Thanks. A lot

Before our eyes, however, a hint of a story grows from the seedlings carefully planted among the rows of acknowledgments in "Bitch," a saga as soaked in existential menace as "Darkness at Noon." It seems that Wurtzel has, in the course of writing "Bitch," become addicted to speed, cocaine and, apparently, sleeping in her publisher's offices, here called "Doubleday." One returns to the text of "Bitch" to locate somehow this Casaubonian key to all stupidities, but Wurtzel has roped off that possibility by writing a deliberately unreadable book. A retreat to her acknowledgments gaspingly dawns as one's lone recourse.

But Wurtzel's addiction is only touched upon, an evocative capillarity of insinuation: "Thank you especially ... for waiting longer than you should have when I was more strung out than I could have explained"; "Thanks for conversation and Chinese food after I'd gone fifty hours without sleep on a Saturday afternoon"; "[He] somehow got used to my addled presence in the office long past the point when it could possibly be justified." Wurtzel's gambit here is stunning -- and it pays off. This is one of the most wrenching, if glancing, depictions of addiction since Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" or Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke."

Many of Wurtzel's fabulous friends from "Prozac Nation" have, oddly, disappeared by "Bitch." Some do return, "Jason Bagdade" among them, though he has -- all too understandably -- "been out of touch." Wurtzel's new "friends" possess a sort of Barthian irreality.

Savoring the virtuosity the real Wurtzel invents for these wraiths feels a bit like reading some compressed mini-novel, or something Lydia Davis would write after being chloroformed. One friend "looks like a Bond girl but writes scholarly papers on missile deployment." Another "completed the New York City marathon and became a member of the Council of Foreign Relations in the same year."

A new friend of Wurtzel's is "Mare Winningham," possibly the most brazen fabrication Wurtzel has yet attempted. It is a full-stop acknowledgment, a display of Tetragrammatonic awe intended, no doubt, to lacerate our obsession with celebrity. "What a gift it was," Wurtzel knowingly writes, "to get to know you late at night by telephone, for all those months of girl talk and movie talk and music talk and book talk and just general cross-country gab." But since Winningham and Wurtzel have left unmolested so many other topics -- zoology, the weather in Iceland, Swazi philosophy -- Wurtzel writes that she is now "ready for my closeup" -- that is, ready to meet "Winningham" in person. One can only imagine the real Winningham's response. Delight at being satirized? Relief at not actually having to meet Wurtzel? Determination to nevertheless beef up her home-security system?

"Lerner" and "Wills," hitherto spectral, Hamlet's father kind of looming presences, finally appear in the denouement of the acknowledgments for "Bitch," Wurtzel actually thanking them for their "blood, sweat, and tears" -- perfectly réchauffé, especially for a writer who would, in her next book, undergo a one-woman coronation and proclaim herself quite possibly the greatest nonfiction writer of her generation. Who would argue it? Possibly only "Wurtzel," that chillingly wrought self-saboteur.

Nevertheless! How, the heads spun, could Wurtzel do it again, acknowledgmentedly speaking, in "More, Now, Again"? She had taken the form so far, further than anyone else had taken it. Perhaps, some feared, the game was over, and the explanation ("It was all, like, a joke") would stand as naked as an orangutan. But Wurtzel -- to say nothing of the sinister "Wurtzel" -- is far too clever a beast for that.

"The acknowledgments of my previous books were so elaborate," she writes in the acknowledgments of "More, Now, Again," "that I now feel like I am competing with myself to come up with increasingly grand words of praise. Instead, I am going to keep it simple." Or, as Kinbote says in the foreword to "Pale Fire," "To this poem we now must turn."

"Prozac Nation" is the book Wurtzel wrote to describe her escape from emotional torpor and "Bitch" is the book she wrote while suffering emotional torpor; "More, Now, Again" is the book she wrote to describe her escape from emotional torpor while suffering emotional torpor. The acknowledgment shocks come instantly. "Betsy Lerner" has now displaced "Lydia Wills" as Wurtzel's agent-cum-Ariel, a staggering turn of events. The improbably named "Marysue Rucci" (not to be confused with "Christina Ricci," also thanked by Wurtzel) is now Wurtzel's editor ("I cannot imagine that any editor has been this central and crucial to a book") -- as though "More, Now, Again" (or any of Wurtzel's books, for that matter) were edited!

Again, we are enticed into Wurtzel's world, like flies into a flame. Or a roughly proximate simile. Wurtzel is sparer here, more restrained. Her "Ulysses" behind her, she has not made the mistake of attempting a "Finnegans Wake" but has returned to a calm perfection much like that of "The Dead."

Thus, "Erin Hosier," although established by Wurtzel as "the secret weapon" at Wurtzel's literary agency, is not one of the Kyrgyzstan-visiting, purse-designing, all-around supercool creations "Bitch" has prepared us for. Even so, Wurtzel blesses "the day that I found [Hosier] in the Ms. Magazine intern pool."

But what we have lost in exceptionality we regain in troweled-on odes: Hosier is a "great first reader, a great friend, and just plain old great." In addition: "And thank you for keeping me up on what the kids are up to." On top of that: "I think the good people of the state of Ohio broke the mold after you were born." Know, too: "The world needs more than one of you." Lastly: "All I can ask is that you remember my name once you have conquered the world." Apparently, Hosier is intended to connote a figure of demonic, triple-six power.

Soon a new, increasingly gnomic Wurtzel takes command. The by now familiar Photographer Figure, here named "Frank Veronsky," is thanked, a little predictably, for making Wurtzel "look just like me but better." The rich theme of surfaces -- and, it seems, film developing -- are clearly to Wurtzel what connection was to Forster, the self was to Whitman and buggering lads was to Burroughs.

But an impenetrable menace soon steals into nearly every proceeding instance of "thanks," lifting her trilogy's final acknowledgments to an aria of Beckettian inscrutability. "It is ridiculous to thank Jim Crimmins," she writes, for instance, "and ridiculous not to, so there you go." While this is not exactly "Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams," it achieves its intended Delphic mystery.

"Thank you, Chris," Wurtzel writes -- not, strangely, for digging her out of a ditch on the New Jersey Turnpike or saving her from the psychic piranha of a bad trip or simply standing beside her as she found the perfect pair of sunglasses at 3 in the morning a few blocks from the Wailing Wall, but rather "for so many reasons." "Wurtzel" is losing power, the stars and planets dim, and her acknowledgments fade with them. Her "friends," by now so familiar, so human, are thanked with a similar, tombstonelike simplicity: "This book was written for them, with all my love."

The final, chilling message of these acknowledgments -- this wrecking ball to our collective vanity, this hidden epic, both of and ahead of its time -- sees no coked-up italicization from Wurtzel. Nor does it need it. For we all, Elizabeth Wurtzel included, know what we always wind up doing to the ones we love.

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