A Certain Age

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.

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.

From The Critics

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 - Publisher's 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

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.
— Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH

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 Florence's 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 thejewels 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.