A Certain Age
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
"I consider every moment of my life spent unaware of the existence of novelist Tama Janowitz a complete and utter waste of consciousness...I would build a city of pearl and onyx for Tama Janowitz with my own raw and useless hands."
-- Mallory Ortberg, The Toast
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.
“If there’s anything Tama Janowitz knows about, it’s the sheer savagery of our most chic and ultra-sophisticated social arrangements.” – The New York Times Book 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
“A scathing satire…Janowitz takes a shredder to New York City’s crème de la crème.” – Philadelphia City Paper
“A sharp-tongued and funny writer.” – Chicago Tribune
“Janowitz’s writing comes out of a tradition of comic American misantghropy that can be traced back to Twain, passing along the way through such intervening figures as Dreiser, Nathanael West, and the author of whom she is most reminiscent, Ring Lardner.” – New York Newsday
“Tama still has her knack for homing in on our worst fears and behavior, and initially, you feel like you can’t relate to Florence. Then you realize you only hope you can’t relate.” – Jane
“[Florence’s] steady decline down the social ladder she so desperately want to climb is the stuff of black humor.” – Manhattan File
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.
