"It was the sort of education that a young woman might have once had simply in order to be able to make civilized conversation at dinner." A stray passage from an Edith Wharton novel? No, it's Tama Janowitz's tale of Manhattan life in the '90s, which follows a decidedly Whartonian downward spiral. Florence Collins wants a rich husband. And although she is accomplished, a good conversationalist, a snappy dresser, and stunningly beautiful, she can't seem to find one. Why? Because she lives in New York; in her early 30s, she is past her prime; and her name is legion.

Florence disastrously visits the Hamptons, goes out to a lot of expensive restaurants, and halfheartedly performs her job at an auction house, but finds her matrimonial quarry ever elusive. Janowitz tells us, "By high school she had realized that no matter what women filled their lives with, there was still no status for them apart from whoever-whatever they had married." No clue is given as to how Florence comes to this arresting conclusion, but the author chooses to make her pay for her callowness. So predictable is Janowitz's notion of moral failure that we find our once-fastidious gal smoking crack by novel's end as well as friendless and broke. What's missing here are the psychological atmospherics found in The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. Instead, we get loving descriptions of department-store sprees: "She went to up to the men's department and spent seven hundred dollars on a black cashmere crew neck sweater--three hundred fifty dollars--two black t-shirts, fifty dollars each, a matelot shirt ... for seventy dollars and a pair of brown linen-silk blend trousers with pleats and cuffs, on sale for two hundred." This is yuppie porn--disguised as a scorching indictment of yuppie porn. Janowitz wants to have her sushi and eat it, too. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
A sordid, contemporary rendition of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, this unflaggingly downbeat comedy of manners charts the cruelties visited upon fashionable Manhattan women seeking husbands and social status before the clock runs out. Like Wharton's Lily Bart, Janowitz's protagonist is, in the words of a society gossip column, "an aging filly about town," whose head spins with fantasies of a fashionable mate, flights on the Concorde, a 15-bedroom apartment furnished with "Biedermeier, French club chairs, Mies van der Rohe." Shedding money from her rapidly dwindling trust fund, Florence Collins blazes a promiscuous, startlingly self-destructive path from the Hampton estate of her all too ephemeral friends, Nathalie and John de Jongh, whose daughter she carelessly allows into the ocean unattended (an event that leads to the child's eventual death from pneumonia) to vacuous Manhattan cocktail parties, art openings and baby showers. Vying for her attention are a circle of men, from investment banker John de Jongh, who forces himself on Florence while his wife sleeps nearby, then persuades her to invest her last $25,000 in a hopeless restaurant venture; the Italian playboy Rafaello, who visits her for quick sex and introduces her to crack cocaine; and Darryl, an earnest lawyer and advocate for the homeless whom she rejects for his lack of funds. What poignancy the novel offers is continuously undercut by the author's arch contempt for virtually every character, particularly the beautiful and insipid figure of Florence herself, and the novel's other protagonist, the city of New York, whose denizens are "in the convulsive, terminal stages of a lengthy disease, the disease of envy whose side effects were despair and self-hatred." At one point, as Florence flips through a profile of a pampered starlet named Ibis in a glossy magazine, Janowitz (The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group) writes, "If Florence had seen Ibis on the street, she would have strangled her quite happily." By the end of this relentlessly cynical tale, readers may feel the same way about Florence. Author tour. (July) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Florence Collins is in trouble. She's 32 and attractive, but she isn't married, has no prospects in sight, and is running out of the money left from her mother's will. In addition, she spends the weekend in the Hamptons with friends Natalie and John, only to find John at her bedroom door with love on his mind. If that isn't enough, the next day she almost lets their daughter, Claudia, drown in the ocean in an innocent attempt to let the girl have some fun. Things continue to deteriorate during the course of the book as we watch Florence reject suitors and spend money she doesn't have in a vain attempt to fit in with the "right" crowd and land a wealthy husband. Her dead-end job appraising jewelry for an auction house and her delusions of grandeur bring her nothing but trouble. In her sixth novel, Janowitz (By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee, LJ 7/96) uses her trademark biting wit to take a dark, satiric look at being young, female, and alone in modern Manhattan. Recommended for public libraries.-ARobin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Henry Alford
...A Certain Age, as amusing and as well observed as it is, is ultimately a Pyrrhic victory.


