Born Nathan Weinstein, the only son of a prosperous Manhattan real estate developer, West was an outrageously spoiled child who spent much of his youth getting over the idea that he shouldn't be expected to work or show up on time or in any other way trouble himself to get by in the world. (The Depression did a lot to revise this attitude.) His domineering philistine of a mother instilled in him a streak of bumptious misogyny and a contempt for his parents' generation of Russian-Jewish strivers, abundantly evident in his fiction. Meade sees a lot of homoeroticism in West's work and some signs of same-sex activity in his medical history, but most of his carnal encounters seem to have been with female prostitutes -- and he had multiple cases of the clap to prove it. He was dreamy, physically clumsy, a natty dresser and (fatally, alas) a lousy driver.

Infatuated with Russian novels as a boy, West started out as the sort of an aspiring author who thought he had to relocate to Europe to produce anything great. (One of Meade's more inspired uses of biographical research explains that the week West spent hanging out in Parisian cafes hoping to rub shoulders with serious writers like James Joyce was the same week Joyce spent sprawled on his sofa, reading Anita Loos' proto-chicklit classic, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.") In opposition to his reverence for high art, West had an iconoclastic impulse to thumb his nose at "litracher" and cram his novels with grotesqueries and colloquialisms. He was particularly partial to lecherous dwarves and cartoonishly beefy lesbians, and his characters say things like "She can't give me the fingeroo!"

A penchant for the "-eroo" suffix appears to be contagious, since Meade's account of West's rocky publication history is full of references to such "switcheroos" and "twisteroos," as the publisher of his second novel, "Miss Lonelyhearts," going bankrupt just as the book was debuting to strong reviews. When West finally befriended some literary luminaries (Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson), it seldom did him any good. As a hotel manager in New York, he'd let Dashiell Hammett stay in one of the rooms free of charge, but once Hammett had made it in the film industry, he not only reneged on a promise to help West get screenwriting work but publicly humiliated him as well. Fingeroo!

The prominent writers of the 1930s had a fantastically contorted relationship to Hollywood. West's brother-in-law, the humorist S.J. Perelman, reviled the movie business as a "gigantic rat fuck," but like Parker, Fitzgerald and the rest, he could not resist the siren song of a Hollywood paycheck. West's good friend, the novelist Josephine Herbst, regarded the film industry as a form of quicksand that sucked in promising novelists -- each one swearing to escape and write something "real" once he'd saved up enough cash -- and never let them go.

Policing the supposedly unbridgeable gulf between entertainment and art still obsesses much of American literary culture, to enervating effect. West, in contrast to his peers, found his best and darkest subject in Hollywood's human detritus -- the hopefuls, hangers-on and dead-enders on Vine Street, who watched everyone walk by with "eyes filled with hatred." As he saw it, legit publishing had jerked him around, while the movie business not only rewarded him handsomely, but also provided the structure that made him much more productive.

Besides the negative example of the movies, American writers of the time were preoccupied with communism, which entered West's life in earnest when he took up with Eileen McKenney. Eileen's sister, Ruth, was a deeply committed member of the Communist Party. To make money while she toiled away on a history of the rubber workers' union in their home state of Ohio, Ruth wrote bubbly comic essays for the New Yorker about living with Eileen in a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, surrounded by wacky neighbors.

Dark-haired Ruth and blond Eileen were cast from childhood in the roles of smart sister and pretty sister, respectively. In her essays, Ruth accentuated those roles, transforming sunny Eileen into a gorgeous but ditzy heartbreaker and her manic-depressive self into the plain and pragmatic straight woman. Thus, she spun the sisters' early experiences in New York into a hugely popular blend of "Sex and the City" and "Seinfeld." (After Eileen's death, "My Sister Eileen" became a hit play, which in turn became the basis for two movies, a TV series and the Broadway musical "Wonderful Town.") Initially indifferent to politics but anxious to prove herself more than a dumb blonde, Eileen succumbed to the knee-jerk political correctness drummed into her by Ruth.

