veryone nurses a soft spot for the wunderkind—the Jonathan Safran Foer, Alicia Keys, or Harmony Korine who swoops fully formed out of oblivion and into Entertainment Weekly. The publishing industry has become as besotted with these instant prodigies as the music or fashion worlds. Where publishers once allowed a writer's voice to develop over long, wiry careers, now they're impatient for that instant payoff, the debut blockbuster.

All this mad love for the first novel could have long-term repercussions, though, dumping unrealistic expectations on the follow-up. The Second-Novel Syndrome has long been an occupational hazard in the world of letters, as authors struggle with writer's block, intense scrutiny, and the self-consciousness induced by sudden celebrity. Take Ralph Ellison, who spent more than 40 years after Invisible Man laboring over his unfinished novel Juneteenth (which Ellison's executor finally "completed" and published a few years ago). Or Harper Lee, whose output ended abruptly after she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and who eventually became the literary equivalent of a hermit (she hasn't given an interview since 1964).

Jeffrey Eugenides and Donna Tartt have never met, but these literary superstars seem to have synchronized careers: Both debuted with acclaimed novels within six months of each other and then spent the next 10 years struggling with follow-ups amidst swirling rumors of creative paralysis. "As much as I'd like to deny there's a second-book phenomenon, there probably is," says Eugenides, whose hosanna'd debut, The Virgin Suicides, came out in 1993. Having just published his second book, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), Eugenides says with evident relief, "I suddenly feel very clear-headed about my writing and where I'm going—much more so than I did after my first."

Donna Tartt took even longer to finish her second novel, The Little Friend (Knopf, $26). "The way I dealt with this fear of 'second-novel syndrome' was to try and write a completely different book from The Secret History," she told one interviewer. "With any project this long, whether it's renovating a house, painting a room, or writing a book, there's a moment you think, 'Oh, my God! I'll never get this done.' " Tartt started writing her debut as an undergrad at Bennington, and became an instant Gen X literary icon at age 28. Her high-profile image—a chain-smoking Southern pixie at the center of New York's literary brat pack—soon mutated into different type of glamour: a Garbo-esque withdrawal which only increased her cult following. Fans speculated about her activities (a project about outsider artist Henry Darger, which was real but never came to be), her mental health (gossip about a nervous breakdown), and her whereabouts (one story maintained that she'd bought her own tropical island, but she insists New York remains her home base).

So intense were the pressures of following up The Virgin Suicides' success that Eugenides eventually did go into a kind of exile. He moved from New York to Berlin (where he still lives with his wife and young daughter), finding anonymity more congenial for concentrated work. Sofia Coppola's successful 1999 movie of The Virgin Suicides kept his profile high and, he says, "bought me a few years to finish the novel without worrying that people would forget me."

What took so long? "There were a couple of years at the beginning when I had difficulties figuring out how to write it and what voice to write it in, getting my bearings," Eugenides offers. He also cops to a standard writerly procrastination technique: excessive research, a way of being enjoyably busy without actually moving forward. "The book kept taking me down roads that made me do more investigation. The novel becomes your jailer and you start to sympathize with it, like Patty Hearst!"

One side effect of their excessive gestation is that Eugenides's and Tartt's books weigh in on the heavy side. Middlesex is a 529-page doorstopper, its generational saga about a Greek American family with incestuous tendencies also serving as the memoir of a well-adjusted hermaphrodite named Callie/Cal. Crammed into nearly every page are meditations—alternately dazzling and awkward—on genetic mutation, destiny, and the Nation of Islam. Eugenides admits, "Sometimes I'd have to write a chapter 10 or 12 times to get the right proportion of how much historical information and new information I needed so as not to overwhelm but energize the story I was telling."

