous advocacy seem a disgrace to our legal system rather than a bulwark of it.