Os anjos por dentro, por DULCE MARIA CARDOSO

Os anjos por dentro

Nunca percebi como a nossa mãe escolhia de entre todas as galinhas a que seria sacrificada. Também nunca lhe perguntei. Logo que a escolhida era agarrada, fazia-se um silêncio esquisito. A escolhida raramente gritava ou se debatia. Ficávamos a odiar a nossa mãe durante um tempo

por DULCE MARIA CARDOSO

Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. Era pouco mais do que um carreiro. Muito íngreme. A terra dura e desbotada. Quase ninguém escolhia ir por ali, mas aquele era o caminho preferido da nossa mãe. Voltávamos do rio. O meu irmão do lado direito e eu do esquerdo, a nossa mãe no meio. A nossa mãe orgulhava-se de nós como não se orgulhava de mais nada na vida.

A água do rio estava fria apesar de o verão ir avançado. Nas partes mais acidentadas do leito a água ficava branca e borbulhava ruidosamente por causa da força da corrente. As bolhas de ar eram tão grandes que parecia possível atravessar o rio de bolha em bolha. Se o fizéssemos, chegaríamos em pouco tempo à aldeia que avistávamos na outra margem. De carro levávamos horas. O nosso carro era velho e as estradas ruins. Era raro sairmos. Tudo se tornava demasiado longe.

A nossa mãe estendia a minha toalha e a do meu irmão em cima da laje e punha a cesta do lanche à sombra do pinheiro-manso. As nossas toalhas eram iguais exceto nas cores. A minha era laranja e a do meu irmão azul. Tinham ambas riscas brancas. A nossa mãe comprava-nos roupas e brinquedos iguais ou semelhantes. Eu era um bocadinho mais alto do que o meu irmão e os pelos começavam a crescer-me nos sítios mais escondidos do corpo. Tirando isso, parecia não haver grande diferença entre nós.

A laje pouco maior era do que os nossos corpos franzinos deitados ao sol, lado a lado. Trazíamos sempre um banco de madeira para a nossa mãe se sentar à sombra do pinheiro. Nunca fazia nada. Olhava para o rio e para as árvores, para o céu e para a aldeia na outra margem, como se visse tudo pela primeira vez. A nossa mãe não gostava de conversar. Às vezes cantava.

Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. O canto da nossa mãe abafava o barulho da terra dura a ser esmagada pelas solas de cabedal das nossas sandálias. Na berma cresciam rosinhas selvagens. Outras vezes margaridas. Mas havia sempre muitas pedras e giestas.

Assim que nos abeirávamos do rio, eu e o meu irmão desembaraçávamo-nos das sandálias, das camisetas e dos calções e corríamos para a água. Os nossos pés pequenos pisavam o caminho cheio de calhaus e cardos secos como se fosse um caminho muito liso. Éramos leves demais para que os calhaus e cardos secos nos magoassem.

Podíamos experimentar a água se nos molhássemos só até os joelhos. Para irmos ao banho tínhamos de esperar que a digestão se fizesse. Nunca desobedecíamos. Como almoçávamos ao meio-dia tínhamos de esperar até as três horas. Com os pés enfiados no fundo lodoso, as pernas uns espetos, experimentávamos a água e gritávamos o mais alto que podíamos, hoje a água está gelada, está mesmo gelada, oh, hoje é o dia em que a água está mais gelada. Dizíamos isso todos os dias.

Os nossos gritos furavam as copas das árvores e subiam até as nuvens onde ficavam pendurados a gritar-nos de volta. A nossa mãe dizia-nos que era o eco. Nós imaginávamos que o eco era mais um dos bichos que nunca víramos, mas que vivia no meio dos montes que sitiavam o rio. Tal como os lobos ou as serpentes, o eco também não se deixava ver. Mas fazia-se ouvir. Chegava mesmo a rir-se conosco. Só que de forma mais desmanchada.

Também costumávamos gritar, pai, já chegamos ao rio, ou então, vamos lançar um barco, pai. Acreditávamos que o eco podia fazer com que estes recados chegassem ao nosso pai.

O nosso pai era técnico na barragem e saía todos os dias de manhã cedo com uma marmita. Voltava ao fim do dia com a testa muito enrugada como se tivesse passado o dia a ver coisas incompreensíveis. Sentava-se na melhor cadeira que havia em nossa casa e a nossa mãe descalçava-o e servia-lhe um copo de vinho.

Eu e o meu irmão gostávamos de inventar histórias sobre a barragem. O nosso pai era sempre o herói e os bandidos terríficos que atacavam a barragem eram sempre vencidos por ele. Tínhamos a certeza de que o nosso pai escondia uma arma na marmita. Inventamos várias maneiras de chegar a essa arma, mas nunca nos atrevemos a executar nenhum dos planos. Não sabíamos se o que nos assustava mais era o manuseio da arma ou a possibilidade de ela não existir.

O rio ia dar à barragem e não havia trajeto mais rápido até lá. No entanto, não era um caminho que alguém pudesse utilizar. O nosso pai tinha de dar muitas voltas de carro pela estrada da serra para ir e vir todos os dias. Mas o rio ia ter diretamente com ele e nós ficávamos maravilhados a olhar na direção em que a água corria. Mesmo depois de se esconder de nós, no sítio onde o rio fazia uma curva, sabíamos que a água não parava até chegar à barragem. Eu e o meu irmão queríamos ir até aquela curva e depois até a outra e a outra, queríamos ir além de todas as curvas para ver para onde ia aquela água toda, para ver a barragem e a água presa. Mas a nossamãe nunca saía dali. Passava a tarde sentada no banco de madeira e nós tínhamos de ficar por perto. Não estávamos autorizados a escapar-lhe do alcance dos olhos.

Enquanto esperávamos pelo final da digestão, entretínhamo-nos a construir barcos que lançávamos à água para que o rio os levasse até o nosso pai. Fazíamos desenhos ou escrevíamos algumas frases que escondíamos dentro deles. Lançamos um barco, pai, gritávamos, lançamos mais um barco. Mas o nosso pai nunca recebeu nenhum dos barcos nem nunca sequer ouviu o eco repetir os nossos gritos. O eco e os barcos desfazem-se ou encalham antes de chegarem ao destino, dizia-nos o nosso pai quando chegava à casa. Parecia-nos impossível que fosse sempre assim. Deitados na cama, antes de adormecer, culpávamos os bandidos terríficos que atacavam a barragem pelo desaparecimento dos nossos barcos. E no dia seguinte tornávamos a fazer barcos e a gritar, lançamos mais um barco, pai.

Os nossos peitos enchiam-se e esvaziavam-se quando gritávamos mas, com ar ou sem ar, as costelas eram sempre visíveis. Os nossos corpos ainda não se tinham abalançado a crescer. Não havia maneira de acontecer o pulo de que a nossa mãe falava. Não tarda nada e dão um pulo, dizia, não tarda nada e tenho aqui dois homens. Mas os nossos corpos pareciam surdos e continuavam pequenos.

Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. Em certas partes, o carreiro estreitava tanto ou as curvas eram tão apertadas que deixávamos de ver o caminho. Como já o sabíamos decor nada nos impedia de continuar. Eu do lado esquerdo, a nossa mãe ao meio e o meu irmão do lado direito. Suficientemente afastados para não nos tocarmos. Era mais fácil caminhar assim, com espaço entre nós.

Dispensaríamos o almoço de boa vontade, mas se não comêssemos não íamos ao rio. A nossa mãe usava o louro na comida como as outras mulheres usam o sal. O nosso pai dizia, desanimado, até nos ovos, mulher, até nos ovos pões louro. Mas a nossa mãe continuava a fritar a folha de louro no azeite antes de abrir os ovos na borda do fogão de ferro preto. Os ovos, mais do que o uso excessivo do louro, intrigavam-me muito. A rodela amarela sempre centrada, a casca frágil que lhes servia de embrulho, a clara transparente que ficava branca ao lume. Era tudo inexplicável. Como um verdadeiro mistério. Daqueles que ninguém tem interesse em desvendar. 

Passava muito tempo a observar as galinhas. Tentava descobrir-lhes nas cabeças, especialmente nos olhos, o conhecimento da geometria, ainda que na altura não conhecesse a palavra. Indiferentes, as galinhas continuavam a bicar o que havia para bicar no quinteiro, fazendo gestos empertigados com os pescoços. Não lhes levava a mal a indiferença por as considerar infinitamente mais sábias do que eu. Além de lhes admirar os conhecimentos de geometria evidenciados na feitura dos ovos, admirava-lhes a dignidade com que se deixavam apanhar para a matança dos domingos. As galinhas agitavam-se no quinteiro enquanto as mãos da nossa mãe perseguiam a escolhida. Nunca percebi como a nossa mãe escolhia de entre todas as galinhas a que seria sacrificada. Também nunca lhe perguntei. Logo que a escolhida era agarrada, fazia-se um silêncio esquisito. A nossa mãe levava a escolhida presa pelas asas, ao pendurol. A escolhida raramente gritava ou se debatia.

Ficávamos a odiar a nossa mãe durante um tempo. Ainda não sabíamos que a violência maior não é a que acontece depois da escolha. Nem é sequer a própria escolha. A violência maior acontece antes, muito antes, e é essa que torna a escolha possível ou necessária. Ficávamos a odiar a nossa mãe por uns instantes. Não mais do que uns instantes. Ainda sentíamos tudo de forma provisória.

Mais tarde, quando aprendi geometria na escola, não gostei porque era tudo muito abstrato. A física era mais aplicada, mas também não me interessou. Desagradava-me especialmente o problema do plano inclinado. Desagradava-me a garantia de que um corpo pesado colocado numa superfície inclinada move-se indefinidamente com movimento continua-mente acelerado. Desagradava-me mais ainda a explicação de que os corpos pesados têm tendência para mover-se para o centro da Terra e só esforçadamente se movem para cima. A verdade é que nunca gostei da escola. Nunca aceitei que tudo possa, deva ou tenha de ser explicado. Explicado e transmitido.

Às três horas corríamos para a água. O corpo do meu irmão tornava-se indispensável para as minhas brincadeiras. Assim como o meu para as dele. Gostávamos muito de pregar rasteiras um ao outro. Quanto mais tortos caíssemos, melhor. Às vezes batíamos nas pedras do fundo do rio e aleijávamo-nos. Também gostávamos de fazer corridas. Nenhum de nós era bom nadador, mas queríamos acreditar que sim. Perguntávamos à nossa mãe qual dos dois nadava melhor. Nadam os dois bem, era a resposta que tínhamos sempre. Acontecia o mesmo quando fazíamos desenhos e queríamos saber qual era o mais bonito. Gosto tanto de um quanto do outro, são ambos muito bonitos. Por mais que insistíssemos, não recebíamos uma resposta diferente.

A meio do rio, onde já não tínhamos pé, havia um tronco de árvore que ficara preso entre as pedras. Era uma espécie de meta inatingível, ali tão perto. Estávamos proibidos de nos aventurarmos até lá. Por causa das correntes, dissera-nos o nosso pai. Só quando ficávamos com a pele dos dedos engelhada, os lábios roxos de frio e sem conseguirmos parar de tremer é que regressávamos às toalhas estendidas sobre a laje. Ficávamos quietos a sentir o oco pulsante do peito a aquecer entre o quente do ar e o quente da pedra. Logo que nos secávamos íamos de novo para a água. Naquelas tardes de verão o tempo demorava mais a acabar. E isso sabia bem.

Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. Eu levava a cesta do lanche, que era mais pesada, e o meu irmão levava o pequeno banco de madeira. Às vezes o meu irmão atrasava o passo, sem dar conta. A nossa mãe chamava-o à atenção e ficávamos de novo os três lado a lado.

Um carro é um corpo pesado. O Opel Kapitän do doutor era indubitavelmente um corpo pesado. Eu e o meu irmão gostávamos mais daquele Opel Kapitän branco do que de todos os carros que já tínhamos visto. Mesmo contando com os dos jornais e revistas. Não havia miúdo que não se abeirasse do Opel Kapitän quando o doutor o deixava na rua. Admirávamos-lhe os cromados resplandecentes e sustínhamos a respiração para não os embaciar. Passávamos os dedos pela carroçaria. Ao de leve, com medo de a riscar. Espreitávamos para o interior, apreciávamos o volante grande e fino e o tablier que tinha três rodelas cromadas com números e sinais com aspecto de gerirem matérias complexas. Os bancos eram corridos e as costuras na napa faziam riscas muito certinhas. Os faróis eram redondos e hipnotizantes. Era um modelo de 1959, mas estava tão estimado que parecia acabado de comprar.

O motor do Opel Kapitän fazia um rugido que todos reconhecíamos. Logo que o doutor dava à chave, o característico rugir do Opel Kapitän fazia ouvir-se a léguas de distância. Mas naquele dia, quando, ao dobrarmos uma das curvas apertadas do atalho, avistamos o Opel Kapitän ocupando toda a largura do caminho, não havia ninguém ao volante nem dentro do carro. Nem ninguém por perto. O Opel Kapitän estava imponentemente sozinho. E, no entanto, moveu-se. Sem rugido. Nem um clique sequer. O Opel Kapitän moveu-se e o corpo pesado que era avançou sobre nós.

Naquele dia o doutor tinha sido chamado para acudir ao nosso vizinho que tinha acordado sem se lembrar de onde estava nem quem era. Enquanto o doutor procurava a origem do mal do nosso vizinho, o Opel Kapitän avançava inexplicavelmente sobre nós. Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. Em certas partes, o carreiro estreitava tanto ou as curvas eram tão apertadas que deixávamos de ver o caminho. Como já o sabíamos de cor nada nos impedia de continuar. Eu do lado esquerdo, a nossa mãe ao meio e o meu irmão do lado direito. Suficientemente afastados para não nos tocarmos. Era mais fácil caminhar assim, com espaço entre nós.

