In truth, for all the suffering it's endured since Joe Piscopo's "Jersey Guy" routine on "Saturday Night Live," New Jersey hardly needs "The Sopranos" to bring it more glamorous kinds of attention. The place is literally bursting with writers, directors and musicians, all ready to tell the truth, good and bad, about the place. And critics have long pointed out that New Jersey is a rich source of material for them. The late George Plimpton told the New York Times not so long ago that New Jersey's "habitués are so extraordinary -- more than any other state in the East. The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York -- there is this extraordinary framework that the state's writers have had throughout American history."

There are too many Jersey books and movies to count. In recent years, we've seen Frederick Reiken's bestselling novel "The Lost Legends of New Jersey," James Kaplan's "Two Guys from Verona," all of Janet Evanovich's books with her kick-ass Trenton heroine, Helene Stapinski's "Five Finger Discount," Lucinda Rosenfeld's "Why She Went Home." Gary Krist wrote a book called "The Garden State." Allen Ginsberg has a poem called "Garden State"; Rick Moody's first novel was named the same; and this summer, "Scrubs" star turned director Zach Braff lifts the irony-infused title for a Sundance-acclaimed film in which he stars with Natalie Portman. Tom Perrotta, Sam Lipsyte, Kathleen DeMarco, David Gates, Richard Ford, Richard Price, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka -- the list goes on.

Add Kevin Smith's proud "Jersey Trilogy" to Todd Solondz's suburban misery-fest "Happiness," and you have a film library of New Jersey convenience stores, malls, Bon Jovi and Camaros, as well as the Jersey of listless suburbs and collective boredom. If we can admit it, these images of New Jersey make up a land we all recognize. As humorist Joel Stein told the New York Times, in an article about the self-consciously Jersey band Fountains of Wayne, "people might make fun of it, but New Jersey is quintessentially American."

It's not surprising that one of America's greatest living writers and one of its best writers about the American experience, Philip Roth, has produced countless books set in New Jersey, from "Goodbye, Columbus" to "American Pastoral" to the forthcoming "The Plot Against America," in which Roth returns to Newark after a recent hiatus in Massachusetts and New York. Roth has given us the most profound, and widely read, portrayal of the Americanness of New Jersey life -- the drudgery of its cities, the clash of ethnicity and race, the yearning to get out and get somewhere better, and even then, the stultification of bourgeois life. David Chase's "The Sopranos," with its in-between-classes Italians, offers a variation on that theme.

But what ideas are New Jersey artists -- including newly popular bands like Fountains of Wayne with its lovely ode to "Hackensack" and big dreams of stardom far away from there -- exporting about their state? About five years ago, back when South Orange native Lauryn Hill was around, a few articles came out suggesting that New Jersey was "in," or at least, no longer "out." And every so often another trend story appears, as they surely will again after Braff's "Garden State" debuts. The Jersey jokes are tired, these stories suggested. The world is a bigger place now -- there are far, far worse corners of hell than New Jersey.

But for those of us from New Jersey, who've long whined about our inferiority to New York, and thus the world, the reparation has come too late. Jersey natives have long internalized the reputation and outsider status bestowed upon them and mined it for its truths and falsehoods. What it all adds up to is a sort of immigrant-spawned, working-middle-class, disaffected-guy, slighted-by-the-world, poorly dressed sense of authenticity, a myth of one's own special New Jerseyness, something that's both unique to the rest of the country and at the heart of it. New Jersey's writers are in on the Jersey jokes; more than just reclaim them, they've taken them someplace new. As Solondz's character in "Happiness" said, "You know, people are always putting New Jersey down. None of my friends can believe I live here. But that's because they don't get it: I'm living in a state of irony."

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