NONFICTION - Dec. 22, 1996

THE WRITER’S DESK by Jill Krementz, introduction by John Updike (Random House: 114 pp., $35). I look at these photographs with a prurient interest, the way that I might look at the beds of notorious courtesans. Except that the beds would tell me less than these desks do. Here the intimacy of the literary act is caught in flagrante delicto: At these desks characters are spawned, plots are spun, imaginative distances are spanned. . . .

Jill Krementz’s photographs, in all their variety of milieu and demeanor, generally show people at peace in their settings, their activity and their poses. Writing at its inner source is a deeply comforting activity, an ordering and a purging and a bringing into the light what had been hidden an hour before. These desktops and nooks are happy places--chaste beds of conception, rumpled and warm.