A nossa mãe também era um corpo pesado. Mesmo eu e o meu irmão, apesar de muito leves, éramos corpos pesados. Só esforçadamente conseguíamos afastar-nos do centro da Terra e caminhar para cima. Tanto mais esforçadamente quanto mais cansados estivéssemos. Quando o Opel Kapitän começou inexplicavelmente a deslizar pelo atalho, eu e o meu irmão estávamos muito cansados por causa da subida e das brincadeiras no rio. Para além disso, ficamos paralisados por vermos que o nosso adorado Opel Kapitän tinha livremente escolhido vir ter conosco. Movendo-se indefinidamente, em movimento continuamente acelerado. Seria preciso um esforço inumano para que eu e o meu irmão nos desviássemos do Opel Kapitän. Mas nem eu nem o meu irmão estávamos preparados para esforços inumanos.

A nossa mãe estava. A nossa mãe ao centro, o meu irmão do lado direito e eu do esquerdo, ocupando todo o caminho. E o Opel Kapitän, o belo Opel Kapitän, animado por uma vontade própria, ocupando também todo o caminho, à nossa frente em sentido contrário. Perto. Cada vez mais perto. Veloz. Cada vez mais veloz.

Quando a nossa mãe me empurrou para a berma, não sei se me desequilibrei ou se foi o corpo dela sobre o meu que me fez cair. A nossa mãe só teve tempo de me atirar para a berma e de proteger o meu corpo com o seu. Mesmo assim, não fiquei suficientemente protegido. Conseguia ver o meu irmão de pé, no meio da estrada, o banco de madeira na mão, de camiseta azul e sandálias castanhas, com os calções tufados que ambos detestávamos, o meu irmão, pouco mais alto do que os cromados luzidios do Opel Kapi-tän. O meu irmão a olhar o Opel Ka-pitän de frente.

Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. O canto da nossa mãe abafava o barulho da terra dura a ser esmagada pelas solas de cabedal das nossas sandálias. Na berma cresciam rosinhas selvagens. Outras vezes margaridas. Mas havia sempre muitas pedras e giestas.

O Opel Kapitän parou de repente sem ter tocado no meu irmão. Parou simplesmente. Sem barulho de travões nem nada. Como se se tivesse esquecido de como as coisas são. Ou como se o meu irmão o tivesse feito parar com uma espécie de hipnotismo dirigido a máquinas. O belo Opel Kapitän parado pelos olhos do meu irmão que continuou de pé, no meio da estrada, com o banco de madeira na mão, de camiseta azul e sandálias castanhas, com os calções tufados que ambos detestávamos. O corpo da nossa mãe, na berma, sobre o meu.

 Levantamo-nos e a nossa mãe aproximou-se do meu irmão, pegou no banco de madeira, estendeu-lhe a mão. Quase reverentemente. O meu irmão deixou-se retirar da frente do carro. Eu esperava na berma. Contornamos o carro e continuamos a subir. Faltava pouco para chegarmos à casa.

Nunca falamos sobre o que aconteceu naquele dia ao voltarmos do rio, subindo o atalho de sempre. Continuamos a comportar-nos como se nada tivesse acontecido. Mas já era tudo diferente.

 Voltávamos do rio e subíamos pelo atalho de sempre. Era pouco mais do que um carreiro. Muito íngreme. A terra dura e desbotada. Quase ninguém escolhia ir por ali, mas aquele era o caminho preferido da nossa mãe. Voltávamos do rio. O meu irmão do lado direito e eu do esquerdo, a nossa mãe no meio. A nossa mãe orgulhava-se de nós como não se orgulhava de mais nada na vida.

Passaram-se muitos anos. Talvez não tenha acontecido tudo exatamente como contei. Mas tenho a certeza de que o dia estava a chegar ao fim. E que a água do rio era doce. 

http://revistapiaui.estadao.com.br/edicao-72/ficcao/os-anjos-por-dentro

Literatura fordista Um autor que escreve de tudo, menos biografia de político por Laís Coelho

Literatura fordista

Um autor que escreve de tudo, menos biografia de político

por Laís Coelho

Em julho de 1992, o paulista Ryoki Inoue, um descendente de japonês que não mede mais de 1,60 metro de altura, recebeu um telefonema desafiador. “O Pablo Escobar fugiu”, berrou do outro lado da linha o responsável pelo escritório da editora Gibo International. “Duvido que você consiga escrever um livro sobre isso antes que os americanos o encontrem.” O sansei não hesitou e, sem tirar o cachimbo dos lábios, aceitou. “Então vamos apostar uma caixa de uísque.”

Nascido em Campos do Jordão em 1946, filho de dois tuberculosos, Inoue não sabia nada sobre as estratégias da inteligência militar. Tampouco tinha informantes no cartel de Medellín, mas pressentia que o serviço secreto dos Estados Unidos e os 4 mil homens mobilizadospelo governo colombiano para encontrar o über traficante demorariam ao menos uma semana para realizar a tarefa. A perspectiva de uma dúzia de garrafas de uísquevalia o esforço, avaliou o autor.

No mesmo dia, o homem que até então sobrevivia das cirurgias torácicas que realizava na rede pública de São Paulo se apresentou na pequena casa que abrigava a editora e solicitou de forma expressa que fosse trancado lá dentro – sozinho. Queria apenas um bom computador e duas refeições por dia.

“Só voltei a ver a luz do sol sete dias mais tarde”, lembrou Inoue, rindo, durante um almoço em julho. “A editora ficou com as 200 páginas que escrevi e, em uma semana, rodou os 3 mil exemplares da primeira edição de Onde está Pablo Escobar?. Vendi 400 exemplares só no lançamento, um dos melhores que já fiz.” Nem precisava tanta pressa: o traficante só foi pego mais de um ano depois.

Ryoki Inoue é notório pela rapidez com que escreve. Não negocia com a própria inspiração – bloqueio de autor é para os fracos. Quando é preciso escrever, ele senta e digita sem tergiversar. Em 26 anos, publicou nada menos que 1 106 livros – que vendem, segundo ele, 15 milhões de exemplares por ano. Seu milésimo centésimo sétimo volume – as memórias eróticas de um velho tarado – está a caminho.

trajetória literária de Inoue começouem 1986 com um enxuto faroeste. Os Colts de McLee, romance escrito integralmente à mão em trinta dias para a editora Monterrey, rendeu-lhe minguados 15 dólares, mas lhe abriu os portões da literatura nacional. O livro fez sucesso em bancas de jornal e tempos depois valeu ao autor uma proposta da Editora Abril. “Eles me procuraram para eu escrever cinquenta originais de faroeste em dois meses. Me pagariam 50 dólares por original, três vezes mais do que a Monterrey”, contou. “Fechei o contrato na hora.”