Although West attended some Party study groups to please Eileen, he had no use for utopian schemes; Herbst characterized him as "a nihilistic pessimist." (Perhaps Eileen would have eased up herself had they more time together.) West understood that mass culture had spawned a scary hunger for borrowed and processed "authenticity," and this makes his novels appear, in the words of the novelist Jonathan Lethem, "permanently oracular," anticipating such piranhaesque spectacles as reality TV and Gawker. Against the urge to idealize writers of the past, "Lonelyhearts" presents a portrait of a literary milieu as double-dealing, bitchy, hypocritical and self-deluding as pretty much every conglomeration of ambitious artists since the dawn of time. It certainly was no better than our own. The switcheroo?: Ours is no worse.

The war against cliché (to cop a phrase from Martin Amis) gained a new weapon this week, when Michelle Kerns, who writes a smart, cheeky books column for Examiner.com -- an outfit described, alternately, as a "hyperlocal" platform for "citizen journalists" or a "pay-per-click meat market" owned by conservative Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz -- created a new game: Book Review Bingo. Kerns took a list of the most egregious book reviewer clichés she'd compiled in an earlier column and arranged them in 5-by-5 grids as bingo cards.

Kerns urges her readers to distribute the cards to their bookish friends, then have everyone sift through "the week's reviews/book jackets/gushing publicity sheets" searching for hackneyed words and phrases. Whoever gets a bingo first wins, although, "Playing for a blackout will absolutely be a requirement when reading some publications."

Within a couple of hours it seemed like every book reviewer in the country had been forwarded multiple links to Kerns' column. "It's getting worse," tweeted Ron Charles, fiction editor and critic for the Washington Post Book World. "People in the office are now emailing me Book Reviewer Cliché Bingo without comment." In silent shame, dozens (if not hundreds) of delete keys wiped out instances of "poignant" and "gritty" and "tour de force."

Every writer has his or her pet words, words that, however ideal they seemed the first time you selected them, have long since worn out. The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani is famous for relying on the verb "limn" -- a choice often derided because no one uses that word in actual speech. As a general rule, though, well-worn verbs are more forgivable than tired adjectives, simply because there are relatively few of them that work without calling undue attention to themselves; which synonyms for "describe," "portray" and "relate" wouldn't sound hopelessly artificial if you were determined not to use such old, reliable workhorses?

Now, I pride myself on never employing "lyrical" (except ironically) or "rollicking," but I must plead guilty to variations on "haunting" and "powerful." What's at stake is more than just lackluster prose. As Kerns wrote to me in an e-mail, when she scrutinized her own use of clichés more closely, she realized that she fell back on them whenever she was "avoiding giving a solid opinion on anything. I was too afraid to just say, 'I hated this and this is why' or 'I thought this was great and this is why.' I used the clichés to fudge on exposing myself and sidestep saying anything that someone else might disagree with."

With this larger purpose in mind, I subjected my own reviews for the past several months to Book Review Bingo. While I was heartened to learn that I have never succumbed to the temptations of "unputdownable" or "riveting," I nevertheless earned a bingo on the very first card, due to my terrible fondness for the constructions "that said" and "at once," and my inability to resist the "X meets X" formulation in the very last review I wrote for Salon. Also, as I am utterly ashamed to admit, I once used the word "stunning."

As for my own irritants, the word "luminous," while not quite a cliché yet, is nevertheless a dead giveaway that the book under consideration is prettily written but dull. "Magisterial" is a word over-applied to nonfiction that is intimidatingly lengthy. And while I have indulged in "generous" (i.e., long and warm-hearted) myself in the past, it's time to give that one a rest, too.

I promise to try to do better in the future, and invite the readers of Salon to nominate their own pet peeves. We have nothing to lose but our chestnuts.

Some readers react with knee-jerk scorn to this theme — reminded, I think, of that time in the mid- to late 20th century when a generation of celebrated male novelists produced novel after novel about aging goats (usually college professors) finding redemption in the arms of young babes (usually college students). But times have changed, and manhood is an even trickier proposition than it used to be; only Philip Roth still believes in the ol' saved-by-the-booty formula anymore. Younger writers know that won't wash, and as a result the literature of the masculine midlife crisis feels at once richer and riskier than ever before.

