What a Name-Brand Dropper: This Fiction Reads Like a Catalog

In her earlier books, Olivia Goldsmith has shown what jolly good fun it is to be a mistreated ex-wife, a mistreated newlywed, a mistreated mistress and a mistreated author (respectively, “The First Wives Club,” “Young Wives,” “Switcheroo” and “The Bestseller”). Now she writes about the joys of being a mistreated prisoner.

“Pen Pals” is the story of Jennifer Spence, a Wall Street trader who agrees to take the heat for her boss and stand trial for fraud and insider trading. She naively believes her lawyer, who is also her fiance, when he says she will never be convicted. (Goldsmith Rule No. 1: Men are, with a few exceptions, unmitigated jerks. The rule’s corollary: Women are absurdly gullible.)

Jennifer is sent to Jennings Correctional Facility for women, an institution that reminded me of the overnight camp I went to as a kid--bad food, communal showers, inspected packages and a lot of fun. At Jennings she meets a bunch of delightful, spunky, heart-of-gold women, each with exactly one idiosyncrasy.

This is not a book of complex characterizations. One woman speaks in sunny cliches; another steals everything in sight. Jennifer eventually becomes tight with these women, and together they make the world a better place and reap a few rewards. (Goldsmith Rule No. 2: Oppressed women always bond with each other, and as a result, every member of the sisterhood becomes more emotionally realized, not to mention richer.)

Rule No. 3: Describe people by giving endless inventories of the products they favor. We know that Jennifer before imprisonment is arrogant and spoiled because she “loved the Pratesi sheets on her bed, the silk Kirmans on her floor, and she loved every piece of Armani, Prada, Gucci and Ferragamo that she kept neatly in her Biedermeier armoire.”

We also know because Goldsmith spells it out for us: “When she’d been sent to Jennings she had been a selfish, narrow young woman.... Her judgment, her values, her goals and her viewpoints had all been questionable. Prison had set her free.”

Free, but still with a fondness for brand names. As she enters New York City’s Balthazar (“still the hottest restaurant in the city”), she looks down at her feet. “Her foot,” we learn, “was beautifully covered in the new Otto Tootsie Plohound shoes.” (A foot covered in shoes? Ow!)

Indeed, the litany of merchandise in “Pen Pals” makes the book read like a catalog (an alternate title could be: “Attention, Shoppers!”). But product-placement writing is tricky. Designed to lend an au courant air, it often accomplishes the opposite because what is hot one day is cold the next.

The references to the “overheated market” and Jennifer’s condo in Manhattan’s “best” neighborhood, TriBeCa (where, post-Sept. 11, real estate has become virtually free), make the book seem like a contemporary historical novel, if there is such a thing.

This is not a subtle book. But it is a dramatic story set in an interesting milieu. And if you are on a plane, you might want to read it before it comes out as a movie (Tom Wolfe meets Disney).