Assim nasceu a maior linha de produção literária do mundo, de acordo com o Guinness Book, o livro dos recordes. Com o contrato em mãos e o dever de produzir quase um livro por dia útil, Inoue mudou-se temporariamente com a mulher e os quatro filhos para a casa do pai em Piúma, no Espírito Santo. Na divisão de tarefas que arquitetou para honrar o compromisso, sobrou para toda a família. Sua mulher, a artista plástica Nicole Kirsteller, fazia as capas. Seu pai, um japonês poliglota, ficou responsável pela ambientação histórica dos romances. Couberam-lhe tarefas como localizar o mapa do Arkansas na Guerra de Secessão, traçar rotas de possíveis caminhos de diligências ou calcular o tempo gasto para uma carta cruzar os Estados Unidos a cavalo.

Inoue era quem criava os personagens fictícios, batizados a partir de uma lista de nomes e sobrenomes. Depois de muito tempo lutando contra a repetição, ele concluiu que o melhor a fazer era se entregar a ela. A partir de um determinado momento de sua obra – que ele, compreensivelmente, já não sabe dizer quando foi –, todos os barmen passaram a se chamar Larry, todos os xerifes viraram Masterson e todas as prostitutas latinas, Dolores. Mas o autor faz questão de frisar que só mantinha os nomes. “Os personagens eram diferentes.”

Os artifícios de Inoue para manter sua produtividade espantam seus próximos. Sua mulher até hoje se choca ao lembrar como ele conseguia conversar sobre as compras do mês ou as contas a pagar enquanto digitava os livros. “Ele fazia isso sem perder o fio da meada e sem errar”, disse ela, afagando um dos cinco cães que vigiam o sítio em que vivem em São José dos Campos. “Parecia possuído.” Na condição de ex-médico, Inoue prefere uma explicação mais científica. “Japonês consegue trabalhar com as duas metades do cérebro ao mesmo tempo”, justificou-se. “Não tem nada de possessão.”

ropagada pelo Guinness Book, a fama de Inoue chegou ao estrangeiro. Nos anos 90, o diárioThe Wall Street Journal mandou seu correspondente na América Latina passar um dia ao lado do escritor industrial e vê-lo produzir um livro de cabo a rabo. “Ele produz capítulos inteiros durante suas idas ao banheiro”, relatou o jornalista Matthew Moffett, após ficar das 23h às 5h30 ao lado de Inoue. Na ocasião, o brasileiro pariu Sequestro Fast-Food, romance de 210 páginas que acabou publicado pelo jornal americano e cujo protagonista foi baseado no repórter.

A experiência mostrou a Inoue um novo jeito de faturar com sua literatura. “No cativeiro, o protagonista recebia comida do McDonald’s, então o Matt Moffett conseguiu que a rede de lanchonetes comprasse uma quota de patrocínio”, contou o autor. “O futuro é esse: merchandising literário.”

Enquanto não encontra um empresário que o ajude a explorar esse filão, Inoue segue experimentando um gênero que ele descobriu recentemente: as autobiografias que escreve comoghost-writer. “Nos últimos dois anos, foram cinquenta”, gargalhou. “Cobrei aproximadamente 20 mil reais cada uma. É um troço que dá dinheiro, viu?”

Mas nem por um valor quatro vezes maior do que o de sua tabela, Inoue topou embarcar em duas produções que lhe propuseram recentemente: biografar o senador Mão Santa e o deputado federal Ronaldo Caiado. “O que eu faço ou é verdade ou é ficção”, justificou o escritor. “Nunca mentira.” 

http://revistapiaui.estadao.com.br/edicao-72/esquina/literatura-fordista

For the Love of Jane, and All Her Creations - By BARBARA STEWART

For the Love of Jane, and All Her Creations

By BARBARA STEWART

YOU want to talk about Jane?" said Barbara Crafton, an Episcopal priest and writer from Metuchen. She could have been referring to an admired elder sister. But the Jane she means is Jane Austen, dead nearly 200 years.

The fans of Jane Austen, unlike those of, say, Ernest Hemingway or Anthony Trollope or the Beastie Boys, call her by her given name. Janeites know they are taking liberties. In Jane Austen's day, the late 1700's and early 1800's, a lady's given name was used only by her family and very close friends. Jane Austen's fans consider themselves intimates -- of Jane Austen and of her characters, who they know in their heads are fictional and in their hearts are real.

Thus, the Jane Austen Society of North America, founded 20 years ago by J. David Grey, a high school English teacher who lived in Spring Lake, consists largely of people who aren't professors or academics, but simply fans. The first little gathering of Janeites has grown to a society of 2,800 across the continent. Mr. Grey, who died at 57 in 1993, was not strictly an academic but an amateur in the finest sense of the word, a man who loved Austen's works simply for themselves.

The society he founded has no New Jersey chapter per se, and members from the state attend meetings mostly in New York or Philadelphia. But that doesn't make them any less devoted.

This has been a good year for Janeites. The movie "Persuasion" received great reviews, as did "Clueless," a ditsy up-to-date rewrite of "Emma" populated by Beverly Hills teen-agers with cellular phones and slick cars. "Sense and Sensibility," starring Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, is to open in December, and the BBC is producing a new version of "Pride and Prejudice."

Jane Austen, who died before she was 40, completed six novels, all about love and marriage. The heroines are smart young women. The other characters are ladies and gentlemen, including buffoons, pretentious people and the Oxford version of beer-swigging college guys. The language is elegant. The wit is arch and crackling, but not vicious.

Love, hate, irritation, longing, the chasing of attractive men are conveyed in beautifully formed sentences, full of implication. There's no hitting, no kissing. There's lots of concern about money, and appreciation for rolling green lawns and hedged-in gardens and parlors with pianofortes. The big historic events -- the Napoleonic Wars, the slave trade, Dickensian poverty -- do not brush the novels' surface. The novels, all of them, end with appropriate marriages. The plots are getting the young women there.

"She's coming back," said Natalie Fine, 73, an Austen Society member who lives in a retirement home in Monroe Township. "She talks about three or four ordinary families in a village. It's the people; it's the words. It doesn't need sex or violence."

Certainly, many writers have fan clubs, or literary societies. But Janeites do it with a single-minded ardor the other societies lack.

Ms. Crafton joined the Jane Austen Society of North America after seeing a T-shirt on a parishioner: "I'd rather be reading Jane Austen." She, like 400 others, travels annually to a distant city to spend four days talking, listening, watching plays and movies about, eating the food of, wearing the ball dresses and dancing the dances of Jane Austen and the 18th century. If the characters in "Mansfield Park" ate roast duck for breakfast, so do the Janeites. They are willing to listen to a lecturer read from a list the price of the Austen bed linen.

What Ms. Crafton likes, she says, is the wit of women. Of women on the page and at the banquet table.

"The company of women is so droll," she said. "We get so satiric when we get going. That's what reading her is like: being with great women. Like a great, great lunch. Life is so tawdry and rude and coarse, and this is so civilized."

The Janeites are homemakers, English teachers, proofreaders, librarians, the occasional lawyer or public relations executive. Most are women -- normal women, by all accounts, except when it comes to the novels. One reads a bit of an Austen novel each night before going to sleep, like a devout Christian with the Bible. Another knit herself a sweater with the names of the novels and characters, making sure she would sit on "Pride and Prejudice." The Janeites look forward to newsletters on the health of the cats at the old Austen house in Chawton, England.

