Keen Observer With Gift of Satire

Forget bestseller lists. If you want to know what new book is hot, walk through an airplane and see which hardcover has become the preferred traveling companion.

Stuart Gavert, a hair colorist who works in his own salon in Beverly Hills and ministers to a loyal New York clientele as well, flies between the coasts twice a month.

“The last time I went to New York,” he said recently, “six people in business class were reading ‘Turn of the Century.’ It was obvious that if you weren’t reading that book, you just weren’t in the loop.”

Kurt Andersen, author of “Turn of the Century,” has spent his career defining the dimensions of said loop. He is a product of the New York media world who, at age 42, sat down to write his first work of fiction and didn’t even try to resist the elements in our culture that were so ripe for parody they dripped. Wall Street’s manic gold rush, drip, trash television, drip, limousine liberalism, drip, Web pranksters and the knights of Microsoft, drip, drip. As he wrote, so much material flowed freely from the morning paper into the irony juice smoothie Andersen was concocting that the result became a fat, rich, deliciously hilarious creation that has earned flattering comparisons to Tom Wolfe’s caustic social panorama of the ‘80s, “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The Wall Street Journal hailed it as a “smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age.”

Who is this storytelling prophet, a man who presumes to tell us what we’ll be thinking and feeling after Y2K does or doesn’t wreak havoc? You could read Andersen’s book, or his resume, or chat with him for a few minutes, and you might well experience deja vu. As the years have passed, his voice has deepened, he has grown tall and thin; his thick, dark hair is now streaked with gray. But you remember knowing him in junior high. Yes, of course: Kurt Andersen was, and is, the smartest boy in the room.

Naturally, he denies it. “There are lots of smart people in New York, and one of the good things about the city is that success and smartness are measured in many different ways, in contrast to Washington or Los Angeles, in which they tend to be measured across fewer dimensions. There are lots of parallel meritocracies in New York, which makes it a healthier place to live, in a way. You can be successful on Wall Street, and people who are successful in fashion don’t give a [expletive], really.”

Observer of American Life

So if he isn’t in possession of a better brain than the ones most of us lug around, an explanation goes begging for how, the first time out, Andersen produced a book jammed with witty observations of the sublime and ridiculous in our culture. The answer is that before he became a clever novelist, he was a clever journalist, one who made his living investigating American life, then judging it, often employing a gift for satire.

A fugitive from Omaha, Neb., who sought asylum at Harvard in the early ‘70s, Andersen takes pains to point out that he went to a big public high school.

“Just so no one thinks I’m some kind of rich preppy or something,” he says. His parents were “these odd socially liberal Republicans.” He didn’t feel as if he’d been switched at birth by mischievous faeries, but by his 10th birthday he knew that his destiny lay in a big city.

After lasting one day as a copy boy at the New York Daily News, then ghost writing for movie critic Gene Shalit, he was hired by Time magazine in 1981 to write about politics and crime. He was 26, and had already published a book of humorous essays. A “knack for glib summary and faked authority” that he admittedly shares with “Turn of the Century’s” protagonist didn’t hurt his professional ascent.

He became Time’s architecture and design critic in 1985, and spent many a lunch hour with friend Graydon Carter, contemplating what they would do if they could invent their own magazine. In the bull market of the ‘80s, investors weren’t hard to find, and by 1986 the pair had given birth to Spy, which unleashed the Harvard Lampoon’s snarky sense of humor on New York society.

“I went directly from being only a writer to being editor of this magazine,” Andersen says. “It was like going directly from peon to king without those horrible intermediate stops.” Anne Kreamer, whom he married in 1981, worked as the magazine’s advertising and marketing director. She later became an executive at Nickelodeon and now works as a television producer. The couple has two daughters, 11 and 9.

Andersen left Spy in 1992 and returned to Time to write a column before being tapped as editor of New York magazine, a job he was fired from 2 1/2 years later “because we did one too many unflattering stories about business and social associates of Henry Kravis, who controlled the firm that controlled the stock that owned the company that owned New York magazine.”

Friends in High Places

Like his fictional characters, Andersen moves in high-octane worlds in which reality is alternately more and less fabulous than it seems to outsiders. He can claim membership in the New York Harvard Mafia, an unofficial group of men who graduated in the last half of the ‘70s who went on to snag a number of significant media jobs. Andersen considers an invitation to plug his book on Conan O’Brien’s show an example of the mafia’s power.

A Rolodex full of contacts aided his research for “Turn of the Century.” He says, “The novel that I chose to write required me to do a lot of journalistic stuff, just to make sure that I could depict a number of worlds with some verisimilitude. Just being alive and an adult for 20 years, you make friends. So you have a friend who’s creating a television show and you have a friend who’s a Wall Street trader.”

Yet Andersen has been around long enough to learn how to separate the chaff of false friendship from the enriched whole wheat kind.

“It’s not that I’m a mystic or anything,” he says, “but I do feel that all I’ve done was preparation for this book, or was helpful in some way.” Such a view of personal sweat equity invested could alleviate any winner’s guilt that the novel’s placement on several best-seller lists and its “soon to be a major motion picture” deal might engender.

The story begins in February 2000. Journalist-turned-television producer George Mactier and his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, who owns a boutique software company, struggle to raise a family while pursuing their manifest destiny as masters of the universe. “A yoga-practicing Jew and a lapsed Unitarian,” they are the sort of plugged in, glamorous, modern Manhattan couple whose own personal and professional peccadilloes become gossip-column fodder.

Their lives, and the plot, take them to the major stops on any late ‘90s power tour--from New York to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. (Washington, D.C., is deliberately, and conspicuously absent, having lost its place in the money-media-technology-entertainment nexus that, you know, is all that really matters.)

Andersen says, “One of the reasons that I set the story a year hence, instead of now, is I wanted to tweak things just up to the level of implausibility. I wanted to occupy that zone that was just this side of farce, where the reader could have a sense that, yeah, that could exist in a year.”

Capital Loses Clout

If it hasn’t already, a year from now the nation’s capital could reach a state of de facto irrelevancy, and the book’s “Al & Monica” show could be a talk show hit. (George wonders if Al Roker was cast in order to make his co-host, Monica Lewinsky, look slim by comparison.) It’s no goofier a concept than “No Offense But,” the hourlong talk/game show on the cable network George works for. “Guests compete for prizes by predicting the embarrassing facts that friends and family will reveal about them on the air--and then, in the Di$ ‘Em Back round, try to double their money by revealing embarrassing facts about their friends and family. For five minutes at the end of each show, [host] Dr. Juanita counsels the guests,” Andersen writes.

Friends are telling friends to schlep “Turn of the Century” aboard 727s not just because it’s wickedly funny, but because beneath the comic hyperbole and glib techno-fluency, a moral consciousness bubbles. In many ways, George and Lizzie are wannabe aristocrats, but they still agonize over whether they can be successful without sacrificing their souls.

“What interests me about this time,” says Andersen, “is that so much is in flux, and there are all these clashes of new ways of thinking and old ways of thinking. Despite all the changes in society and all the advances in technology, the virtues of loyalty, friendship, fidelity, family haven’t changed. They seem kind of increasingly quaint or corny in this futuristic ‘Jetsons’ world we occupy.

“Nevertheless, if you don’t have those foundations and take them seriously and try to observe them, then you’re lost. I’ve been most gratified by reviewers who see the book as a portrait of a marriage. This love story.”