The More Things Change . . .

It’s playtime at Tama Janowitz’s house these days. The players? Janowitz and her daughter, Willow, the 3-year-old she and husband Tim Hunt adopted in China. For this production, Willow has assigned herself the role of casting director.

“She says, ‘I’m the happy king. You have to be the congenial peasant,’ ” Janowitz says, sailing through the lobby of the hip new Avalon Hotel on a recent visit. “They pick up bits from TV. Now I’m trying to make her call me Your Majesty.”

Janowitz, the literary brat packer of yore, is now Tama the mama, so she has a few other things on her mind--not least of which is raising a multicultural child--as she surfs the wave of buzz for her sixth novel. “A Certain Age” (Doubleday) has some critics hailing Janowitz’s comeback after years of dim reviews, which frankly annoys her.

“Comeback from what? I kept writing, and I keep writing. It’s nice to make my living from my books and get published, but I’m so old now, I’d rather just get up every morning and still do what I want to do, whether I’m well liked or not liked.”

Now an antique 42, Janowitz has the same river of raven hair and porcelain skin she displayed on the cover of New York magazine 13 years ago, when her first book, “Slaves of New York,” hit the bestseller lists. Despite her early fame, people are mistaken if they assume Janowitz is one with the high-gloss world she sometimes writes about--the universe of Manhattan cocktail parties and Hamptons jaunts. It’s not her turf now, but it’s the minefield navigated by Florence Collins, the superficial but fabulously dressed heroine of “A Certain Age.”

“The world that Florence inhabits? That’s not my world. I never ran around that much. I’d get tired by midnight. But if I went out once a week, I paid attention.”

And now the married Janowitz has fixed her unswerving gaze on the plight of single women at the millennium, which she argues has ultimately changed little over the last century.

“No one wanted to admit it, but even now the highest status for women in New York was to be married to a rich man,” she writes. “Marriage was still the great achievement, and single women, no matter how powerful, were still considered suspect, desperate or damaged.”

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The suspect single woman of “A Certain Age” thinks she’s getting a little dog-eared as a marriage prospect at 32, and so she throws all the resources she has--and those she doesn’t, thanks to credit cards--toward buffing her external assets. Florence casually drops $800 on gauzy hats and ridiculous sums on custom-made cosmetics, even though she’s spent most of her inheritance and makes a mere $25,000 a year at an auction house.

Florence fritters away her investment by tumbling into bed with an Italian roue and a taxi driver, all the while rebuffing an earnest lawyer for the homeless who genuinely cares for her. Meanwhile, she circulates among “the right people,” the moneyed folk who party in the Hamptons, bragging about their latest achievements.

As Janowitz’s biting novel opens, Florence’s decline begins with a weekend in the Hamptons in which she’s “practically raped” by her hostess’ husband and accused of precipitating their daughter’s death.

“I’ve lived in New York long enough to have been treated viciously at times,” Janowitz says. “I went to a house in the Hamptons; the hosts were a man who’s rich and his girlfriend. They had a party, and when you walked into the kitchen, everyone stopped talking, and then someone burst into nervous laughter. You get the point that they’ve been discussing you in a not very pleasant way.”

Janowitz blames women for the mean-spiritedness and narrow-mindedness that still constricts their lives, even after feminists have rattled the cages.

“I expected with the feminist movement that things would be changed more. Instead, it seems that we backslide. Men come to New York, and they’re going to have some kind of exciting career and secondarily get married. Women come to New York thinking, ‘I’ll get married, and then I’ll think of something I want to do.’

“It attracts these fantastically beautiful creatures that I see on Madison Avenue. They’re shopping. They’re wearing Armani outfits. Where’s the money coming from? What are they hoping to do? What do they think is going to happen to them?”

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Nothing good, they fear, if they’ve reached “a certain age,” Janowitz says.

“Women panic at 32 because they’ve been around for 10 years out on the scene. They realize there are people who only go out with 18- or 20-year-olds. But I blame women because it’s other women making women feel bad. I remember when I was single how it was really other women who made it seem that if you didn’t find somebody to be with, there was something wrong with you. I don’t think men care.

“And once you’re married, they make it clear that you’re the housewife, as if that’s another negative place to be. So it’s women who are competitive with each other. They’re far more nasty and vicious out of desperation. Somehow they think it’s a game of musical chairs and they’re going to be pushed off the chair.”

Doesn’t she hold men responsible for discarding women of a certain age?

“I don’t hold them responsible, because if the situation were reversed and women were completely in power, what motivation would there be for them to change? Why would you, if you’re on top?

“And besides, you can try to change yourself, but you can’t change somebody else. And with women suffering constantly because of these things, they can try to change how things are for women, but they can’t change men. When a 20-year-old runs off with a 50-year-old husband and father, people feel embittered toward the woman. But it’s not so unacceptable that women don’t continue to do that.”

Janowitz’s harsh view of her gender is encapsulated in the shallow Florence, who has given some critics the willies. Entertainment Weekly called her “one of the least likable characters in modern fiction history. . . . Do you want to spend 317 pages in her company? That would be no.”

But Janowitz maintains that’s a ridiculous way to judge a novel.

“Look, I don’t think this is a happy, lovely book. But the fact that they didn’t like the heroine has nothing to do with whether a book is good or bad. For example, there’s ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ I hated Isabella Archer, but that doesn’t mean the book isn’t a great book. To feel that a character has to have a moment of epiphany and cast off her poor values, that’s just not the way it is.”

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Not to worry. When Janowitz goes back to Brooklyn, she’ll awake in the three-bedroom apartment she shares with Willow and Hunt, her husband of eight years, curator of Andy Warhol’s estate. And after Willow and Hunt take off for school and work, Janowitz will go back to bed, laptop in tow.

“For me, the city has endless, endless topics to write about. I have a love-hate feeling toward the city. On the one hand, the quality of life is lousy. Nevertheless, when I’m done writing, I just head out into the street, and every story is right there in front of me. I can’t imagine finding that range anywhere else.”

Irene Lacher can be reached by e-mail at irene.lacher@latimes.com.