"It's like a big family reunion," said Florence Spencer, 68, of Monroe Township, who traveled with Mrs. Fine recently to join 400 others at an Austen convention in Madison, Wis. "There's something about her that the people who like her are people you like."

AT one convention, she said, a speaker, referring to characters in "Sense and Sensibility," announced, "I don't think Elinor should have married Edmund," and 150 heads in the room nodded. "The next hour we spent pairing up people who should have married." People who exist, of course, only on the pages of Austen's novels and in the minds of her fans.

"You know these people," Ms. Fine said. "You meet them in your everyday life. You meet somebody and say, 'That's Emma's father' or 'That's Anne Elliot.' "

That is one reason some academics take a dim view of Janeites, said Claudia Johnson, a Princeton University professor who likes them. Some academics think Janeites are soppy, sloppy readers who reduce proper, elevated literary criticism to literary gossip about fictional characters. Furthermore, they regard reading as sociable, not private, as proper academics do.

"To them she's a living presence, not a dry academic subject," Ms. Johnson said. "But they can be very knowledgeable readers with an incredible eye for details."

And even academics seem to melt a bit in the face of some Austen heroines. "Elizabeth Bennet," said A. Walton Litz, a Princeton University English professor and author of a book on Austen, "is as free a spirit as ever walked into a novel. She is about as attractive a character as ever appeared."

Hollywood, having left Edith Wharton since "The Age of Innocence," will surely drop Jane Austen, too. When that happens, her real fans, the ones who feel they know Anne Elliot of "Persuasion" as well as their college roommates, will still be getting together for cream teas, debate on the type of silk ribbon Emma once bought at the village store, and recreating, for a few emphemeral hours, a world of order, courtesy and understated loyalties and love.

"She shows," Ms. Johnson said, "that adventure is very interior. You don't have to go out and travel. You simply have to be alert to your own life."

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/nyregion/books-for-the-love-of-jane-and-all-her-creations.html?pagewanted=print

It Takes All Kinds; Jane Austen: The Cool Artist - By Charles McGrath

It Takes All Kinds; Jane Austen: The Cool Artist

By Charles McGrath

There are only two known likenesses of Jane Austen, both by her older sister, Cassandra. In one her back is turned, so that we mostly see her bonnet; in the other she is poker-faced and looking askance. ''Of events her life was singularly barren,'' her nephew claimed, and her letters, or those that her family didn't burn, reveal almost nothing of the person who wrote them. Yet the evidence suggests that Austen's life was full of inner drama. She experienced maternal rejection and sibling rivalry; she was unhappy in love and had trouble with relationships; she suffered from writer's block and bouts of depression. And her novels powerfully suggest both a world and a personality that now seems remarkably familiar. Under that bonnet and behind those vacant hazel eyes there burns the first modern sensibility.

It's a sensibility, for one thing, that's fraught with our kind of financial anxiety. Unlike Defoe or Dickens, Austen isn't concerned with extremes of wealth or poverty. What interests her is the way that money underpins the social fabric of a middle class that is otherwise precariously unstable. Money for Austen is both necessary and vulgar, and for that reason it's also sexy. Austen's other great insight is that in such a highly wrought society, the self is necessarily self-conscious and provisional. In the novelists she grew up on, Fielding and Richardson, character is fate: you are who you were born to be. In Austen, who you are is a role you play. (Discomfort with this recognition may account for why, in Austen's oddest and least popular novel, ''Mansfield Park,'' Fanny Price gets so worked up over the issue of amateur theatricals; it's more playacting than she can handle.) Austen's characters, even the most clearheaded and authentic, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood, are always acting, saying less or other than they mean; and in such a treacherous arena, where a single word or gesture can mean everything or nothing at all, it's not just poor Emma Woodhouse but apparently sensible people like Anne Elliot who are often clueless.

Austen's world (which is to say our world) would be unendurable if she weren't so funny about it, and this, of course, is her most essential invention of all -- her encompassing irony. It's a matter not just of shrewd social observation but also of something brand-new, an ability to stand apart from life even as it's being lived, and a quicksilver narrative technique that puts us almost inside a character's head and then in an instant, with just a word sometimes, darts away to someplace else. Of herself, Austen gives away nothing directly; she's everywhere and nowhere. She was the original master of what we now call ''cool.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/17/magazine/it-takes-all-kinds-jane-austen-the-cool-artist.html?pagewanted=print

A World Without End For Fans of Jane Austen By PAMELA LICALZI O'CONNELL

A World Without End For Fans of Jane Austen

By PAMELA LICALZI O'CONNELL

     IT is universally acknowledged that Jane Austen wrote too little. For years, publishers have sought to capitalize on the craving for more Austen prose with a steady stream of sequels to her mere six completed novels. Many of these ''continuations,'' unsurprisingly, have been found wanting by Austen devotees and literary critics alike.

     Now, with a grass-roots publishing platform available, Janeites, as fans of the English novelist are known, have taken to the Web to extend the author's oeuvre themselves, creating online libraries of hundreds of stories inspired by her novels.

     These stories are an example of a widespread Web phenomenon known as fan fiction, or fanfic, creative writing that uses existing characters. Most such fiction grows out of science-fiction television shows (''Star Trek'' stories alone number in the tens of thousands). But Austen's works represents the only classic literature to inspire a sizable collection of online fan fiction, said Karen Nicholas, who maintains a comprehensive Web site on the topic (members.aol .com/ksnicholas/fanfic/index.html).

     The two largest libraries of Austen fan fiction can be found at Austen.com (austen .com) and The Republic of Pemberley (www.pemberley.com), noncommercial sites devoted to all things Jane.

     Several explanations have been offered as to why Austen, who died in Winchester, England, in 1817 at age 41, has inspired such an explosion of fan writing. Ann Haker, the founder of Austen.com and a structural engineer in Minneapolis, points foremost to the dearth of Austen prose.

     ''Fanfic writers make no claims to be able to reach the literary heights of Miss Austen,'' she said. ''But we feel the need to expand on the world, the characters and the stories, that she created. There just is not enough of Jane Austen's own words to read, so we write our own.''

     Many fanfic authors also cite Austen's restrained style and tendency to leave out critical scenes (in ''Pride and Prejudice,'' Darcy's second marriage proposal to Elizabeth Bennett is not described, for example) as spurs to their own creativity.

     ''The implicit nature of Austen's writing collides with our modern sensibilities and desires for the explicit,'' Ms. Haker said. ''As Jane Austen failed to write of these things, we feel compelled to do so in her place.''

     Laurie Kaplan, a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and editor of Persuasions, an academic journal published by the Jane Austen Society of North America (www.jasna.org/pol01/index.html), is no fan of Austen sequels, published or otherwise. Yet she sees how they could naturally arise from what she terms Austen's ''non-endings.''

