'Dear Abby' Doesn't Live Here Anymore

MAN'S WORST FRIEND had a problem. A big problem. Years ago she had seduced a guy, then spurned him and later turned him in to the police as a possible stalker. Now he was dying of cancer. Should she write to him and make up? The question lay smoldering in the mailbag of Dan Savage, the author of the advice column Savage Love.

Mr. Savage loves this kind of question.

As an hors d'oeuvre, he called the writer a ''flaming jerk.'' Then he served up the main course. ''Your motives are as self-serving now as they were when you used him, abused him and turned him in,'' he wrote. ''You don't deserve absolution.'' A little dessert, perhaps? ''Leave him in peace, and stew in your own guilt,'' Mr. Savage concluded. Check, please.

The once gentle, helpful American advice column has grown fangs. Readers who write in these days are likely to get a faceful of attitude along with their answers, if the answers ever arrive in the course of the winding narratives. In dozens of alternative weeklies and mass-market monthly magazines, the advice column has waved farewell to Dear Abby and Ann Landers, and in the process it has become something else: one of the most vital, unpredictable literary forms going, built around a vivid and decidedly cynical personality.

In an age when many novelists have repudiated character and dialogue, and the theater no longer offers the cut and thrust of Shavian debate, advice columnists like Mr. Savage, E. Jean Carroll of Elle and Mickey Boardman of Paper magazine, not to mention a posse of strange rangers on the Internet, practice a quirky literary craft, a hybrid of the epistolary novel, the personal essay and improvisational theater. With no particular claims to expertise, they field questions and offer solutions to personal problems, but problem solving isn't really the point, even when the advice is sound and Abby-like. What National Public Radio's ''Car Talk'' is to auto repair, the new wave advice column is to love, sex, fashion and relationships.

''One reason these columns are so popular is that we get stories from them,'' said Ms. Carroll, who writes Ask E. Jean. ''These are true tragedies, or dramas, with a narrative and a solution. They're sort of the chewed slipper in the dog kennel of literature.'' In other words, they offer some of the pleasures of popular fiction but delivered in a sharper, post-modern flavor.

In sheer numbers, Dear Abby and Ann Landers still rule the question-and-answer franchise. Appearing daily in about 1,200 newspapers, they each reach an audience of perhaps 20 million and receive some 10,000 letters apiece each week. No one else even comes close. The most popular of the new renegade columnists say they receive perhaps a hundred letters a week, most of them from youthful readers.

''The younger generation these columns appeal to is sick of advice,'' said Robert Levy, the executive editor of United Feature Syndicate, which handles Ann Landers. ''They're almost looking for anti-advice, or the sheer kick of an in-your-face response. In the same way that game shows on MTV are anti-game shows, and Letterman is anti-television, they bring a cynical edge to the idea of an advice column.''

P AIGE STEIN, who as the New York Nuisance Lady doles out sassy advice in Manhattan Spirit and Our Town, two neighborhood weeklies, and in Dan's Papers, the Hamptons weekly, usually takes an ''enough about you'' approach to readers' problems. ''I definitely talk about myself, a lot,'' she said. Ms. Stein, 31, fell into the advice racket after spending a summer in the Hamptons drinking beer with her friends, listening to their problems and taking notes. She submitted a sample column to the publisher of the Spirit and landed a job.

Her stance is ''been there, done that.'' ''I've been so crazy in love I've tried to send a kiss-o-gram to Moscow,'' she said. ''I've worked horrible jobs, the kind where I wore a plastic cowgirl outfit and said: 'Howdy. You cowfolk ready to get some good grub tonight?' ''

Entertainment is the object. ''I can't be bothered with people's misery unless it's funny,'' she said. Like Mr. Savage, Ms. Stein has a short fuse. ''I'm much tougher than a lot of other columnists, and less patient with whining and blathering,'' she said.

Her readers fall into two camps. ''They either love me or totally hate me,'' she said.

Mr. Savage, 32, whose column appears in The Village Voice and 19 other newspapers, signed on for duty as an advice columnist five years ago when a friend started an alternative newspaper in Seattle. An aspiring actor who worked as a waiter and bookstore manager, Mr. Savage had some definite ideas about the tone of the thing. It should have an assertive gay voice, he said, and should ''be really obnoxious.''

For today's columnists, the universe of permissible questions has expanded to include inquiries on everything from esoteric sexual techniques to the nature of the cosmos. Anything goes.

Savage Love deals in sex and relationships, with side excursions. In a recent column, for example, Mr. Savage indulged a curious reader who wanted to know whether cheese could be made from human milk. (Theoretically, yes, but it probably would not win any prizes.) Many of the questions, and answers, cannot be described in a family newspaper. The tone is lively, funny and confrontational, although Mr. Savage can be wise and kind. He probably startled his readership when he told one troubled questioner that she did not have to be sexually attracted to her husband to lead a happy life. But in general, he thrives on conflict. ''For me the golden letter is when someone is doing something so stupid I just knock them out of the park,'' he said.

