Stairway to Heaven

Tama Janowitz blasted onto the literary scene in 1986 with her hard-boiled vignettes of modern New York life, “Slaves of New York.” Now in her sixth book she has cast her skeptical glance backward to show, in her publisher’s words, that “a woman’s choices, while perhaps less constricting today, are no less exacting than they were a hundred years ago.” This is a far-reaching claim for what is essentially a present-day parody of Edith Wharton’s turn-of-the-century novel “The House of Mirth.” Wharton subtly manipulated characters and language to illustrate how arrant greed and social barbarism afflict the most highly “civilized” members of society. Janowitz, in “A Certain Age,” all but shrieks about the sins of the rich.

Florence Collins, like Wharton’s Lily Bart, is an attractive single woman caught up in the social whirl of top-notch New York, and she, too, relies on her well-tended looks and wardrobe to compensate for her inadequate funds in gaining entry to elite circles. Florence, 32, and Lily, 29 are beginning to feel the desperation of the advent of that “certain age” when they require a wealthy partner to catapult them to the position of solidly banked hostess rather than decorative hanger-on. As Florence reflects, even at the end of the 20th century, “No one wanted to admit it, but the highest status for women in New York was to be married to a rich man.” Both women fruitlessly pursue an extremely wealthy boor who is ruled by an overbearing mother, and both spurn the men who truly care for them.

Florence overindulges in retail therapy and turns to the husband of a seeming friend for financial advice. The husband demands more than good conversation in return, and scandal erupts. The investment he recommends turns out not to be what she had hoped for, and she responds not by becoming chastened or prudent but by being a more active instrument in her own demise. Reckless spending and social missteps combine with fickle friendships to make the downward spiral inevitable.

This is not to say that Janowitz has added to Wharton’s tale, but she has done so much more in style than in substance. Though both stories begin with the journey to a friend’s country-house gathering, Florence’s life becomes interesting only once she leaves the Hamptons. She returns to her cramped, overpriced apartment “in one of the best locations,” and Janowitz regains her sarcastic stride, farcically updating the story. Rather than having a friend’s husband take her for rides around Central Park, Florence is “practically raped” by him and then continues the affair out of resignation. A social interloper does not merely monopolize her attention; he rubs up against her at the buffet with an erection.

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One grotesque scene places Florence at an exhibition opening at the home studio of an artist and his wife. Max, a gay gossip-monger who has invited Florence and later betrays her confidence, explains the couple’s domestic arrangement: “He has boyfriends and she has girlfriends--but they only sleep with people who have a title.” Max and a friend begin a shouted conversation about one woman’s tapeworm. In one of several veiled references to Wharton’s story, Florence surmises that such vulgarity is a symptom of the age: “It was the end of the twentieth century and there was no bile, no filth, no disgusting image that could not be taken out and publicly displayed, paraded. Had things really been so much worse in the Victorian era, when all this stuff was repressed?”

This represents a rare flash of insight (however naive) for Florence, who generally behaves much like all the other “cardboard cutouts with a sense of self-importance” whom she disdains, and that is the ultimate disappointment of “A Certain Age.” While the ridicule is usually well-placed and funny, the effect is hyperbolic: The characters amuse, but they never expand to three dimensions. Florence “had spent her whole adult life in New York preparing for this. The perfect clothes, the expensive grooming, the sleek pelt of hair, the job in an auction house. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of women like herself.” Florence never develops beyond this type and is as unreal as the young movie starlet in a magazine article who provokes her ire: “Ibis, twenty-three, came from an incredible family: her mother, an English aristocrat and well-known beauty, had once been married to an English pop star before marrying Ibis’ father, an ornithology professor at Oxford. Ibis had been a brilliant actress since age fifteen. The other children in the family were named Shrike, Pheasant, Madchen, Vireo and Warbler. Oh, in such cool bliss did the family live, roaming the grounds of their four-thousand-acre estate . . . discovering new species of sparrow, performing their own composed concerto to one another. . . .”

This is Tama Janowitz at her cutting best. Florence and her coterie of social climbers are no match for the pale elegance of Lily Bart. And Janowitz’s satire does not attempt the fullness and depth of Wharton’s tragedy. She is, however, disarmingly adept at describing the tedium and tumult of New York or the strange pain of a crack hangover, making sharp observation of veneer a passable substitute for an understanding of the more subtle complexities that lie beneath. In that spirit, even the refined Lily Bart might simply advise Florence to stop whining and get a job.*