     ''Her summaries at the end of her novels are never as neatly packaged as those of other authors of that time,'' Professor Kaplan said. ''There's always change and trouble hinted at -- it's almost satiric -- and the story isn't projected very far into the future. It makes the reader want to push it further.''

     Most fanfic authors would probably agree with Ann Rydberg, a librarian in Orebro, Sweden, and a prolific fanfic writer, that the sheer volume of Austen fan fiction is but more ''proof of the rich material she left her readers to build imaginings on.''

     The two Austen Web sites represent two schools of fan fiction. The Republic of Pemberley's stories try to mimic more closely Austen's style with plots that remain ''in period,'' or true to Regency-era England. They range from straightforward sequels and ''missing scenes'' (those that readers wish had been in the novels) to retellings from different characters' points of view and stories that imitate Austen's style without being a sequel to, or a completion of, any specific original.

     Austen.com, however, allows more fanciful interpretations, like ''crossover'' stories in which Austen characters mix with those from other novels or even modern television characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A recent story inspired by ''Pride and Prejudice,'' for example, was set in the antebellum South. ''That was our first black Lizzie!'' Ms. Haker sighed, happily.

     Stories based on ''Pride and Prejudice'' dominate both sites, and not just because it is arguably Austen's best-loved work. Many fanfic authors date their interest in writing Austen-inspired stories to the 1996 broadcast in the United States of a BBC adaptation of that novel, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

     ''That broadcast brought a lot of obsessives out of the woodwork,'' said Myretta Robens, a founder of The Republic of Pemberley and the technology and operations editor at Harvard Business School Publishing in Boston.

     Carolyn Esau, an author of more than 20 fanfic stories and a secretary for a chemistry journal published by the University of Virginia, conceded that she found herself wishing she could see her dialogue acted out by Mr. Firth and Ms. Ehle. ''I often think, 'If only I could have seen this in the screenplay,' '' she said.

     Like most of her fellow fanfic authors, Ms. Esau limits her creative writing to Austen fan fiction and has few pretentions that her stories will find a wider audience, much less pique the interest of a commercial publisher. In a way, she said, posting her stories at Pemberley was like publishing them. ''It's exposing yourself to a lot of people,'' she said, ''since there's a lot of lurkers,'' people who read the fan fiction but post no comments on it.

     While the audience for both sites is small in overall Net terms, it remains steady. Austen.com draws nearly 30,000 page views a week, and about 25 percent of those represent people looking at the board where the fanfic stories are posted, Ms. Haker said. The Republic of Pemberley has a larger audience, with one million page views of its fan-fiction area each year, Ms. Robinson said.

     Most fanfic authors are women, and in the case of Austen fanfic, nearly all are. Ms. Robinson suggested that was because ''most fan fiction is romantic.''

     ''The authors are drawn to the relationship aspect,'' she continued. ''Also, Austen didn't write scenes for men -- we don't ever get Darcy's point of view, for example -- so perhaps that has something to do with it.''

     Bill Friesema, a computer programmer in Oak Park, Ill., is one of a handful of men contributing to Austen.com. ''Austen's examination of the mating dance may have led some males to falsely conclude that she is a romance novelist and so want nothing to do with her,'' he said via e-mail.   ''Or perhaps men are intimidated to join an activity so heavily dominated by women, although I have never found that to be a particular deterrent.''

     Diana Birchalls may be the only Austen fanfic writer to have her work published. Ms. Birchalls, who evaluates novels for the Warner Brothers film studio from her home in Santa Monica, Calif., began posting her sequel to ''Emma,'' entitled ''In Defense of Mrs. Elton,'' to an academic-oriented Internet mailing list devoted to Austen. It was eventually published by the Jane Austen Society for distribution at one of its conferences, and Ms. Birchalls is planning a sequel to the sequel.

     Ms. Birchalls characterizes the fan fiction at the decidely nonacademic Austen.com and Republic of Pemberley as ''short romantic fiction -- fun to do, a pasttime,'' and that is a fair assessment of most of the stories. Too many refer to Darcy, incongruously, as Fitzwilliam and overuse words thought to lend Regency flavor, like ''exceedingly'' (as in ''I am exceedingly happy to see you here, Fitzwilliam''). And the stories tend toward the overly romantic, a complaint often leveled at many of the published sequels.

     Yet some of the more serious stories are enjoyable for their efforts to think through missing scenes and get period details just right.

     Other stories introduce characters who prove so popular that they begin appearing in stories by other fanfic writers. Some authors play intellectual games, incorporating dialogue from the actual novels, or disguise existing Austen characters and challenge readers to identify them.

     Where some might see hubris in any attempt to mimic Austen, Ms. Robinson of The Republic of Pemberley, argues that the best fan fiction is very conscious of Austen.

     ''It doesn't just use her as a vehicle,'' Ms. Robinson said, ''but pays homage to her work.''

     Whether hubris or homage, the wealth of fanfic may well prove, in Ms. Rydberg's words, that ''Austen's novels can take any amount of bungling amateurism and still remain unsoiled, remain the exquisite and well-polished bits of ivory she once presented us.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/13/technology/a-world-without-end-for-fans-of-jane-austen.html?pagewanted=print

Pretty Words, Jane; Would That You Were Too - By CHARLES McGRATH

Pretty Words, Jane; Would That You Were Too

By CHARLES McGRATH

NOBODY knows for sure what Jane Austen looked like, which is causing some of her admirers a degree of anxiety these days. Was she attractive or not? What if, to put it bluntly, she became a writer in part because she didn’t have the looks to land a husband along the lines of a Mr. Darcy or a Mr. Knightley?

There is no definitive portrait. Scholars think that a small pencil-and-watercolor sketch by her older sister, Cassandra, now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, is a fairly trustworthy likeness, though a niece, Anna, said that the Cassandra sketch was “hideously unlike” her aunt. It shows a rather plain woman on the wrong side of 30 in a spinsterish cap, with what may even be a hint of a scowl.

The image is sufficiently homely that Wordsworth Editions, a British publisher, recently decided to Photoshop it, removing the frumpy headgear and giving Jane some hair extensions and a bit of blush in her cheeks. This airbrushed version (inspired perhaps by “Becoming Jane,” the new biopic starring beautiful, bosomy Anne Hathaway, showing in Britain this month and scheduled for release in the United States in August) will appear on the cover of a re-issue of a memoir of Austen by her nephew.

Austen “wasn’t much of a looker,” Helen Trayler, the managing director of Wordsworth, told reporters in Britain. “She’s the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn’t be very inspiring at all.”

Ms. Trayler added that she was also thinking of making over “George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous.”

The Austen makeover is actually fairly convincing, compared to the “forensic” portrait painted in 2002 that hangs in Bath, where Austen lived from 1801 to 1806. The painter, Melissa Dring, who had worked as a police sketch artist, said she based her likeness on contemporary recollections of Austen, which are all pretty vague and don’t say much except that Austen was “very attractive” and “like a doll.” The resulting picture, with excessively large eyes and features that don’t quite fit together, has some of the quality of a wanted poster.