Literary ambition, fueled by a need to surpass his debut, is part of the explanation for this bloating. "I wanted to see if I could top myself," Eugenides confirms. "I made it hard on myself, because my idea for the second novel was to write a large comic epic of a book. There were times when it gave me enough trouble that I thought, Forget this big idea, let's do the small one. But it was like I had seen the enchanted mountain and I couldn't get it out of my head," he laughs. As she explains it, Tartt's desire to do something completely different from The Secret History entailed "starting again at the beginning and learning how to do my work in a completely different way: formally, psychologically, in all respects." Jettisoning the self-conscious pretensions of The Secret History, she focused on developing characterization and narrative. A fusion of the children's adventure genre and Southern gothic—imagine Harriet the Spy meets Faulkner—The Little Friend follows a young girl (named Harriet, incidentally) on a quest to solve the mystery of her brother's murder. In her Mississippi backwater town, Harriet is cosseted by a lovingly concocted menagerie of spinster aunts (the remains of a grand old family halfway to ruination). "The Little Friend is a much more symphonic work, with different movements and many different voices," says Tartt. "Very few of the lessons I'd learned in writing The Secret History applied." This meant that "sometimes, at the end of the day, I end up throwing away everything I've done, like Penelope unraveling her day's weaving."

Tartt's longtime editor, Gary Fisketjon, insists that he never tried to hurry her along. But most contemporary writers I spoke to feel a nagging pressure to turn books in quickly. Mary Gaitskill, who has labored over several embryonic novels in the decade since 1991's Two Girls Fat and Thin, explains, "No one's holding a gun to your head, although I suppose that could happen if you took too long. But you do fall off the map, because the career benefits are from publishing a lot of books."

Literary agent Nicole Aragi doesn't buy this notion that readers and publishers lose interest in tardy authors. "I don't get too nervous if a writer works slowly. My files are full of amendments extending delivery dates. . . . The pressure writers feel may be largely self-imposed." Junot Díaz, an Aragi client, is a case in point: He continues to work on a novel six years after the stunning success of his debut story collection, Drown. "He's his own toughest critic," says Aragi. "He shows me material and it's extraordinary, but I sometimes worry that he goes back and tears it up."

The biggest difference between writing a first and second novel is not just more money (if you're lucky); it's what British editor Simon Prosser, whose roster includes Zadie Smith and Alain de Botton, deems "a lost state of bliss." Says Prosser, "When you write your first book, you don't know who you're writing for or what awaits you. With the second book, if your work has been digested in the press, you think, 'Oh, is my writing really like that?' It's impossible to ignore the consciousness of your work being out there and people reading it and thinking things about it."

Ali Smith, one of Prosser's writers, recently won an Encore Award—a prize specifically geared toward second novels—for Hotel World. While she's thrilled by the praise, she's also wary: "All the attention made me more visible to myself, and that's the worst thing for a writer, because when you're sitting in front of a piece of paper you need to subtract yourself. Suddenly there's this idea that you are not just a writer—you are a performer."

No one knows this better than Zadie Smith. Before she'd even finished White Teeth, she was engulfed in a blizzard of media buzz. At first Smith seemed to blossom—as fast as you can say "multicultural diva," she'd transformed from a plump, bespectacled nerdette into a glamorous lit star. But Smith soon wilted under the harsh media glare. Then she attended the Santa Maddalena writers' colony in Tuscany. "When I arrived in Italy, I was all washed up," she revealed in a letter quoted in Vanity Fair. "I hadn't written properly for a year, I wasn't writing, I'd stopped thinking. Despite every advantage in terms of money and support, despite some success and a lot of encouragement, I really thought I was all done. . . . At 25, and with only one novel to my credit, I couldn't see myself writing another. Nothing I liked about it—about the practice of writing—was the same. What had been a hobby was now a job, what passed for a quiet life had turned all shouty, all busy, all screamy, all the time."

Last year, Smith told a British newspaper that she might never write another novel; instead she planned to become an academic. In the event she did both. This month she heads to Harvard to take up a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, just as The Autograph Man (Random House, $24.95) hits the stores. Following White Teeth relatively swiftly—a mere two-year gap compared with Tartt's and Eugenides's 10—The Autograph Man seems anorexic compared with their plus-size novels. At 400 pages, The Autograph Man's scope is narrower than that of the sprawling, ambitious White Teeth. This seems like a deliberate tactic to deflate or sidestep excessive expectations, since Smith has voiced discomfort about the way White Teeth was hailed as an epochal panorama of multiculti London.