T HE advice column has come a long way since its beginnings at the turn of the century, when a reporter at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Elizabeth Gilmer, began writing Advice to the Lovelorn under the name Dorothy Dix. She gave rise to advice givers like Beatrice Fairfax and Doris Blake, who in turn begat Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Alongside the personal-advice column, medical columnists occasionally entertained questions about sex, and columnists like Emily Post instructed confused readers about etiquette.

In the late 1970's, Judith Martin, a Washington Post reporter, and Cynthia Heimel, a writer at The SoHo Weekly News, redefined the question-and-answer column. Ms. Martin created Miss Manners, a sharp-eyed stylist with firm views on etiquette, personal behavior and sloppy thinking. Ms. Heimel added a breezy, feminist style to the genre in a column that later became Problem Lady, which ran in The Voice until Ms. Heimel left last year. Readers who wrote to Ms. Heimel, as often as not, simply wanted to spend time with her. They expected a witty mini-essay rather than an answer.

The current crop of anti-columnists took that attitude and ran with it.

While Ms. Carroll of Elle usually gets around to answering the question, the trip is half the fun. Miss $$$$, wondering how to find a matchmaker to hook her up with a rich man, earned a ripe hoot of derision from the breezy, insouciant Ms. Carroll, a 53-year-old journalist, who began her column four years ago. ''Hell's bells, honey,'' she wrote, ''the evolution of the species depends on females choosing the strongest, fastest, handsomest, bravest, richest buggers (old Charlie Darwin called it 'natural selection'). You wouldn't be here if your female ancestors ran after the bland, the broke and the brainless.'' Ms. Carroll then pointed out a serious flaw in the bag-a-billionaire scheme. ''If matchmakers knew any really rich people, they'd marry them themselves.''

Mr. Boardman, 30, who writes Ask Mr. Mickey for the out-there monthly Paper, has hijacked the advice column and flown it to points unknown. Ostensibly, he offers fashion advice, but this is a writer who drifted into the advice arena after creating fictional makeovers for the Pope and Mother Teresa and is now, he said, moving on to ''third-world Pacific Rim dictators' wives.'' The questions serve as a flimsy pretext for Mr. Boardman to cut some fancy figures on the page.

A recent letter asked for diet advice. No problem. ''Mr. Mickey has found that the most effective appetite suppressants for him are constant nagging, personal anxiety and debilitating depression.'' How about dressing for transitional weather? ''Conceptualize yourself as a style onion -- perhaps a zesty Vidalia like Mr. Mickey -- and slip on a whole trash bag full of fashion separates.'' Mr. Boardman, by the way, describes his own fashion look as ''alcoholic housewife.''

The determinedly nonexpert approach to problem solving disturbs Isadora Alman, whose column Ask Isadora appears in Time Out New York, the weekly listings magazine, and 16 alternative papers around the country. A licensed marriage and family therapist and sexologist, she gives sober, studied advice on sex and relationships. ''I really do know what I'm talking about,'' she said. ''I am a woman of certain years with a highly checkered personal past who informs, encourages, pats on the back and gives resources.''

The ''checkered past'' description is not serious. Ms. Alman lives in San Francisco with her daughter and cat and takes care of her aged mother. ''I am rather conservative and vanilla,'' she said, ''but I do want to encourage people to go for broke when pursuing their own pleasure.''

In the wild world of the alternative weekly, she seems a bit of an anomaly. And she has an archenemy, Mr. Savage, whose column displaced hers in The Voice. ''We have a Hedda Hopper-Louella Parsons thing going,'' Mr. Savage said. ''She doesn't like my tone. She thinks it's abusive. And I don't like hers. I think she's boring.'' Ms. Alman declined to discuss Mr. Savage.

Anyone fearful of boredom need only turn to the Internet, where chaos reigns. There seem to be more advice columnists than people with problems. It says something about the ferment in cyberspace that Camille Paglia's column for the ''culturally disgruntled,'' as she refers to her readers in the on-line magazine Salon, seems serene and statesmanlike, even when Ms. Paglia is explaining pop stars like Morrissey in terms of early Christian asceticism. On the Internet, many print columnists maintain Web sites, but they share cyberspace with the likes of Mr. Angst (philosophical advice), Sister Rossetta (religious), Sir Charles Grandiose (foppish), Grogg (Neanderthal) and Auntie Lois (''advice you didn't ask for from a woman you will not like''). But for those who like their advice to the point, nothing beats the Magic 8 Ball, who entertains only questions that can be answered with a yes or no.

Because this is the Internet, the Magic 8 Ball has a rival, the Mystical Smoking Head of Bob, a smiling Middle American male, circa 1948, who puffs a pipe and has a third eye in the middle of his forehead. Go ahead, present him with a problem. He may not be a licensed therapist, but he always has an answer.