Celia Wren. (Summer reading).

Any classification is superior to chaos," anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind, expressing an idea that, perhaps, explains the proliferation, over the last few years, of a certain type of nonfiction chronicle: the cultural history that views the past through the lens of a single invention, idea, or custom. A recent survey of a Barnes & Noble display table yielded a couple dozen books with titles like: Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon that Changed the Course of History; The Potato: How a Humble Spud Rescued the Western World; Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World; and Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. Simultaneously broad and narrow, such accounts impose a reassuring order on time gone by. In doing so, they seem, for the space of a few hundred pages, to tame the chaos of reality.

One addition to this genre that deserves attention is Elizabeth Wilson's sophisticated but readable Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (Rutgers University Press, $28, 208 pp.)--a book that may particularly fascinate those who've tracked the latest doings of Baz Luhrmann, impresario extraordinaire. Luhrmann's risky, hallucinogenic movie Moulin Rouge!, and his current Broadway staging of Puccini's La Boheme, which generated a hype maelstrom the size of the Pentagon budget, both cashed in on the seductive myth that Wilson documents: that of the bohemian, the financially challenged artist-outsider whose romantic allure depends on his refusal to slot into capitalism's success-equals-profit equation.

The Industrial Revolution and the attendant commodification of art, Bohemians theorizes, pitted artists against the bourgeoisie and set up "a paradoxical situation in which to succeed was, for the artist, to fail." Wilson follows the development of this trope--and its variations--from the nineteenth century to the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization, peppering her account with fascinating historical tidbits, such as the identity of the individual who coined the word "bohemian" in its glamour-in-a-garret sense: French journalist Felix Pyat, who, in 1834, described "the mania of young artists to wish to live outside their time, with other ideas and customs." The lives of Lord Byron, the pre-Raphaelites, the Surrealists, William Burroughs, Freddie Mercury, Amiri Baraka, and many others fill out Wilson's story, which is sparingly illustrated with evocative photographs (Greenwich Village in 1910, student riots in 1968 Paris) and maps. Wilson profiles are so colorful, and the battle between romantic rebels and the status quo is so intrinsically fascinating, that Bohemians will engage anyone interested in the history of ideas.

Fiction, too, can exploit the human fondness for detecting continuity in variance. A single historical theme threads together the brilliantly eclectic vignettes in Colson Whitehead's tour de force John Henry Days (Anchor, $14, 400 pp.)--a novel that's about the legendary steel driver John Henry, about Americans thinking about John Henry, and, more generally, about the way culture appropriates and consumes its icons. The book's often hilarious frame tale depicts an underachieving American journalist who ekes out a life from press junket to press junket, one day finding himself assigned to a rural celebration of John Henry's life, in the company of fellow hacks, Machiavellian PR agents, and a deranged post office worker.

Set within this narrative are fragments of other stories--a 1920s African-American scholar tracking down regional variants of the well-known "Ballad of John Henry"; a little girl, stealing from her home on Harlem's Strivers Row and spending candy money on the "Ballad" sheet music; Paul Robeson brooding backstage before an entrance in the 1940 flop John Henry; the author of a stamp-enthusiasts' newsletter opining about the unveiling of a commemorative John Henry stamp. The sketches, which conjure up an entire society unconsciously collaborating on a palimpsest of cultural history, provide a moving complement to the cynical, hemmed-in perspective of the deadline-driven central protagonist. John Henry Days doesn't pack the emotional wallop of Whitehead's alternate-reality novel The Intuitionist (about schismatic sects of elevator inspectors in a city not unlike New York), but it is dazzling.

If Random House does not have a genius on its hands in the person of Matthew Pearl, author of the best-selling novel The Dante Club ($24, 384 pp.), it does at least have an enfant terrible of the most terrible sort. A recent graduate of Yale Law School, Pearl has already snagged the 1998 Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America and has assumed the editor's mantle for the new Modern Library edition of Dante's Inferno. As if that were not galling enough for those of us aged thirty and over, Pearl has also crafted a most ingenious and beautifully written mystery--one that reminds us that siphoning meaning from chaos is also the metier of the detective.

Set in Boston in the aftermath of the Civil War, The Dante Club revolves around a real episode from scholarly history: the collaboration between Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few other notable litterateurs while Longfellow was working on the first American translation of The Divine Comedy. In Pearl's ingenious narrative, these intellectual bigwigs have a second task on their hands during the months they spend poring over Dante's Italian--they have to catch a serial murderer who models his crimes on the punishments meted out to sinners in the Inferno.

This concept may sound dismayingly cute, but the scenario furnishes Pearl with a serpentine whodunit plot, while allowing him to evoke the intellectual atmosphere of nineteenth-century America. As Longfellow and his fellow savants smelt out English equivalents for terza rima, they run into adamant opposition from their employers and acquaintances in the academic establishment. Dante's vision, a Harvard Corporation official warns the poets' publisher threateningly, is too unsavory--too alien, too Catholic, runs the subtext--for the university to sanction.

More than scholastic conservatism is at stake here: Longfellow et al., Pearl suggests, are battling for the soul of America. "Our world is strangled and demolished by infiltrators," Harvard's Augustus Manning says in one confrontation, "newfangled notions of immorality coming in with every foreigner and every new idea against all the principles America was built upon.... Our war is just beginning." Even as he wields his detective-story staples--gruesome corpses, red-herring clues, police department turf wars--Pearl reminds us that in choosing our reading, we are selecting our civilization's common denominators. New books salvage a little order from the universe's pandemonium.

Celia Wren, managing editor of American Theatre magazine, is Commonweal's stage and media critic.