Knowing, self-deprecating humor is the default approach these days. Take Sam Lipsyte's satire about a failed artist turned academic fundraiser, "The Ask," a novel so caustic you might want slip on a pair of safety gloves before turning its pages. Milo Burke, Lipsyte's narrator, is emasculated both at home and abroad, from the wife who withholds sex and casually cheats on him to the third-rate university that keeps him on only at the insistence of an old friend turned philanthropist intent on jerking his chain. Lipsyte's second novel, "Home Land," also featured a perpetually bullied (though younger) narrator, and there are readers who find his well-turned prose and grotesque scenarios hilarious. I am not, alas, among them. The hammering, ground-in nastiness of "The Ask" strikes me as overly grim — Neil LaBute meets Martin Amis — but if your idea of fun is the kind of novel where male co-workers routinely greet each other with questions like, "What's the matter, your pussy hurt?" then by all means, have at it.

Chances are I'd be recommending James Hynes "Next" to you this week, if not for a frustrating conflict of interest: Hynes (whom I've never met), blurbed my own book. Suffice to say that this novel about another put-upon, midlevel university administrative worker is more fully rounded and less claustrophobic than "Ask," with a wallop of an ending that has been justly praised by those reviewers who lack the good fortune to be encumbered by Hynes' generosity.

Which brings us to this week's choice, Thomas Kennedy's "In the Company of Angels," definitely not a satire. The gravely injured 50-something man at the center of this novel has infinitely better reasons for losing faith than Lipsyte's and Hynes' narrators do. His name is Bernardo "Nardo" Greene, once a teacher of literature in his native Chile, who, as a result of discussing the work of a radical poet with his students, was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime. The novel takes place in Copenhagen, where Nardo has sought asylum and receives treatment from a psychiatrist who narrates some of the chapters. Other chapters are told from the point of view of Michela, a Danish woman who frequents the same cafe as Nardo, as well as Michela's dying father and her callow boyfriend.

The style of "In the Company of Angels" is, like its somewhat unfortunate title, so earnest as to seem almost artless; by the standards of contemporary literary fiction, it's often hopelessly on-the-nose and unsubtle in describing its characters' inner lives. Yet this in no way detracts from the novel's power or its tractor-beam-like ability to lock the reader into the unfolding drama of Nardo's recovery, a fragile structure that's always on the verge of disintegrating into despair.

What this novel reminds me of, surprisingly enough, is Stephen King — though not King's supernatural apparatus or breakneck action, and certainly not his slangy, strip-mall prose. What King and Kennedy (an American who lives in Denmark) share is an interest in the idea of violence as an occupational hazard of masculinity. For this reason, there is a seeping dread that crawls through the lives of the characters in "In the Company of Angels," much like the demonic forces that infiltrate the suburban idylls of King's novels, an apprehension that cruelty and domination might be contagious and that even victims are capable of unwittingly spreading the infection. Eventually, Nardo's therapist comes to believe that he can hear his patient's chief torturer whispering taunts to him when he's at home with his wife and kids, polluting the sanctum of family life with a knowledge of human evil at its most extreme.

Every character in "In the Company of Angels" is battling that evil in one way or another, and none of them is entirely free of it himself. "You will never again be a man to a woman," the chief torturer told Nardo, and although he was speaking of physical damage, it is the experience of utter helplessness and degradation that has wounded this once-respected teacher most deeply. Such impotence is utterly incompatible with his previous understanding of manhood; therefore, he must be unmanned. The urge to cancel out a shaming weakness with some act of force is a temptation that all the men in Kennedy's novel face. If they succumb, they will only perpetuate the contagion, but to transcend violence requires an imaginative courage difficult to muster.