And then there is the so-called Rice Portrait, which Christie’s is putting up for auction on April 19. The painting, the work of the English society artist Ozias Humphry, shows a girl of about 14 or 15 — no great beauty, it has to be said, though at least she’s not scowling — standing in a landscape while wearing a white dress and carrying a parasol.

The owner of the picture, Henry Rice, a sixth-generation descendant of one of Austen’s brothers, says he believes that it depicts his ancestor Jane, and indeed if you squint at it a little, the face does bear a certain resemblance to the one in the Cassandra sketch. Some costume experts, however, believe that the girl’s outfit — empire-waist gown, short hair, flat, slipper-like shoes — didn’t come into fashion until Austen was out of her teens. It was a look popularized by Emma Hamilton after she took up with Lord Nelson and became the ideal of what an 18th-century beauty should look like.

Whether or not buyers believe the picture is of Austen will make a big difference to the sale, of course, and so Christie’s is auctioning the painting in its New York salesroom, presumably on the theory that Americans are less apt to get bogged down in historical nitpicking and may not care that the National Portrait Gallery has turned down the Rice Portrait on five different occasions.

But as long as we have her books, does it matter, really, what Austen looked like? It might matter less if we understood more about her in general; yet in many ways we know less about Austen than we do about Shakespeare, of whom we have many more likenesses, or purported likenesses, as well.

From the few letters that her family did not succeed in burning, we have just a few tantalizing clues: that though she received one marriage proposal (which she first accepted, then turned down) Austen was generally unlucky in love, and suffered from sibling rivalry and bouts of depression and writer’s block. It’s not even possible to infer a whole lot about her from her work, the way that Stephen Greenblatt, for example, so ingeniously pieced together a portrait of Shakespeare and his world from a close reading of his plays.

Austen exists in her novels as a disembodied, quicksilver intelligence — now making a general observation, then slipping into a character’s head, then darting across the room to eavesdrop on a conversation — but from her novels you would scarcely know that England was at war with Napoleon at the time.

Despite what many readers assume, there is not a lot of physical description of people in Austen’s novels; she clearly puts more value on qualities like wit, intelligence and firmness of character — precisely those qualities devotees wish were more in evidence in the sourpuss Cassandra portrait. Yet we know that Austen lived in an age when a woman’s physical attractiveness was, next to her fortune, her greatest asset.

The family believes that the Rice Portrait was commissioned by Austen’s uncle Francis, who wanted to advertise her marriageability — sort of the way debutantes in this country used to have their photographs taken by Fabian Bachrach. If the Cassandra sketch is the truer likeness, then that’s as much a blow to latter-day admirers (who’d like to see at least a hint of the wit and vivacity that so animated her writing) as it might have been to 18th-century suitors.

Austen’s relative lack of interest in exterior appearance may itself be a clue of sorts. She probably wasn’t much of a looker. And why we care must have something to do with might be called the BBC-ification of Austen — the way that her books have, over and over, been transformed into successful movies and highbrow TV series.

We’ve watched them so often that we think we really do know what Austen’s people looked like, and the men — the good ones, anyway — are all hunks and the women are all adorable, with just a hint of gingham-gowned sexiness. That their creator might not be part of this club seems unfair. We can accept that Austen might have been a Cinderella — underappreciated, with an elusive beauty of character and intellect that maybe took a little getting used to — but the dreary spinster of the Cassandra sketch isn’t anyone we recognize.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/weekinreview/01mcgrath.html?ref=janeausten&pagewanted=print

Pulp Fiction By Walter Kirn

Pulp Fiction

By Walter Kirn

Crime Novels

Volume I: American Noir

of the 1930's and 40's.

990 pp. New York:

The Library of America. $35.

Volume II: American Noir of the 1950's.

892 pp. New York:

The Library of America. $35.

Crime novels are not the same as detective novels. It is an important difference. Though police officers and detectives usually appear in them, crime novels follow the crook, the perpetrator, and cast the good guys in secondary roles. The crucial mystery is not Whodunnit? but Why did he do it? and Will he get away with it? Detective novels exploit the reader's desire for justice to be done, for truth to triumph, but crime novels play on an even deeper longing for justice to be evaded and postponed. If detective novels engage the superego -- that upright adult who values law and order -- crime novels speak to the id, the inner delinquent who values nothing but his own dark appetites. What crime writers know, and what gives their writing power, is that no matter how monstrous the criminal or how repugnant his crime, part of the reader will hope he gets away with it.

Americans love an underdog, even if (especially if?) it's rabid. In ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' (1934), by James M. Cain, the opening novel in the Library of America's new two-volume collection of classic noir, the narrator is Frank Chambers, a brawny drifter who shows up one day at a roadside diner somewhere in anonymous California and wastes no time seducing the owner's bored wife. Frank's entrance evokes the hobo of the 1930's -- when men of no fixed address roamed the roads -- as succinctly as anything in Steinbeck: ''They threw me off the hay truck about noon.'' Cain, like other writers in the collection, held strong left-wing views, and his picture of the Depression is subtly class conscious. Cora, the femme fatale who plots with Frank to kill her ''greasy'' Greek husband, is obsessed with issues of racial inferiority and social mobility. Her biggest fear is that her dark complexion will cause her to be mistaken for a ''Mex,'' and when Frank invites her to hit the road with him and live the easy life, she balks, with fatal consequences for all involved. Sexually, Frank and Cora are a pair, but philosophically they are a toxic mismatch: the bum who wants out of the system for good, and the social climber hungry for a leg up. As such, what destroys them is not the justice system, which Cain portrays as a pawn of big financial interests, but Cora getting pregnant by Frank and Frank's unconscious rebellion against fatherhood. In the typical mid-century crime novel, particularly those written before the 1950's, Freud's shadow is at least as long as Marx's.

Horace McCoy's ''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' (1935) follows another pair of doomed outsiders, Robert and Gloria. Hollywood extras who can't get roles because they don't fit the profiles at central casting, the pair sign up for a dance marathon that McCoy makes a metaphor for rampant capitalism. The dance contest turns on greed and sensationalism, a lurid whirligig, run by criminals, that draws a crowd of creepy retirees and vain celebrities. McCoy's infernal machine of a narrative is sheer mad genius and devilishly simple -- the sort of image a writer finds once, if that, and spends the rest of his life brooding over. Though the story, like so many others in the collection, is basically a countdown to destruction, it has a uniquely droning beat. It's the telltale heart played out with horns and cymbals.

As the editor, Robert Polito, makes clear in his helpful thumbnail biographies of the authors, American crime writers like McCoy were often one-hit wonders -- and not a few of them had no hits. Grubbing along at newspaper jobs, plugging away doing piecework for the pulps and churning out cheap amusement for the movie studios, they were laborers, not artists. Their working lives account for their left-leaning politics as well as their stripped and square esthetics. Above all else, they wrote stories. They turned out plots. Style was a function of getting from start to finish, from gunshot through cover-up to punishment, by the quickest, boldest, means possible. Hemingway was an influence certainly, but industrial writing -- writing at speed for pay, that is -- was the pre-eminent molder of sentences.

