Nicole Krauss’s sophomore novel, “The History of Love” (W.W. Norton, 255 pages, $23.95) is certainly more satisfying than her husband’s. Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” published last month, extended the author’s resolutely boyish vision to post-September 11 New York, and many critics took the opportunity to bash Mr. Foer, who is perhaps more rich and more famous than any author his age can safely be.

The most frustrating thing about Ms. Krauss’s book is that it demands comparison to Mr. Foer’s. They both expressly champion a kind of more-innocent-than-thou determination, the kind that older brothers instinctively squash. Taken on its own, each of their books has humor and color to recommend it; taken together, they adumbrate a tiresome future for trendy American letters.

In Ms. Krauss’s novel, as in Mr. Foer’s, precocious and well-meaning children embark on exhaustive detective missions in the metropolitan area, with an eye to sorting the older generations, who came to America as European refugees in the fifties. Trauma has not matured these survivors; it has redeemed them. They are somehow history’s innocents, leavened with peevishness or some other charming flaw, but basically holy. Both books sap the pathos of the Jewish-American experience – although everyday anti-Semitism is notably absent – and imagine a world in which vanity and hardness are no longer viable, in view of the holocaust, or September 11.

There are other ways to approach this. In “The Ghostwriter,” Philip Roth plays Nathan Zuckerman’s libido against a waifish character whom he suspects to be Anne Frank. Zuckerman sees her, her emaciated frame obscured by an oversized sweater and a large tweed skirt, as “a trapped chick that could not get more than its beaked skull out of the encircling shell.”

Mr. Roth is drawing out his narrator’s attraction to stunted growth, to the sadly cute, to the ambiguous license that attaches to world-famous suffering. He highlights these temptations, in a style itself more wicked, but also more damning, than the styles of Mr. Foer or Ms. Krauss, which gratify Zuckerman’s fantasy of innocence.

Ms. Krauss’s novel is ultimately a better read than Mr. Foer’s because her three plotlines gyre down to the same, moving climax, whereas Mr. Foer’s two plotlines rattle along separately. Yet Mr. Foer’s precocious young

Oskar is a far more memorable sketch than Ms. Krauss’s precocious young Alma or her messianic little brother, Bird.

All three are neurotically survivalist in the wake of their father’s death, children laden with absurd gear who keep journals that allow their authors to indulge in tricks of pagination and font. But Oskar is a rascal – he does much to irritate critics, but his unrealistic inventiveness and his tacky questions about love keep the pages turning. Ms. Krauss works less by invention than by exaggeration. She tells tall tales of devotion.

Her other major character, Leo Gursky, is a theatrically desperate old man who still pines for his childhood sweetheart, also named Alma. He remembers:

“If I had a camera,” I said, “I’d take a picture of you every day. That way I’d remember how you looked every single day of your life.” “I look exactly the same.” “No, you don’t. You’re changing all the time. Every day a tiny bit. If I could, I’d keep a record of it all.” “If you’re so smart, how did I change today?” “You got a fraction of a millimeter taller, for one thing. Your hair grew a fraction of a millimeter longer. And your breasts grew a fraction of a -” “They did not!” “Yes, they did.”

Leo does not realize that he might not want to measure fractions of millimeters for very many days in a row. In “The Invention of Love,” doting of this kind is regularly mistaken for love, a pet feeling that will never stray.

At the center of Ms. Krauss’s vision is a manuscript, composed by Leo Gursky in his youth. It is the eponymous “History of Love,” and other feelings are treated as the inventions of gifted children:

Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other.

The voice here is flagrantly omniscient, a kind of first person plural that includes everyone but you, the party-pooper. It is a voice that alienates feeling from its ground – chaos – and establishes an order that is openly disingenuous. Even its author, Leo Gursky, remembers it as naive: “A twenty-year-old in love. A swollen heart and a head to match.” So why does Ms. Krauss write a book about it?

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James Salter’s new story collection is one of the best, most adult collections to appear in a long while. Mr. Salter indicates a philosophical distinction between novels and stories in a passage about memory: “That home. The rest was less dense. The rest was a long novel so like your life; you were going through it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there were bloodstains.”

In “Last Night” (Alfred A. Knopf, 132 pages, $20), Mr. Salter makes 10 bloodstains, and nothing more. His narratives do not end with a marriage, they begin with one, and it usually does not survive the ensuing story.

The feelings of Mr. Salter’s characters are lean and instantaneous. They deliver minimalist dialog that is more Hollywood than noir: “Oh, Jack! she said. It’s gorgeous!” She means it, completely – you can be certain, when Mr. Salter is writing. But just as simply, she turns around and demands that Jack give up his gay lover.

Mr. Salter’s idea of happiness is accumulative. Brule, a wealthy lawyer, “walked to work, perhaps a mile down the avenue, in a cashmere overcoat and scarf during the winter, and the doormen, who murmured good morning, received five hundred dollars apiece at Christmas.” The richness is not in the bonus so much as its regularity over the years.

Tragedy, then, is not the slow burn of the unfortunate but the sudden tumble of the rich. In several stories, it is a quick, indelible dinner conversation. Even Mr. Salter’s prose works by this puncture aesthetic, as in this abrupt anecdote: “She had always been afraid of dogs, the Alsatian that had unexpectedly turned on her college roommate and torn off a piece of her scalp.”

Perhaps this is why so many writers admire Mr. Salter: because he seems to do what he does in a single sentence. But it takes an entire story to smooth out the tablecloth; only then can he stain it.