THE MADONNA COMPLEX

Plotboiler Bogner’s tenth novel (Honor Thy Wife, 1999, etc.) is actually a rewrite of a sex-and-shopping tale he published some 30 years ago, now “totally rewritten for the 21st century . . . and 25% shorter.”

Though it bristles with contemporary brand names, pop singers, art-world babble, Internet dot-com companies, and trendy Manhattan eateries, Bogner's story remains a 1970s sin-and-salvation mattress-pounder. Widowed, 50-something billionaire financier and wheeler-dealer Teddy Franklin has bought every pleasure he ever wanted until he meets Barbara Hickman, the daughter of a wine merchant whose business affairs Franklin had offered to restructure. Barbara, a United Nations translator, has a connoisseur's knowledge of big money passions and curves that would make men of a bygone era say hubba-hubba. Alas, she harbors dark feelings of worthlessness that inspire her to casual promiscuity with every man but Teddy, whose dazzlingly expensive acts of largesse (name-brand watch, name-location apartment, dinner at name restaurants, roses roses everywhere) leave her nonplused. She feeds his obsession by teasing him. Desperate to learn about her private life, Teddy pays his Latino crime boss buddy to burglarize the office of Barbara's psychiatrist. Faster than you can say “Watergate,” the burglary results in an accidental death. Teddy tries to buy off the victim's daughter and finally achieves bliss when Barbara throws underwear to the wind and tells him to “be diabolical with me.” After gloriously naughty sex and brand-name spending, they must learn that they truly love each other when Teddy finds himself blackmailed and then held for ransom in a remote corner of the Canadian frontier, with only Barbara to come to his rescue. Lumpy prose (“the hiss of sputtering bus fumes cannibalized the air”) and lurid glimpses of the high life seem the appropriate accouterments for this tiresome tale of mutual obsession between a wanton beauty and an odious old goat.

A gussied-up Jacqueline Susann novel for those who have not had the pleasure or the pain.