Early in her novel -- a farrago about Janey Wilcox, a lingerie model and adventuress who gets caught up in movie business double-dealing -- Bushnell explains the operations of her discriminating characters: ''New Yorkers sliced everything into tiny categories, and then, like diamond sorters, examined and graded each particle.'' Bushnell herself then confers transcendent power on certain particles. The right ones (a Michael Kors dress or a rare lipstick) mean deliverance, while the wrong ones (a Laura Ashley dress or a fat arm) can be ruinous.

Accessories further reveal their oracular quality when Janey reflects on her impending marriage to Selden Rose, a cable TV executive: ''Selden had worn dark socks with sandals. When she'd seen him in that get-up . . . the beautiful yellow hills dotted with hayricks were invisible to her -- all she could picture were those navy blue socks (they seemed to be new, but still, there was a thread sticking out of the toe on the left one), encased in the heavy brown leather sandals. The sandals were Prada, but even designer shoes couldn't save a man with inherently bad taste, and all afternoon she agonized over it. Should she call off the wedding?''

Somehow, in ''Trading Up,'' this passage registers as authentically portentous. And, sure enough, the novel bears out Janey's intuition: Selden is not the right husband for her. She should have heeded the socks.

Bushnell's novel contains expansive, haphazard allusions to Balzac, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Flaubert and Forster, but it nonetheless signals its distance from literary fiction with simple, literal sentences, as well as regular italics, one-sentence paragraphs and suggestive ellipses possibly piped in from daytime drama: ''It was only, she thought bitterly, yet another misconception she was going to have to correct. . . .'' With all this fluff, the novel could almost be dismissed as cake for social aspirants, were it not for two instances of inspired iconoclasm.

First, Bushnell messes with Edith Wharton. Having ripped off the name of Wharton's hero -- Selden -- from ''The House of Mirth,'' she refuses to preserve him as the chaste man of honor that Wharton invented. Instead, she matter-of-factly fixes up Selden and Janey in the second chapter, and soon they're having sex, guzzling Cristal and dancing to the Grateful Dead. In spite of early promise, Selden goes on to be more a killjoy than a saint. In this characterization, Bushnell neatly collapses the distinction between ''chaste'' and ''priggish.''

Bushnell then demolishes a still more precious distinction, tearing down the cordon sanitaire that separates women who marry for money from common prostitutes. She does this by disclosing, frankly, that her gold-digger Janey is the real thing: for $10,000 a week, she once belonged in the harem of a gunrunner. Flashbacks to that melodrama, and to the surprisingly plausible way that Janey ended up in it, have a sordid appeal.

But the best part of the book is the ending. After 400 pages of misbehavior, Bushnell still declines to reform her characters, twisting the plot once more just when another writer would have gone straight. As HBO's ''Sex and the City'' (which evolved from her work) goes its own way, Bushnell proves she's still the philosopher-queen of a social scene propelled not by vanity or conscience but by sheer perversity. If Bushnell's prose is like her trademark drink, the fruity pink Cosmopolitan, she's still making it with plenty of vodka and Triple Sec.

俺连一次都没看过。。。。。

要看喔~~~

好经典~~~

有趣，你看了么？

我想买给我老婆看。

偶觉得刻画人物蛮生动滴, 可能系author was a model before, so~~~

could be quite some fun~~~

偶觉得剧本写的很好,语言有深度,而且犀利,大胆,一针见血.............