Young writers come to New York not just to be with other writers but to learn to write about New York itself, a privileged subject. If you can cadge access – to the lowlife and the high – then you deserve to be a writer. Young writers may waste a lot of time trying to live “Bright Lights, Big City,” but the most respected role model is a far older one: Joseph Mitchell.

New Yorkers are as eager to know the bodega clerk as they are to know the bouncer, and Mitchell knew the bodega clerk, the bodega clerk’s barber, and maybe the salesman who sold the hair tonic. His imitators talk about his indubitably excellent prose, but what they really want are his moves. How did Mitchell strike up conversations with all these people?

He sits in with the night matron at a homeless shelter, then the bartender around the corner, and then he’s uptown with marijuana smokers at a Harlem rent party. He visits Italians in Red Hook, then interviews George Bernard Shaw. He goes into all the quirky places we walk past and makes friends in there. Perhaps Mitchell was just doing his job; it’s ironic, then, that he’s become a fetish at M.F.A. programs.

All this explains why Thomas Beller’s first novel “How To Be a Man: Scenes From a Protracted Boyhood” (W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $14.95) is not about growing up so much as about hanging out in New York City. Mr. Beller is a New York native, but for him, as for so many, learning about New York was a way of testing himself, in manners and maturity. He philosophizes about his ongoing adjustments:

For a while every visit to my old neighborhood [the Upper West Side] was punctuated with curmudgeonly remarks about how things have changed, mostly for the worse. I was becoming a Young Fogy. I decided this was unhealthy. I vowed to be upbeat, or at least apathetic, when some gargantuan operation opened up and the city I used to know receded a bit further from view.

This confession is pre-emptively funny – designed for a dinner party, not for intimacy. As a bildungsroman, “How To Be a Man” seems more for the mothers of boys than for boys themselves.

There is a reason for Mr. Beller’s sociable tone. His Web site, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, from which some of these stories are taken, was an early and excellent example of the collaborative potential of the Web. The site shows a satellite image of New York that, once enlarged by neighborhood, displays red dots. Each represents a capsule anecdote, contributed by anyone but selected and edited by Mr. Beller.

Crucially, all the anecdotes “illuminate a corner of life in the city.” Like Mitchell’s admirers – although not like Mitchell himself – the Web community of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is excited to develop an autobiography, in this case collective, that is tied to experience of the city.

“How To Be a Man” captures the dynamic of this ambitious, urban self-awareness in a story about street basketball. Here is a social space many writers would not have access to – it is strenuously athletic and governed by tacit codes. Mr. Beller is an insider, having learned to play at a park as a teenager. As an adult, he relishes the strange anonymity of the court.

He knows the regulars on a nickname basis, and can say a great deal about their personalities, but nothing more. He calls one particularly vituperative man “the Litigator,” but one day a bystander corrects him: “What are you talking about? He works in a bodega.” Another day, the face belonging to a player named Rich is all over the news: It turns out he was a token-booth clerk, now murdered.

If Joseph Mitchell were alive, he would certainly haunt public basketball courts. He gravitated to people who passed the time in interesting ways, and he would have appreciated the congregation of untold stories. But he would be an outsider, and his write-up would be purely anecdotal. Mr. Beller favors sociology.

Like today’s most successful purveyor of anecdote, David Sedaris, he packages his stories with generalization and implicit advice, sometimes stale. By comparison, Mitchell’s achievement is newly extraordinary: His stories weren’t his, but they had a pure flavor.