Gay Talese is not what you would call a frugal writer. His trademark is abundance: long run-on sentences and long periods of immersion in his subjects, which add up to long, important, best-selling books. “Unto the Sons” (1992) told the story of Italian immigration to America in 635 pages; “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” (1981) covered the sexual revolution in 568. Mr. Talese’s slightly manic garrulity, no less than Tom Wolfe’s neon garishness, provided the DNA of the New Journalism. Indeed, Mr. Wolfe credit ed Mr. Talese with being the father of the movement, which no longer seems “new” only because its influence is so widespread. Reading a few sentences of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Mr. Talese’s 1966 Esquire profile, which is one of the urtexts of the New Journalism, shows how much today’s journalists owe him:

For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people – his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five – which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has the money, the energy, and no apparent guilt.

Here is the whole arsenal with which the modern writer arms himself to confront celebrity. There is the too-long list, a series of non sequiturs that simultaneously feeds our appetite for information and winks at its sheer inconsequentiality; there is the caffeinated repetition (“can do anything he wants, anything, can do it”) that suggests, almost onomatopoeically, the “buzz” of its subject; there is the quasi-erotic enthrallment to the modern American trinity, money-power-fame. But if the tones and rhythms of Mr. Talese’s prose were new in the 1960s, the sensibility behind them belongs to an old American tradition. The tall tale of the backwoodsman, the patter of Melville’s confidence man, and the sour eloquence of H.L. Mencken all feed into Mr. Talese’s wised-up, baroque style.

“A Writer’s Life” (Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $26) is Mr. Talese’s first new work since “Unto the Sons,” and while his prose is lavish as ever, he also displays an unsuspected knack for thrift. Over the course of his long career, Mr. Talese has had the usual quota of false starts: leads that didn’t pan out, stories that lost their momentum, articles that were killed by editors. As long ago as the 1960s, Mr. Talese writes, he was interested in the history of a certain building on the East Side of Manhattan and thought about writing a book about all the lives that had intersected there – a low-rent version of “Grand Hotel.” In the 1970s, he played with the idea of a book about Elaine’s, the Second Avenue writers’ hangout, and its owner and maitre d’. In the early 1990s, he wrote a piece about the Lorena Bobbitt trial for the New Yorker that Tina Brown politely spiked. And in 1999, the year of America’s victory in the women’s soccer World Cup, he was seized with the impulse to write about Liu Ying, the Chinese player whose blocked shot lost the game for her team.

In “A Writer’s Life,” then, he has had the frugal notion of putting all these odds and ends together, knitting them into a kind of journalistic quilt. In fact, Mr. Talese knits so skillfully that it takes a while for the reader to realize that there is no actual connection between the book’s half-dozen subjects. Mr. Talese starts off watching the World Cup final on television, giving a play-by-play description of the penalty kick phase; drifts back to his years covering sports for the University of Alabama’s student newspaper; fast-forwards to the 1980s to sketch the career of a restaurateur named Nicola Spagnolo; jumps back again to remember the civil rights march in Selma, Ala., which he covered for the New York Times; and so on for 400 genial pages. If few of Mr. Talese’s subjects are momentous, they are almost all curious, and by the end of the book, the reader has learned a little about a lot of subjects: pilfering in New York hotels, early 20th-century piano movers, interracial romance in 1990s Alabama, the difficulty of finding a good interpreter in China.

The only thing to object to in all this leisurely recycling is the title under which it was published. The book is “A Writer’s Life” not in the sense of a memoir, but at most as a demonstration. If reporting stories is what a writer does, Mr. Talese seems to be saying, then a writer’s life is just the sum of those stories. In fact, he more or less admits that this book is really offered in lieu of the memoir he was contracted to write a dozen years ago, but couldn’t finish:

What blocked me, I think, was the imprecision of my persona and the fact that I did not know where to establish my story. I had no idea what my story was. I had never given much thought to who I was. I had always defined myself through my work, which was always about other people.

This is not the whole story, of course. A writer with a career like Mr. Talese’s – New York Times reporter, best-selling author, world traveler, friend to the rich and famous, one half of a New York power couple (his wife, Nan A. Talese, has her own imprint at Doubleday) – must have a lot of tales to tell, and several passages in “A Writer’s Life” offer glimpses of the fascinating memoir Mr. Talese finally chose not to write.

He is most explicit in dealing with his childhood, which he also wrote about in “Unto the Sons.” The son of immigrants who lacked or deliberately repressed any Italian warmth – his mother, Mr. Talese writes, was the rare Italian woman of her generation who hated to cook – he grew up deeply ambivalent about his ancestry. The story of his return to Calabria, in the uniform of an American soldier, evokes the ambivalence and alienation of the first-generation American in ways that any child of immigrants would understand.

But when it comes to his adult life, Mr. Talese prefers to keep his private affairs private. He writes very little about his family, nothing about his sex life, and almost nothing about his career since leaving the Times in 1965. Oddly, too, as the reader gets deeper into “A Writer’s Life,” it becomes clear that most of Mr. Talese’s work on the book must have been completed at least six years ago. There is absolutely no reference to more recent events – most glaringly, the September 11, 2001, attacks, which surely must have had a profound effect on a quintessential New Yorker like Mr. Talese. All of these absences and improvisations make “A Writer’s Life” feel curiously light, even evasive; but they do not stop it from being thoroughly entertaining.

akirsch@nysun.com