A Certain Age - Softcover

Florence Collins is assistant director at a second-rate auction house. She doesn't earn enough to support her lifestyle, which requires the purchase of vast quantities of designer clothes and over-priced, pre-prepared foodstuffs. The cash she inherited from her mother is running out fast, she's 32--"A Certain Age" (or, according to NY society gossip columns, an "aging filly-about-town")--fully conscious of her own shallowness and lack of principles, and desperate for a husband. A rich husband. A very very very rich husband.

Janowitz's witty, nasty novel shows how Florence's crass attempts to capture this elusive creature draw her into a downward spiral through the superficial world of air-kissing, baby showers, fashionable art, infidelity and child-neglect, into her own personal hell. More self-destructive than Madame Bovary, like Bridget Jones with the nice bits amputated, in Florence Collins Tama Janowitz has created a tragi-comic anti-heroine who is just one big fatal flaw. Read it and shriek. --Lisa Gee