Trauma isn't an unusual subject in contemporary fiction, but more often than not, it's handled in a sentimental, even precious fashion (Chris Cleave's "Little Bee," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close") through characters who are children or have a charming, childlike naivete and an uncomplicated relationship to their own suffering. Kennedy, who worked for a Copenhagen rehabilitation center for torture victims for several years, is much more convincing in rendering the aftereffects of unthinkable ordeals. "In the Company of Angels" is a novel about grown-ups, people battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their own responsibility, whose understanding of their past never stops evolving. It's the dignity of their adulthood — the elusive prize at stake in any midlife crisis — that makes them so admirable and, above all, so moving.

Above all, Shields' book yearns to be what its subtitle proclaims: a manifesto. That desire is really the easiest thing to nail down about "Reality Hunger." It's not that Shields is evasive, exactly, but he does keep dodging and feinting in celebrating the irrelevance of originality or the supremacy of the documentary mode. The book's format only accentuates this slipperiness: It contains a lot of passages cut and pasted from the work of other writers and artists. This technique, which Shields calls "literary mosaic," is meant to imitate hip-hop sampling and other kinds of musical appropriation. In the book's final pages, he explains that initially he didn't even want to identify the sources of these quotes, but "Random House lawyers" talked him into naming them in the endnotes.

Lots of assertions get made in "Reality Hunger," so many that it's easy to get lost in the maze of explaining and evaluating them. It seems true to me, for example, that reality TV, memoirs and other documentary-based forms feed a popular craving for the authentic, the unscripted and the unpredictable, even though the demand for certain formulaic storylines pressures creators to tweak "reality" into a more conventionally satisfying narrative. On the other hand, I can't endorse Shields' opinion that too much emphasis on plot is what makes contemporary novels boring and is causing a lot of people to stop reading them. Then again, the people I know who have stopped reading fiction do seem to concur with Shields that "more invention, more fabrication" is not what they want from a book. Which is why none of them, in turn, would agree with his insistence that the distinction between fact and fiction is often immaterial.

But I'm going to set aside all of those eminently arguable points for the moment and consider the manifesto-ness of "Reality Hunger," evident in such mottoes as, "The novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps," and "Plot is for dead people." Shields is far from alone in his taste for bold and sweeping aesthetic calls-to-arms. A manifesto makes people feel that their writing (and reading) is caught up in and contributing to some greater movement or cause -- possibly one that will be looked back upon by future generations with as much admiration as we feel today toward, say, the surrealists, the beats, or the writers who clustered around the old Partisan Review.

What really makes manifestoes exciting is that they transform the grinding labor and frequent isolation of doing artistic and intellectual work into a thrilling narrative -- which is pretty ironic, when you consider that Shields is forever announcing his impatience with and dislike of narrative. Manifestoes, of course, usually state some sort of code, such as the principles outlined by the Dogme 95 avant-garde filmmaking group. But, if anything, they are defined less by what they propose than by what they oppose -- in the case of Dogme 95, it's the artificiality of Hollywood movies and their ilk. The prevailing order, the average manifesto proclaims, has become complacent and exhausted. It must be overthrown!

This rhetoric is borrowed from war, or, more precisely, from revolution. Political revolutions justify themselves by saying the ruling order is unjust, but the artistic manifesto usually has to fall back on accusing the established art form of its day of being worn out, used up, inadequate to the important tasks of the moment. By this rationale, art is much like technology: The word processor will replace the typewriter, the CD dethrone the vinyl LP, and voice mail supplant the answering machine. Only fuddy-duddies and the terminally nostalgic will cling to the old (and therefore patently inferior) machine.

The analogy to technology is no coincidence; this model of cultural progress dates back a couple of hundred years to the Industrial Revolution. Culture is always evolving, of course, but the idea that new forms make the old ones obsolete and therefore useless is relatively recent. It's part of the core creed of modernism, a broad artistic movement insisting that art and literature needed to be entirely rethought and reconfigured to respond to the unprecedented conditions of modern life -- conditions brought about in large part by technology.

