BRIEFLY NOTED.

A Writer's Life, by Gay Talese (Knopf; $26). In a culture of success and celebrity, Gay Talese has always found his best subjects in failure and decline: Joe DiMaggio in his lonely eclipse; Joshua Logan in the midst of terrible depressions; Floyd Patterson struggling to express what it is to be knocked flat in front of a filled stadium. Talese's lapidary style and impeccable reporting standards have endured far better than the work of some of his more histrionic New Journalism contemporaries, but he has also known failures: long periods of struggle and silence, abandoned stories and books. Much of his memoir is about frustration and dead ends. When the U.S. women's soccer team defeated the Chinese in a shootout at the Rose Bowl, in 1999, Talese was interested in the young woman who had given up the deciding goal. A natural story for Talese, but he couldn't complete it. This book is a less polished construction than Talese's early profiles or "The Kingdom and the Power," but there is something distinctly moving about his decision to think through the work--and the years--that did not quite cohere.

Slaphappy, by Thomas Hackett (Ecco; $24.95). Hackett travelled around the various circuits of professional wrestling--that peculiar mixture of Olympic games and the burlesque, in which beefy athletes beat each other up in scripted bouts--determined to take its participants seriously. The result is an enjoyable and astute appraisal of a too easily maligned subculture. Hackett believes that wrestling, with its "blue collar" celebrity, convoluted sexuality, and faked reality, epitomizes something essential about American culture, although his attempts to discuss these theories with the subjects themselves often prove comically inconclusive. At one point, he tells a goodnatured young wrestler named Altar Boy Luke (who has just insisted that "wrestling is real," unlike, say, "Star Trek") that ...