From Booklist
Janowitz returns to New York, the city she loves to revile, after satirizing small-town eccentricity in her last novel, By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (1996). Here, in this caustic caricature of fashionable Manhattan and the Hamptons, its summer camp, everyone is maniacally materialistic, narcissistic, and cutthroat. And Janowitz has, once again, whipped up a ditsy dame for her hapless protagonist. A beautiful 32-year-old blond with the unhip name of Florence and the personality of a possessed Barbie doll, she is not only clueless around men, she is cruel to women and fatal to children. She dithers around at her low-paying job at a second-tier auction house while roaring through her modest inheritance at an alarming and demented rate. The only solution to her financial woes that she can imagine is the age-old compromise of seducing and marrying a rich man, but she can't even get that right. Florence gets ripped off, drinks too much, smokes crack, and succumbs numbly to forcible sex. She loses her job, her apartment, and the few acquaintances who could tolerate her stupidity, and although such epic failure is plausible and intriguing, Janowitz's intentions remain murky. Her burlesque of greed and what passes today for high society is poisonous, frenetic, and intermittently amusing, but it is also blandly nihilistic. Florence is a bizarre reincarnation of the desperate women of, say, Edith Wharton, who had to marry to survive, but surely things have changed? And surely Janowitz could aim her vituperation at more deserving targets. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Vaguely matured author Janowitz (By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee, 1996, etc.) creates a well-rounded, static character, smartly walks her through New York's social paces, and succeeds in creating a fully adequate novel. Janowitz characters once were indifferent to the harms they caused others, but Florence Collins at least justifies her innocence. Collins, a 32-year-old unmarried, underpaid employee at an auction house, makes the mythic summer pilgrimage to the Hamptons, where Natalie and her husband, John, entertain in high style. Natalie is a winner in Florence's eyes, having married a wealthy, if unfulfilling, husband. After a trio of mishaps, Natalie accuses Florence of stealing her husband, destroying her sumptuous home, and attempting to drown her child, Claudia (who dies weeks later). Naturally, Florence is exiled back to New York, where her hunt for a mate takes precedence over paying her bills, maintaining her dignity, and keeping her job and her friends. She fruitlessly dates Italian playboy Rafaello, is accused of Claudia's murder, and spurns the love of sincere-but-penniless Daryl. Meanwhile, she stumbles on a sack of valuable jewelry intended for the auction house, and when fired from the job, she keeps the gems. After a crack-smoking night with Rafaello, Florence is evicted from her apartment, loses the precious jewels, and John scams her out of her last $25,000. And it seems sincere Daryl is secretly wealthy. Though the pace of Florences tumble slackens in the second half of the story, the parties, openings, and crack highs are deftly sketched. Yet she learns nothing from her travails: she is an unchanging sensibility in a fickle world. Luck has it that she finds the jewels in the end, her transparent personality unaltered. While Florence's declining fortunes in a crass city are well-described, her failure to achieve any wisdom about her life makes it hard to sympathize with her misfortunes. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Her best ever."--Harper's Bazaar

"Janowitz has penned a brutal update of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, accurately analyzing the social codes and economic hierarchy that functions in the New York she knows, as Wharton did a century ago." --Detour

"Smart and sassy." --The Boston Globe


Review
"Her best ever."--Harper's Bazaar

"Janowitz has penned a brutal update of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, accurately analyzing the social codes and economic hierarchy that functions in the New York she knows, as Wharton did a century ago." --Detour

"Smart and sassy." --The Boston Globe


Book Description
From the bestselling author of Slaves of New York comes a hilarious, clear-eyed, satiric novel about the sad plight of a misguided woman on the make in Manhattan. Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins is an "aging filly-about-town"--still beautiful enough to be (sometimes) invited to the best parties and the right restaurants, but unmarried and rapidly going broke. In her world, marriage to a wealthy man is all that can save her, although Florence's hard-hearted search for security and status takes her on an inevitable downward spiral.

New York "society novels" at the turn of the nineteenth century gave us a piercing look at the world and rituals of the city's wealthy; Janowitz here casts that tradition in a fresh light, giving us a tirn-of-the-century society novel that demonstrates how little seems to have changed. In a sly and unforgettable portrait of New York's haute monde, Janowitz brilliantly evokes a young woman's struggle for love and survival in the city that is as unforgiving today as it was a hundred years ago.



From the Inside Flap
From the bestselling author of Slaves of New York comes a hilarious, clear-eyed, satiric novel about the sad plight of a misguided woman on the make in Manhattan. Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins is an "aging filly-about-town"--still beautiful enough to be (sometimes) invited to the best parties and the right restaurants, but unmarried and rapidly going broke. In her world, marriage to a wealthy man is all that can save her, although Florence's hard-hearted search for security and status takes her on an inevitable downward spiral.