The irony is that even modernism got old. (Yes, another irony! -- you can see where postmodernism got its reputation for that.) Modernism fostered many, many transcendent works of art. It pushed boundaries, and also, as is less often remembered, established the very idea that "pushing boundaries" is what any serious art must do. (When, in "Reality Hunger," Shields points out that originality of material was not especially prized in art or literature prior to the Industrial Age, he's right; what he neglects to acknowledge is that neither was formal innovation.) The champions of various modernist movements announced that their new art would sweep away the old, but when the dust cleared, this mostly turned out not to be the case. The possibility of a stream-of-consciousness narrative, while exhilarating for a while, did not, as advertised, suddenly make it impossible to write or read a more traditional novel, and abstract art did not kill off the human appetite for representation.

This history should make anyone leery about sweeping claims that certain commonplace art forms are "dead" -- because what does that even mean? True, I feel comfortable saying that the epic narrative poem (along the lines of "Paradise Lost") is pretty well dead. Hardly anyone writes new ones and very close to nobody reads them, not even the old, good ones. But people still read and love conventional novels, even if they're culturally marginal compared to movies or, especially, television. Furthermore, the very elements of fiction that Shields denounces as hopelessly "boring" and old-fashioned, "invented plots and invented characters," remain the staple attractions of film and TV. As for the literary form that Shields espouses, the "lyric essay" -- an amalgam of fact and fiction, autobiography and reportage, fragmented and for the most part lacking a coherent linear narrative -- well, that has yet to take the reading public by storm.

This, you may interject, is hardly the point. The books at the pinnacle of the bestseller lists may still be fiction, but this conversation is not about mere numbers. Shields is speaking of serious literary art, not "The Help," or -- God forbid! -- "Twilight." He even looks down his nose at Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," the sort of "run-of-the-mill, 400-page page-turner" by a "middle-of-the-road" author that he is amazed people still want even though he himself "couldn't read that book if my life depended on it." (How he knows, then, that it's run-of-the-mill is unclear.) Shields just can't bear to read any kind of novel anymore!

Fine. He has plenty of company in that, even if only a vanishingly small percentage of the refugees from fiction will join him in turning to the lyric essay instead. The novel is dead to him, but so what? Can't he just go off and write whatever he wants to write without climbing up on a soapbox to make a speech about it? How does this offbeat preference of his merit a book-length manifesto? Why does this book exist?

"Reality Hunger" doesn't offer up a convincing answer to this question until Page 177, when Shields inserts a letter addressed to someone named William. It appears to have been written during some kind of professional, possibly academic, conference, and in the aftermath of a quarrel. According to the letter, William (no last name is given) told Shields that his students had expressed interest in reading novels about people coping with "incest or abuse." Shields recommended Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss," a memoir that generated much controversy when it was published in 1997. William sniffed at the suggestion: "On principle, I'd never have one of my students read that," he said, and Shields took offense, assuming that his colleague disdained the book out of hand, simply because it was a memoir and a notorious one. "Have you read it?" he snapped back (to which I can't resist retorting: Have you read "The Corrections"?). Shields then goes on to explain to William his "frustration at times with the extremely traditional aesthetic that predominates at this conference. I find that the kind of work to which I'm the most drawn is often condescended to here."

This letter, to my mind, is the very core of "Reality Hunger," the grain of sand at the center of not only the pearl, but the oyster itself. Until I read it, I could not make sense out of the book because I could not figure out what authority Shields' manifesto wants to overthrow. Who, I kept wondering, is he arguing against? It's not the masses. He might scold the rabble for naively believing that a memoirist should be expected to deliver a factually verifiable account of his or her life, but he's just as likely to point to the success of something like reality TV as confirmation of a groundswell in the "thirst for reality." The public, however, makes for a treacherous ally, since it adores Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King, whose bestsellers are extravagantly fictional. Presumably, these works, although popular, don't count, because they aren't Art. But in that case, why should reality TV factor into the discussion?

The stock villain in most manifestoes is the "establishment." But who is the establishment these days? The culture Shields claims to speak for has undergone a radical Balkanization; there is no Paris Salon to be rejected by anymore. If the novel is "dead," as he claims, then presumably anyone who still reads, writes and values it is hopelessly provincial and permanently sidelined. Why, then, go to the trouble of denouncing them? What power do they possess? Do novels reign at, say, the New York Times Book Review? Not really; fiction advocates have long protested that their stuff gets scant play in those pages. Besides, print book reviews are fading away amid complaints of their increasing irrelevance. In an age when a thousand blogs and amateur reviews have bloomed, whatever authority once resided in print's bastions is rapidly ebbing.

