The guys, many of whom were no doubt wearing wedding rings, fashioned disguises of routine heterosexuality, paid their taxes like anyone else, made sure to brush their teeth, to recycle beer cans, but their girls were concealing that extra special surprise underneath. Subsequent researches into the rhetoric of the tranny chaser always turned up variations on this particular turn of phrase, so I use it advisedly: I'm looking for a girl with a little something extra...

Dean was a frequenter of the old Times Square bars, Sally's, Edelweiss, the vanished demimondes of transsexual hookers, and he constructed a forceful argument about the inferiority of this club — there were regulations now, in the Giuliani administration, on how decadent a business of this kind could really be, and so there was an abridgement of the pure expression of transgender madness...

We stood around watching, as the bouncer stood around watching, as the pool of available men stood around watching. There was no privacy to be had. We watched as the girls peeled back layers, hiked up miniskirts, flung halter tops on the floor, so that you could see their boys' hips and the residuary knob in their thongs that no amount of female hormones had yet been able to obliviate. One guy in the corner was desperately trying to achieve satisfaction, such that his Asian girl, weighing in at about ninety-three pounds, was athletically cycling through a half-dozen different poses. Abrading the front of him. What would happen to this pair? Dean, with his slightly weary brand of curiosity offered a guess: They'll negotiate some price for going back to a hotel. Or she'll take him to her room.

...I thought I had learned everything I needed to know, and I was downstairs getting ready to take leave when we beheld, across a crowded room, the Radcliffe Girl. Her ambitions were far more interesting than the post of receptionist. She didn't simply want to be in the bar, she wanted to own the bar, or maybe she wanted to replace Anna Wintour at Vogue, or Tina Brown at Talk, and, along the way, she wanted to make men yearn and suffer. Her chestnut hair, just a bit shorter than shoulder length, was pulled back, and she wore a black sheath minidress, black fuck-me pumps. No stockings. A discreet lipstick, very little makeup. Her demeanor was both insouciant and resolutely aristocratic, as if, after she had danced a few lap dances, the driver might pull around front with the Mercedes, and she would head home for a nightcap. And in the morning, there would be her squash lessons over at the club.

The attraction was tribal. I mean, I could have easily seen her in Connecticut — she was very Greenwich — or perhaps at my boarding school class reunion; in fact, she looked a little like my famous classmate, the failed actress, Catherine Oxenberg. Except that this Oxenberg imposter would more likely incline toward restraints.

"Reactionary, mean-spirited. Has a permanent grudge against experiment, playfulness, subversion, perversity and complexity. Her reviews are predictable, dull, ugly, conservative, mocking and trite."

Take, for example, her review of Jonathan Franzen's recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone:

Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen's mind remains something of a mystery. In fact, by the end of this solipsistic book, the reader has begun to feel every bit as suffocated and claustrophobic as Mr. Franzen and his estranged wife apparently did in their doomed marriage.

Mr. Moody offers not-very-interesting parallels between his life and his little-known first novel; a disembodied tirade about ''brutality, bloodthirstiness, and murder'' in American history (from the massacre of Indians to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki); and ham-handed efforts to draw parallels between Handkerchief Moody and contemporary figures like William S. Burroughs (who shot and killed his wife while playing a game of William Tell) and the high school killers Kip Kinkel, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. All of which suggests not only that ''The Black Veil'' was written in fits and starts, as the author admits, but also that halfway through, Mr. Moody abandoned the effort to transform self-indulgent fragments into something that might properly be called a book. This volume should have been titled: ''Digressions Masquerading as a Memoir.''

Judgment Day [TONY]
A Man Who Looks in the Mirror and Smiles [NYT]
Behind Each Dark Cloud Lies an Even Darker One [NYT]

Related (and image via): Assessing Michiko Kakutani [Slate]