WOMEN ABOUT TOWN

A group of sleekly self-absorbed New York women anguish over one-upmanship in the fields of print and fashion—in a trite, superficial debut from editor and New Criterion dance critic Jacobs.

Iris Biddle is in her 40s, divorced (from the old-money Biddles), and a style hound who, in her exquisitely furnished Gramercy Park apartment, creates high-end lampshades for people just like her. Fixated on things, as nearly everyone in this flatfooted novel seems to be, Iris quietly spends her time gluing on branches she has clipped from New York City parks, shopping for precious, costly items, and sneering at sorority sisters who get better seats at Calvin Klein’s fashion show. Lana—who has yet to meet Iris but whose story is related in alternating chapters—is a gutsy, hard-driven woman from Chicago who has needled herself into the perfumed pages of New York magazines. Lana, while not unsympathetic, alienates the reader by the grossly glamorous pusses she’s captivated by, such as beanstalk, frost-headed Sylvie, who competes with her for junk journalism assignments, and Lana’s intimidating and insecure nemesis in dance criticism, Fernanda Levine. These may well be modeled on real people known to Jacobs and her husband, fellow Vanity Fair author of note James Wolcott, but any spell they might therefore cast equally on the reader is far from guaranteed. Their existential conflicts consist, typically, in choosing $275 shoes at Bergdorf’s (“Shoes are like lipstick. . . no matter what is happening in between, your feet and your mouth can always be beautiful”) and stoking one another’s prickly egos while having tea at the Stanhope. Men are eccentric appendages, as in Iris’s case, or clueless bachelors who can’t take the hint that it’s time to get serious, as in Lana’s. This is a world described in labels and surfaces, and the ending arrives with all the momentousness of the next issue of a glossy monthly.

An insider affair, and a shameless plug for the glib set.