A Taste of The High Life

THE SPARE WIFE

By Alex Witchel

Knopf. 286 pp. $23.95

One of the spookier things about Alex Witchel's new novel of manners about bigwigs in New York is the inclusion, as additional publicity for book reviewers, of one of her notorious Feed Me columns from the New York Times. The column tells the story of a disastrous evening out at a very pretentious restaurant. She was accompanied that night by Peter Gethers, who, she writes, "edits cookbooks by authors like Nancy Silverton of . . . La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles," and "Janis Donnaud [who] is a literary agent with authors like Paula Deen and Bill Telepan. Let's just say they eat out a little." She doesn't have to mention her own husband's name, because Manhattan readers would know it already. She's married to Frank Rich, for years the biggest, baddest theater critic in all the land, and now an op-ed pundit with a scary reputation. It's like being married to Dick Cheney or the Wizard of Oz. The column is particularly vengeful. The young restaurant hostess is described -- in a quote widely repeated on the Internet -- as having "the anesthetized air of a Barneys salesgirl who had languished too long in Belts." Plainly put, she doesn't recognize them! She makes them wait for a table! Witchel murders the place. Then the four walk out and go to a restaurant where they're treated more appropriately -- lots of bowing and scraping, rabbit with spaetzle and free desserts for all. No one pushes Witchel around and gets away with it. One does wonder if the young hostess lost her job. Or how badly her feelings were crushed. Or if Witchel relishes collecting one more enemy.

But why would a publicist fold this petty column into the pages of a novel? Because "The Spare Wife" is also a tale of grandiosity, paranoia and revenge, set in big, bad New York, where men are men and women live by their beauty and their wits, and life is like one long metaphysical escalator where you're either going up or down.

The heroine, Ponce (yes, for eternal youth, for Ponce de Leon, though she's actually in her 40s), is utterly glamorous, devastatingly thin, ineffably rich. She arrived in the city 20-some years ago, had a few seasons as the most beautiful model in all America, then carefully decided to marry a rich old man. She went to law school, divorced her husband, returned to nurse him on his deathbed and now works somewhere downtown (although you never see this) devoting her career to good causes. She's generous to her doorman and is a stand-up, square-shake gal to her friends: She doesn't threaten wives the way an ordinary extremely rich and beautiful single woman would, because she's given up on sex and is only available to talk about the Knicks to their husbands (you never see her doing that, either).

Her best friend, Shawsie, is married to a philanderer, and Ponce disapproves of this -- how can Shawsie put up with it? But Ponce can afford her own high standards. She needs no one, nobody. Of course, all this is an elaborate ruse. Ponce is having an affair with a married man, and since New York, for all its fabled fearsomeness, is about the size of three junior high schools, someone is bound to find out about it. The finder-outer, a blond babe named Babette, bears an eerie resemblance to what Ponce might have been a couple of decades ago, except that she has no ethics. Still in her early 20s, Babette has come to New York to make her fortune. She works as an editorial assistant at a Manhattan magazine, steals other people's invitations to parties and hands out her sexual favors like penny candy. She's one of the many who sleeps with Shawsie's husband, and when she discovers Ponce's indiscretion, like a wicked child she plots to overthrow New York's undisputed queen.

But messing with Ponce is like ignoring Frank Rich and Alex Witchel at a restaurant. You just don't want to do it. Ponce's reputation as a good friend to all is hard-earned, and middle-aged, professional-class Manhattan rushes to her aid.

Does Witchel scorn this society or love it or simply love her place in it? It's hard to tell. The novel is framed by two almost identical, over-the-top dinner parties. At the first, a distraught hostess pulls out her blow-dryer to make a rose open gracefully. What a fuss over nothing!

To return to the earlier restaurant piece, I was a guest at Silverton's signing party at Campanile, next door to La Brea Bakery. I met the cookbook editor Gethers; he seemed like a nice man. Nobody fainted at his very sight, though. New Yorkers take themselves so seriously! Is Witchel laughing at that, or is she a part of that? It's hard to say.

Sunday in Book World

¿ Susan Choi's "A Person of Interest."