In short, I couldn't figure out who was keeping Shields down and shutting him out until I read his letter to William. Much, then, became clear. In the circles of professional writers -- arts colonies, literary conferences, MFA programs, prize committees and so on -- the attitude apparently persists that the supreme artistic achievement for any prose writer is the novel. Shields used to write and read fiction, but he's lost interest in it. The semi-documentary, semi-autobiographical lyric essay is what he wishes to pursue. But his colleagues, like William, don't take it seriously, especially if they catch a whiff of that popular but still not-quite-respectable (in their eyes) genre, the memoir. The people occupying this small corner of the culture still believe that the novel is the form that really counts.

If this doesn't strike you as matter of great consequence, I feel you. Shields could have simply announced that he has lost all interest in reading or writing fiction and is miffed that some writers he knows don't entirely respect his choice. He might have gotten a nice piece in a literary journal out of that. But a manifesto -- now, that's thinking big, with drama and conflict baked right into the format! It's reality to say that you just can't work up the enthusiasm for novels anymore, but to proclaim from the rooftops that the novel is dead, that's showbiz. Even people who don't really give a shit about the lyric essay and its delights can be goaded into writing long, brow-furrowing rebuttals to that sort of thing. Because when you write a manifesto, you are, after all, telling a story, and casting yourself as its hero. It's a story every bit as familiar and traditional as the plot of the most conventional middlebrow novel: A visionary revolutionary fights for progress by bravely challenging the reactionary old guard. It's an old-fashioned tale, no doubt -- well, let's face it, it's really pretty hokey. But it still plays.

Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. "Today's popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it's profoundly misleading," Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn't caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they're discussing -- mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness -- is genetically determined.

According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff is genetically determined, if by "determined" you mean exclusively or largely dictated by genes. Instead, "one large group of scientists," a "vanguard" that Shenk has labeled "the interactionists," insists that the old genes-plus-environment model (G+E) must be jettisoned and replaced by a model they call GxE, emphasizing "the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment." They don't discount heredity, as the old blank-slate hypothesis of human nature once did. Instead, they assert that "genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be."

Shenk's particular interest is talent, genius and other instances of extraordinary ability, whether the skills be athletic, artistic or scientific. Musicians and athletes most often get held up as examples of the triumph of innate gifts. According to Shenk, we are erroneously led to believe that stars like Tiger Woods and cellist Yo-yo Ma were born to climb to the top of their fields, when in fact the environments they grew up in are just as responsible (if not more so) for their spectacular feats. To prove this point, he methodically debunks several widely cited examples that supposedly prove the reality of inherited gifts: child prodigies, twin studies and geographical pockets of excellence at particular sports. In all of these cases, he demonstrates, observers have ignored and downplayed the enormous role of environment (especially in early childhood) in favor of touting the preeminence of genetics.

"The Genius in All of Us" strives for clarity -- a difficult standard when you're trying to describe such things as the role of environmental factors in controlling the expression of genes that are in turn susceptible to far more influence from environment than most of us realize in the first place. Or when you're explaining that "heritability" -- a "dreadfully irresponsible" word coined by researchers studying identical twins raised apart from each other -- refers to statistical probabilities in large populations, not to the qualities of particular individuals. A lot of the misunderstandings that Shenk laments seem to arise from the fact that genetics often involves statistical reasoning, while most nonspecialists have a pretty weak grasp of how probability, averages and means work.

With this in mind, Shenk states his assertions as plainly as he can in the main text of "The Genius in All of Us," then expands on the topic in his notes for those readers who want more information. It's an inspired method, a lot like the print manifestation of a digital article with hyperlinks to other documents illustrating the key points. For the majority of readers who are really only interested in the book's core argument, it's easy enough to extract the gist in a mere three or four hours of reading, but skeptics and advocates are free to lift the hood and see how it all works. While "The Genius in All of Us" isn't an inventive, sensitive piece of writing like Shenk's celebrated book on Alzheimer's disease, "The Forgetting," it isn't meant to be; he has deliberately stripped it down to communicate a handful of insurrectionary ideas as simply and unequivocally as possible.