New York "society novels" at the turn of the nineteenth century gave us a piercing look at the world and rituals of the city's wealthy; Janowitz here casts that tradition in a fresh light, giving us a tirn-of-the-century society novel that demonstrates how little seems to have changed. In a sly and unforgettable portrait of New York's haute monde, Janowitz brilliantly evokes a young woman's struggle for love and survival in the city that is as unforgiving today as it was a hundred years ago.


From the Back Cover
"Her best ever."--Harper's Bazaar

"Janowitz has penned a brutal update of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, accurately analyzing the social codes and economic hierarchy that functions in the New York she knows, as Wharton did a century ago." --Detour

"Smart and sassy." --The Boston Globe


About the Author
Tama Janowitz is the author of Slaves of New York, A Cannibal in Manhattan, American Dad, The Male Cross-Dressers Support Group, and By the Shores of Gichee Gumee, and is the recipient of two NEA grants in fiction, as well as a New York State Council of the Arts Award in Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
She had an urge to tap his head with a spoon. It might wake him out of his trance. She could visualize the yellowish brains trickling over his glasses frames, such mild yolk--and the other passengers on the jitney to the Hamptons would no doubt quickly whip croissants out of their weekend luggage and come to dip the corners in the soft stuff, hoping to taste so much money.

"Florence . . . !" Charlie said. "How are . . . you?"

She grabbed the seat next to his.

"I would normally . . . drive," he said.

"You usually drive to the Hamptons on the weekend?" Florence asked.

He nodded. "Only my car is in the garage."

"Being fixed," Florence said. Maybe having so much money had made him sluggish, softened his brain, like the last Emperor of China. He seemed to be cocooned in something. He seemed swaddled, a great distance away, though she was right beside him. The traffic chugged forward and died to a halt. The air was gray and thick with exhaust. Here there were no trees, only old factories and warehouses, like rusted shipwrecks jutting from cement. If there was already so much traffic, it would be midnight before the bus got to the Hamptons.

"Not . . . exactly," Charlie said. "You see, a few . . . weeks ago, I left it . . . parked in front of that new restaurant, Derek and Trevor's . . ."

"And somebody . . . hit it?" Whatever he had was catching. She was speaking slowly too.

"No . . . it's a convertible, you see, and the roof was closed. When I got into the car, I thought, Something stinks, and next to me, on the passenger's seat, some idiot had thrown a fish head."

"Why would they do such a thing?"

"I can only assume . . . because I parked in front of someone's yard, and I know there have been a lot of local complaints in Bridgehampton that Derek and Trevor opened a restaurant there. I threw the fish head onto the sidewalk. Well, it was so warm and sunny I opened the roof . . . and this is sort of . . . complicated . . . however . . . a few days later I noticed . . . there was a terrible smell . . . and I cleaned out the car . . . but the smell didn't go away. And after another week I tried to clean it again. I put the roof up . . . because I was going into the city and--"

"Weird," Florence said. "And you really don't think it was some girl or something?"

He either didn't like her question or, having begun, couldn't stop before he had finished his story. "And when I put up the roof . . . I found wedged down in the back part where the roof goes when it's open . . . there was another fish head . . . and by now it was crawling with maggots.  And the company can't get the smell out . . . they've replaced the seats, and had it cleaned, but they can't seem to get rid of the smell."

"Ugh. How creepy!" She gave his hand a squeeze. It was soft and rubbery, and next to her hand, with its long graceful fingers, his looked like a child's. This seemed somewhat sad, the reverse of one of those children who age prematurely. "You're sure it wasn't someone who knew you?"

"Oh, God, I don't know," he said. "This weekend I'm just going to go out and buy another car." Then, changing the subject, he said brightly, "Hey! A friend of mine just gave me a picture he took of me--a portrait. He's a well-known fashion photographer.

"I'd love to see," she said.

"Yes?" He was cute when he smiled. His whole face cracked open, as if sealed under the layers of skin was a trapped baby allowed out only on special occasions. "The picture's kind of artistic, if you know what I mean--I'm naked." He pronounced both "artistic" and "naked" as if they came with quotation marks around them.

He opened a manila envelope and handed the photograph to her. In the picture he was seated nude on a stool, looking as if he might topple off, balanced only by his two skinny legs, spread far apart, feet clinging to the rungs. On his face was an expression of such supreme self-pride that Florence knew it could only be related to the appendage dangling between his legs. The bus was heavily air-conditioned. She reached for a sweater and put it on while she thought of what to say

"It's awfully hard to see in this light," she said. She was shocked, which she supposed was the point. He seemed so prissy, then to start flashing naked pictures of himself. Maybe it was a little test, to see how she would respond. She fumbled in her pocketbook for the remains of a Swiss dark chocolate nut bar she had been nibbling throughout the day. "Very nice!" The words came out slightly patronizingly, but he didn't seem to notice.