Edward Anderson, reporter, hobo, contributor to True Detective and screenwriter, published his masterpiece, ''Thieves Like Us,'' in 1937. Of all the novels Polito has chosen, this is by far the bluntest and the saddest, a heartbreaking American primitive. Like a W.P.A. mural devoted to bank robbers, the scenes are heraldic and dumbly chronological. A gang assembles. They rob, hide, get drunk, argue, disperse, reunite and rob again. The hardest part of their job (and it's a job, all right, as specialized, yet finally as mundane, as driving a truck or sorting mail) isn't getting away with the money but holding on to it. Bowie, the youngest, least hardened robber, finds a girlfriend along the way and even dreams of making it in the straight world, while T-Dub and Chicamaw, his scarred partners, just stumble unconsciously from score to score, their only ambition to escape arrest. Every time they amass enough cash to bankroll the lush retirement they claim to want, they reflexively throw it away or lose it. As the men toodle on from bank job to bank job, so deeply self-deluding they are almost cheerful, the reader starts feeling the dread that they refuse to feel, absorbing the apprehension that they laugh off. Anderson's outlaws are holy fools dead set on trying their luck until it breaks. In a novel of simplistic socialism that repeatedly equates property with theft (bankers and lawyers are ''thieves like us''), what makes the gang members different from normal folk is their need to keep toiling until it kills them. The novel also has the single best noir nugget of hard-boiled imagery I've ever come across: ''Bowie felt like his eyes were wired together.''

''The Big Clock'' (1946), by Kenneth Fearing, about a self-hating publishing executive framed for the murder of his boss's mistress, and ''I Married a Dead Man'' (1948) by Cornell Woolrich, a contrived little tale of mistaken identity, feel decidedly minor and gimmicky, works of commerce that aren't quite works of art. Woolrich's is the more memorable novel, chiefly for its guilty, hushed, miserable lullaby of an opening (''I don't know what the game was. I only know its name; they call it life. I'm not sure how it should be played. No one ever told me. No one ever tells anybody. I only know we must have played it wrong. We broke some rule or another along the way, and never knew it at the time''). ''The Big Clock'' has a long ingenious chase scene and, for a crime novel, an unusually brightly lighted setting: corporate New York.

The strangest novel in either volume is William Lindsay Gresham's ''Nightmare Alley,'' published in 1946. Long and misshapen, its middle section swollen with half-baked chunks of sadistic spectacle, the book tells the story of a carnival ''mentalist'' bent on perfecting and expanding his act. For fans of vaudeville and magic, the book is a treasure trove of trade secrets. In chapters named after different Tarot cards, we learn how small-time mind readers work (a partner in the audience flashes signals), how disembodied hands and faces materialize during seances (the medium uses a retractable metal rod) and how -- allegedly -- alcoholic drifters are transformed into sideshow geeks eager to bite the heads off live chickens (by starving the poor men for liquor). Gresham's subculture of freaks and con men is nauseatingly pessimistic, mostly because it thrives on the presumption that everyone in the audience is an idiot and everyone on stage a psychopath. ''The world is mine!'' shouts Stan, the cynical clairvoyant. ''I've got 'em across a barrel and I can shake 'em loose from whatever I want. The geek has his whisky. The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope.'' Stan's journey from huckster to spiritualist ''minister'' to utterly degraded human worm is wild, cartoonish and all the more repulsive for

Gresham's lapses into awkward prose, crude psychology and tasteless action. Fiction doesn't go any lower than when Stan kneels down to lick the polish off his evil female analyst's toenails or the scene inside a morgue where he gawks at a stripper's corpse.

The narrator of ''The Killer Inside Me,'' the Jim Thompson classic published in 1952, is a Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford, a backslapping good old boy on the outside, a one-man inquisition on the inside. He puts out cigars on the backs of beggars' hands, shoots up bottled testosterone from his dead father's medical bag and spends his idle bachelor evenings reading textbooks on abnormal psychology. When Ford feels his murderous ''sickness'' coming on, he starts to needle people with cliches, lending terrible credence to the notion that violence, at its psychic root, is verbal: '' 'Another thing about the weather,' I said. 'Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything. But maybe it's better that way. Every cloud has a silver lining, at least that's the way I figure it. I mean, if we didn't have the rain, we wouldn't have the rainbows, now would we?' ''

In the pantheon of great American characters, Lou Ford stands in something like perfect opposition to Huckleberry Finn. His folksiness is a form of hostility and his salt-of-the-earth pose is poisonously alkaline. Anti-American isn't the word; there isn't a single plank in the platform of traditional heartland optimism that Ford's adventures don't reduce to sawdust. When he gives the girl next door a solid spanking, she comes back, drooling, for more. When the son of a struggling immigrant businessman comes to him for avuncular advice, Ford kills him and makes it look a suicide. But most disturbingly of all, Ford puts the lie to the comfy modern notion that self-awareness brings self-mastery. Telling his story from hell, already dead, Ford is his own omniscient audience, retracing every step in his decline, every vector of rage and resentment.

The four remaining novels are something of a letdown after Thompson. Three of them -- ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, ''Pick-Up'' (1955) by Charles Willeford and ''Down There'' (1956) by David Goodis -- center on underachieving single men who have consciously walked out on the establishment. These dropouts are to 50's crime writers what drifters and hobos were to 30's authors. Highsmith's Ripley is a chameleon and a sycophant, an opportunistic social parasite lacking even fixed sexuality. Because he has no backbone, no identity, he can wiggle through even the tightest jams. Goodis's Eddie is a barroom pianist who gave up a promising concert career out of disgust for the music world's corruption. His story is somber, an extended mood piece whose swerves into criminality seem nonessential. Finally, there is Willeford's Harry Jordan, a painter with formal academic training who finances his heavy drinking by frying burgers in greasy spoons. Harry takes up with Helen Meredith, another drunk, and after surviving a few failed suicide pacts, the couple check into a public mental hospital, hoping for a miracle. They don't get one. The tale could be called an emotional roller coaster, except that it has no upswings; it's sheer free fall. In the novel's gimmicky next-to-last sentence we learn that Harry is black, as if this matters. The damned are all the same color: hellfire red.

''The Real Cool Killers'' (1959) by Chester Himes is set in Harlem and stars two black policemen, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. The action is slapstick, preposterously violent -- Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis. What makes this a crime novel, not a detective novel, is Coffin Ed and Grave Digger's method of seeking justice: shooting people, busting heads and extracting confessions through intimidation. In Himes's Harlem -- a Hobbesian wilderness cordoned off by rich Caucasians -- detective work is not about assembling clues but about beating the truth out of people, issuing threats and making good on threats, walking tall and refusing to be lied to. Police brutality isn't an issue for Himes; he is not a writer who brakes for social niceties. ''The Real Cool Killers,'' like most superior crime novels, does not propose to change society or even to advance the art of fiction. Those are side effects. Crime novels tell stories. They are guilty pleasures for the guilty minded.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/30/books/pulp-fiction.html?pagewanted=print