To boil these ideas down even further, Shenk asserts that intelligence is not fixed but rather highly malleable depending on the demands placed upon it and the resources made available. Much of our capacity to think, perform and create is primed in early childhood, so the importance of creating a stimulating, challenging and supportive (but not coddling) context for young children can't be overstated. And while some of us are born with a slight edge when it comes to aptitude, most people can come pretty close to the highest levels of achievement in our chosen field if we pursue it in the right way. Of course, the intensity of drive and commitment exhibited by top athletes like Ted Williams or scientists like Einstein (who said "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer") is, in itself, extraordinary. But Shenk believes that this, too, can be inculcated, if we so desire.

As someone who has always resisted genetic determinism while still subscribing to the secular mystery religion of talent, I confess that "The Genius in All of Us" has quietly blown my mind. But the book's premise has far more profound implications for social policy. What would education, the workplace and government look like if we behaved as if we truly believed that nobody is born to mediocrity? "Human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel," Shenk writes, "but potentially plentiful like wind power." It's an apt comparison in more ways than one; there are huge vested interests relying on the old attitudes. The determination to turn that around will need to be mighty enough to put even the great Ted Williams to shame.

A lot of the advice focuses on practice (work every day, keep a diary, stop while you're still interested, etc.), and almost as much strives -- gently or not -- to inform aspirants that they shouldn't expect much (or, really, any) money or fame from a literary career. It soon struck me, though, that the perspectives offered are limited. What makes Leonard's advice so refreshing, after all, is that none of it fusses over the writer's own process and delicate ego. His tips ruthlessly focus on the creation of better fiction.

Readers are what every novelist really wants, so isn't it about time that a reader offered them some advice? I've never written a novel, and don't expect to ever do so, but I've read thousands. More to the point, I've started 10 times the number of books that I've finished. Much of the time, I'm sampling brand-new novels that aren't great -- that frequently aren't even very good -- each one written by someone sincerely hoping to make his or her mark. I can tell you why I keep reading, and why I don't, why I recommend one book to my fellow readers, but not another. I've also listened to a lot of other readers explain why they gave up on a book, as well as why they liked it. Here are my five recommendations for the flailing novice:

1. Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There's a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.

2. Make your main character do something. For the reasons stated above, many writers gravitate toward characters to whom things happen, as opposed to characters who cause things to happen. It's not impossible to write a compelling novel or story in which the main character is entirely the victim of circumstances and events, but it's really, really hard, and chances are that readers will still find the character irritatingly passive. When you hear someone complain that "nothing happens" in a work of fiction, it's often because the central character doesn't drive the action.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting. Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much. Believe me, I wish this were otherwise, and I do urge all readers to polish their prose and avoid clichés. However, I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little. As Leonard himself notes at the end of his list, most of his advice can be summed up as, "if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Or, as playwright David Hare put it in his list, "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it." But whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences.

5. A sense of humor couldn't hurt. American writers in particular are often anxious to be perceived as "serious," which they tend to equate with a mournful solemnity. Like most attempts to appear grown-up, it just makes you look childish. Comedy is as essential a lens on the human experience as tragedy, and furthermore it is an excellent ward against pretension. While readers may respect you for breaking our hearts, we will love you for making us laugh.

I could go on, but I'll stop there unless the populace clamors for more. Naturally, writers of genius have broken these "rules" as well as every other rule ever conceived. But, let's face it, geniuses don't need lists like this and couldn't follow them even if they tried. Most writers are not geniuses, and most readers would be exhausted by a literary diet that consisted only of the works of geniuses. The novel can be a down-to-earth and companionable thing as well as an exalted one, and while management gurus like to go on about the good being the enemy of the great, they are in fact misquoting Voltaire. He said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good," which means exactly the opposite. And he, as you are no doubt aware, was a bona fide genius.