The new book revolves around Alex-Li Tandem, a Jewish-Chinese autograph dealer who serves as a prism for all of Smith's ruminations on popular culture, religion, celebrity, and love. Although too hipsterish for its own good, The Autograph Man won't fatally disappoint fans hungering for Smith's energetic way with the word. She hits the Jewish note too hard (does she realize that the chosen people don't kvetch about kabbalah and goys all day long?), and the plot gets madcap somewhere in the middle, but her portrait of a young man using his cultural obsessions to wallpaper over his feelings bears Smith's signature sting.

The book's 27-year-old hero is "one of this generation who watch themselves," Smith announces. "He was in the habit of mouthing his own personality traits to himself like this while putting his coat on; he suspected that farm boys and people from the Third World never did this, that they were less self-conscious." Smith likes to mouth her own personality traits too, always ready with a wiseass auto-critique. ("When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.") This self-consciousness informed her writing from the start (she gave White Teeth one of its few cruel reviews), and she uses it to her own benefit—as a way to keep expectations in perspective. "The only thing I'm interested in is writing twice as well as—no, not even the next guy—as myself, last time," she wrote a few years ago on her British publisher's Web site. "I know White Teeth dances about on the page, performs itself, concerns itself with writerly-ness instead of people, and is cold. It is cold. But I can fix that, I think. I keep on reading, I learn—it's all good. It may take twenty years, but I'm in this thing for the long haul. You have to be, don't you?"

Hooking up with Dave Eggers—with his "Let the mountain come to Mohammed" approach—also seems to have lightened up her attitude to publishing. She's done very few interviews or public appearances in the last few years, mostly participating in McSweeney's vaudeville-style road show by contributing a short story, a letter, or an impromptu rendition of a Motown classic. "The stuff I do for McSweeney's," she has said, "is absurdist and experimental and quite liberating." So although The Autograph Man isn't the leap forward that critics might be craving, ignoring publishers' hopes for another big blockbuster book might be a fine way to preserve sanity and escape the clutches of the Second-Novel Syndrome.

The second novel never used to be the make-or-break point in a writer's career. Allen Kurzweil, who published his much anticipated second novel, The Grand Complication, last year, thinks we should look to "late bloomers" like Jonathan Franzen, Robertson Davies, and John Irving—examples of literary careers allowed to unfurl at a more leisurely pace: "It's nice to have a success along the lines of Franzen's The Corrections, it provides a chronology that accommodates writing in obscurity for three or four or five books. As long as publishers are willing to keep publishing writers who aren't a hit the first time around, it's fine. But that's not a given anymore. The burden now falls on the writer to create space he or she needs to write the ambitious book, which is where the pressure comes in." Kurzweil points out that although it took him six years to write his celebrated first novel, A Case of Curiosities, and nine years to write The Grand Complication (which got a more muted reception), "my third book took no time at all to have a draft done. It was a different, much briefer experience."

As a follow-up to their follow-ups, both Eugenides and Tartt are working on smaller books with more finite parameters—Eugenides has written a Berlin travelogue for Bloomsbury's "Writer and the City" line, and Tartt signed up to do a novella based on the tale of Icarus for Scottish publisher Canongate's myth series. Finishing the second novel means clearing a huge career hurdle for a lot of contemporary authors; much of the pressure to prove oneself disperses with its publication. More than that, Eugenides feels it is an important threshold in a writer's trajectory. "Don DeLillo told me that the first book was a gift and you don't know how you wrote it. The second book you really teach yourself to write. By the time you've finished it, you know you can write books. And I think that's true: After book two, it's like you've finally become a professional writer." V

Joy Press is a book critic for the Voice.

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