"I thought . . . he did a good job. My friend is very talented, as a photographer . . . I don't know what I'll do with it, though. Frame it, I guess, and hang it in the bedroom." He turned to her and whispered in a confidential voice, "You were right . . . I think it was this girl I was going out with who put the fish heads in my car. She knew I had just gotten a brand-new SAAB convertible."

"She must have been heartbroken," Florence said. "That you broke up with her--and that was all she could think of doing, to get revenge. But it wasn't funny! It wasn't very nice!"

"No . . ." said Charlie thoughtfully. "You know, I don't think I've ever really spent much time talking to you. This is great, that we're getting a chance to talk."

"I think so too," she said, giving his arm, padded beneath a robin's-egg-blue cotton sweater, a quick stroke. Though she appeared aloof, she was an oddly affectionate person--it was as if touch was the only way she could reassure herself that anyone else existed. The cool blond looks were blended in a boyishly jock physicality, more California than New York.

The bus held forty or fifty passengers and was completely full. The travelers, with their pinched, ferocious expressions and their too brightly glittering eyes, projected an aura of paranoia mixed with anxiety that permeated the bus. The hostess, a surly overweight young woman in her mid-twenties, stumped up and down the aisle delivering plastic bottles of mineral water and cups; she was probably a local from Long Island, hired for the season. She had the sour expression of a camp counselor devoting herself to a summer's worth of sadistic activities. And yet Florence always felt calmer heading east. The Western migration had not been the right journey for her mother, nor for her. All her life she had felt rootless. But her mother, after marrying, had gotten trapped, preserved in the amber sun of Southern California. She had always encouraged Florence to go back East, to marry rich, to return to spawn like a reintroduced salmon. And though her mother was no longer alive, she had managed, somehow, to imprint this on Florence--or perhaps it went deeper, imprinted on her strands of DNA like a celestial map carved on an ancient Aztec necklace.

"Would you like to do something?" Charlie said. "Tomorrow night, maybe?"

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Florence Collins sets out on the jitney for a weekend at her friend Natalie's house in the Hamptons, she boards the bus with an air of unspoken expectation, especially when she spots the very wealthy and still available, if somewhat uptight, Charlie Twigall. But the weekend's promise of potential partnering spirals into a disastrous series of mishaps that include an unwanted nighttime visit from Natalie's husband, the near drowning of Natalie's daughter, a bad financial gamble, and the expulsion of one Florence Collins from the premises. Thus begins this tragicomic novel about the sad plight of a woman on the make in Manhattan. Biding her time in a low-paying job at one of the lesser auction houses, Florence spends every cent of her not-so-hard-earned money and what's left of her mother's inheritance on body wraps, designer clothes, custom-mixed makeup and skin emollients, and every other known accessory - all in the vain hope of attracting a rich husband.

FROM THE CRITICS

NY Times Book Review

If there's anything Tama Janowitz knows about, it's the sheer savagery of our most chic and ultrasophisticated social arrangements.

BUST Magazine

Part modern-day Wharton, part updated Austen, part pissed-off, post-Warhol diatribe on greed, A CertainAge is a ruthless portrait of how wrong a girl can go in Gotham.

Book Magazine

In A Certain Age, a portrait of late-capitalist, fin de siècle New York, Tama Janowitz chronicles the travails of an "It' girl, one of those creatures who seem to emerge straight from the surface-obsessed pages of The New York Times Sunday Styles section or out of the glut of slick women's magazines, like Glamour or Allure. As Janowitz writes, "There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of women like herself: They worked in art galleries, on magazines, for investment companies. They all had poise, little black cocktail dresses, black pumps with the latest heel. They went to screenings, to parties at the Museum of Modern Art, to fashion shows.'

Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins has dedicated every facet of her existence—her "society-girl' education at Sarah Lawrence, her job at a second-rate auction house, her dwindling inheritance from her late mother—to one purpose: marrying rich. At the beginning of the novel, Florence tells her only real friend, Darryl (who is taken out of the "potential husband' category because of his "do-gooder' status as a homeless advocacy lawyer):

"I see that the disease of the twentieth century is wanting to be rich. You don't get real power as a woman—you still get it by being married to a powerful man . . . At least I'm honest enough to see the world for what it is and know what it is I'm going after. Since the disease is here, and it's here to stay, why pretend that what I want is so dishonorable or distasteful?'

