BOOK REVIEW : Pulling Shade Off a ‘Perfect’ Life

Elizabeth Cole by Susan Cheever (Farrar Straus Giroux: $18.95; 196 pages)

For the first quarter of this thoroughly contemporary novel, you might be too envious of the heroine to sympathize with her plight. Hasn’t she got a charming Greenwich Village apartment, a glamorous job with flexible hours, a handsome and prominent art dealer for her lover, and a best friend on 24-hour call, always available for tea and sympathy?

Back home in Connecticut, there’s a famous artist father and a liberal, understanding mother, both delighted to see her whenever she can tear herself away from her exciting life in town. Her younger brother, Andrew, is affectionate and attentive, eager to take his sister to lunch and either offer or accept advice, according to her mood.

And if all that doesn’t make Elizabeth Cole seem lucky enough, there’s an old flame who still hasn’t given up hope that she’ll marry him, and a new one waiting in the wings who seems to combine the best qualities of Sebastian Smith, the incumbent art dealer, and Patrick Casey, the discarded investigative reporter. He’s an eminent professor, and apparently without any of the character flaws of either Smith or Casey.

Before you pack Elizabeth off to her long-suffering psychiatrist, consider that all is not quite the Cosmo romance it seems. The perfect job is really hack art work for an expiring magazine, the dashing lover Sebastian is married and the father of two of the whiniest brats in modern fiction, and the best friend is hooked on everything but trout flies. Furthermore, the celebrated Daddy is a secret alcoholic, the elegant mother consoles herself with casual affairs, and devoted brother Andrew’s mental balance depends heavily on lithium. The old lover, Patrick Casey, was covering a story in San Francisco when Elizabeth had the abortion, and the potential new man isn’t a patch on either Casey or Smith for looks, though as it turns out, he’s fine in the fame department and could win any financial competition hands down.

Unfortunately, his appearance is so badly timed that we never know if he’d have solved all Elizabeth’s problems or not. If this were a murder mystery instead of a tale of sophisticated urban Angst , he’d be a red herring. As it is, Ed Lissner is completely incidental to the story except as a showcase for Elizabeth’s sexual magnetism.

The progress of the affair between Elizabeth and Sebastian provides the novel with its focus. Despite Cheever’s crisp prose and chillingly authentic dialogue, that focus seems too narrow for an entire novel. Reading “Elizabeth Cole” is like two weeks in a ski resort. The fun becomes redundant before the holiday is over. Though the author sends Elizabeth’s father into alcoholic-induced cardiac arrest, forces her best friend, Julie, to confront her drug addiction and embroils Sebastian in an unethical art swindle that imperils his reputation, these characters are so unsympathetic that they seem to deserve their misfortunes.

The father has always been remote and egocentric; beautiful Julie seduces and abandons every man who appears on the horizon, and Sebastian is purely and simply a philanderer. Not only are we unable to rejoice when he finally leaves his wife for Elizabeth, but there’s a guilty sense of satisfaction when he treats her as shabbily as he treated his ex-wife, Melissa. Having gained her heart’s desire, Elizabeth becomes Melissa II--shopping, lunching, and listening to Sebastian’s complaints about his newly straightened circumstances.

After a few months of this, she finds the courage to rebel, realizing that the brass ring is just that and she’s got it around her neck. She leaves her meaningless job, begins to do the serious art work she’d always evaded, gets in touch with Casey, and abruptly grows up. You could call this a coming-of-age novel, except that Elizabeth Cole is already of age when it begins. Still, because Cheever knows and clearly doesn’t love the New York art scene, her satiric treatment of its personalities and machinations gives the book a sharp and brittle edge that partly compensates for the limp center.