A Certain Age: A Novel - Softcover

Janowitz, Tama

3.31

652 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385496117 ISBN 13: 9780385496117

Publisher: Anchor, 2000

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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.

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Review:

"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 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

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