Florence's age is not the Age of Innocence (although Janowitz refers repeatedly to Edith Wharton), or the Gilded Age(although it has parallels), but the age of commodification, in which Florence packages herself as a potential wife-to-be, forgoing a retirement fund so that she can spend the entirety of her paltry twenty-six thousand dollar annual salary "on maintenance for herself.' Janowitz writes, "Her facade was her property. It was an item she possessed, which she groomed and dressed in order to achieve her goals.'

With a keen eye for detail and a dry wit, Janowitz exemplified mid-'80s bohemian life in her bestselling Slaves of New York, which catapulted her to Brat Pack celebrity status, along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. More than a decade and four mediocre novels later, it is clear that Janowitz's literary skills are best suited to the vignette format of her most successful book. (It is interesting to note that the three Brats have all reappeared recently with New York-now updates of their first, best works.) In A Certain Age, Janowitz succeeds in capturing the spiritlessness of nineties wanna-be-in-society life in her portrayal of the downfall of a determined, yet imprudent, material girl, but unfortunately absence is all there is.

Florence's passive affair with her friend's husband and subsequent public humiliation and ejection from the couple's Hamptons home during a dinner party (covered in the tabloids, of course) spark a series of misfortunes and ruinous choices. An ill-advised investment in a non-existent restaurant that totally depletes her inheritance, an affair with a crack-smoking wine connoisseur, the loss of her glamorous yet low-paying job, and eviction from her Upper West Side apartment follow inevitably.

While Janowitz's prose expertly mimics the omnipresent messages of conspicuous consumption in today's culture—as found in the glossy magazines that Florence devours—it never rises above their level or penetrates their glossy surfaces. Her attempts at imparting great meaning are limited to clunky literary references to Wharton, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, especially, Henry James. In Janowitz's insight-deprived, late-twentieth century version of James' The Portrait of a Lady, Florence is a not-so-independent Isabel Archer, the secretly rich Darryl (who adores her) is the consumptive Ralph Touchett, and Eurotrash druggie Rafaello is the seductive Gilbert Osmond.

Like the latest novels of her '80s cohorts—Ellis's Glamorama and McInerney's Model Behavior—A Certain Age feels empty, as does Florence: "It was only a matter of time before she too joined their ranks, abandoning feelings—anguish, despair, hope, caring, understanding—thoughts, wishes, dreams, ideals. She had so few of those things already.' In their most recent glam-obsessed works, all of these novelists have adeptly described the so-called "disease of the twentieth century' Florence refers to, but none has offered even a glimpse of a cure.

At the beginning of Janowitz's tale, Darryl (the only character in the novel who could be described as moral) tells Florence: "You might have had a chance of becoming a real human being—but you've devoted yourself to being shallow, superficial and unreal.' Unfortunately, the same can be said of A Certain Age. —Margaret Juhae Lee

Publishers Weekly

A sordid, contemporary rendition of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, this unflaggingly downbeat comedy of manners charts the cruelties visited upon fashionable Manhattan women seeking husbands and social status before the clock runs out. Like Wharton's Lily Bart, Janowitz's protagonist is, in the words of a society gossip column, "an aging filly about town," whose head spins with fantasies of a fashionable mate, flights on the Concorde, a 15-bedroom apartment furnished with "Biedermeier, French club chairs, Mies van der Rohe." Shedding money from her rapidly dwindling trust fund, Florence Collins blazes a promiscuous, startlingly self-destructive path from the Hampton estate of her all too ephemeral friends, Nathalie and John de Jongh, whose daughter she carelessly allows into the ocean unattended (an event that leads to the child's eventual death from pneumonia) to vacuous Manhattan cocktail parties, art openings and baby showers. Vying for her attention are a circle of men, from investment banker John de Jongh, who forces himself on Florence while his wife sleeps nearby, then persuades her to invest her last $25,000 in a hopeless restaurant venture; the Italian playboy Rafaello, who visits her for quick sex and introduces her to crack cocaine; and Darryl, an earnest lawyer and advocate for the homeless whom she rejects for his lack of funds. What poignancy the novel offers is continuously undercut by the author's arch contempt for virtually every character, particularly the beautiful and insipid figure of Florence herself, and the novel's other protagonist, the city of New York, whose denizens are "in the convulsive, terminal stages of a lengthy disease, the disease of envy whose side effects were despair and self-hatred." At one point, as Florence flips through a profile of a pampered starlet named Ibis in a glossy magazine, Janowitz (The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group) writes, "If Florence had seen Ibis on the street, she would have strangled her quite happily." By the end of this relentlessly cynical tale, readers may feel the same way about Florence. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal - Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH