Pretty Woman

This Yale-educated courtesan is a royal (literally) pain.

KEPT

A Comedy of Sex and Manners

By Y. Euny Hong

Simon & Schuster. 270 pp. $24

At some point in my exceedingly democratic and class-blind upbringing, I read The Late George Apley, by John P. Marquand, and for the first time observed the inner sanctum of high society. I didn't accept the snobbery, didn't want Beacon Hill to discriminate against South Boston, but at least I started to understand the social drawer I hadn't been born into.

Now comes Kept , a first novel by Y. Euny Hong, reminding me that the upper crust may not be the sturdiest launching pad for a well-adjusted American life. Narrator Judith Lee, often Jude, is a direct descendant of the Korean royal family who can trace her family back 28 generations on her father's side and 26 on her mother's. At 26, she is living in New York, unemployable despite her Yale degree due to a low personal threshold for anything practical, commercial or subservient. Here is the essential dilemma, as Jude defines it: "I am ten times prettier than my intelligence would warrant, and ten times cleverer than such a lovely girl has any right to be. This has been the origin of all my life's sorrows, for one attribute gets me only so far before the other undermines it."

But don't worry that all in these pages is vanity. Hong, a Washington-based journalist, has managed to convey -- even as her first-person offender rants and raves in queenly fashion -- that her intolerances are neither admirable nor prescriptive. Not an easy trick, to create a seemingly reliable narrator who is blind to some of her faults but willing to showcase them for a greater redemptive and comic good.

Royal blood notwithstanding, Jude is penniless and deeply in debt. A discreet relative with her own set of secrets on the intimacy front puts Jude in touch with an ogresse , "what the French used to call a woman who made social introductions" -- not a matchmaker but a madam with a four-story townhouse on East 62nd Street, doing business as Tartakov Translation Services. Madame, formerly a Russian ballerina who married a dance pupil "who, by good fortune, was wealthy and had angina," will pay Jude's debts if she buys the right underwear, moves in, has her tubes tied and signs on for two years of dispensing sexual favors to a well-born and wealthy clientele.

Madame Tartakov utters nothing that isn't terse and quotable; she's a woman who's never met a euphemism. Here she is evaluating Jude: "Good skin, but need emulsifier. Good nose; most Oriental girls have too flat nose. Eyes have too much red. Use Visine. And too small, you look like squinting . . . . Breasts mediocre . . . . Annoying voice. Don't talk when you're making love." Jude's fellow courtesans are similarly pedigreed, all descended from far-flung royalty (Scottish, German, Romanian), and none has had money for at least two generations. "Growing up aristo is not really what most people think it is," she explains. "Your power is all gone, but your responsibilities remain the same."

Jude's code of conduct will undergo some revision with the help of a non-client suitor, a philosophy PhD candidate named Josh Spinoza, half-Jew, half "generic mongrel" and 100 percent fair-minded. Still, even as we root for a better, kinder heroine, we wouldn't want to miss her tantrums. To a woman at the opera "gabbing at full volume," Jude hisses most satisfyingly, "I don't know how you people do things at Disney on Ice, but here you keep silent during the performance."

The sex in Kept, though the basis of the loan-shark arrangement, is pretty much confined to the novel's subtitle. "I met with Yevgeny at a room in the St. Estèphe," Jude reports briskly. "We had commerce, and I put a lot more effort into it than usual." I admired that restraint. After all, only so much of the sexual fevers and transports and emissions can be described with a straight face in any fiction, let alone a comedy of manners. Witty disdain leads the way, which is to say that the whole might best be appreciated as the sum of its antics and conversations.

Sprinkled throughout the exposition are phrases less worthy than the rest, such as "Joshua gave me the hairy eyeball" or "I was about to lose my lunch" or "Madame Tartakov began screaming at the top of her lungs" -- all avoidable deductions from the overall score.

We small-d democrats can bear with the book's brazen elitism because we know it is doomed and because we glean through hints of self-renunciation that better, more egalitarian days are ahead for Jude. Not an easy authorial task: to win readers while they are observing life through the eyes of a defrocked royal brat. Also admirable: Hong gives the reader credit. She risks losing us to a purposefully unsympathetic narrator, trusting that we will not only indulge her character's excesses and forgive her haywire moral compass but also applaud an ending where decency, most entertainingly, reigns. ·

Elinor Lipman is the author of eight novels, most recently "My Latest Grievance."