The mating game in Manhattan

Rachel Johnson

BERGDORF BLONDES by Plum Sykes Miramax Books, £10, pp. 320,

ISBN 1401351964

Apublishing friend arrived with an armful of new books as a cadeau maison. I have to confess I picked up Plum Sykes's Beigelotf Blondes with a groan, expecting it to be bad, on the grounds that the young author was thin, beautiful, had an irritating name and should therefore be doomed to fail.

A few minutes later I had decided that her sparkling effort represented an important milestone in the history of the genre of book best read as a teenager at boarding school under the duvet in the dorm, whilst pretending to Matron to be racked by terrible cursepains.

It is a romantic rollercoaster starring a fashion moppet referred to merely as Moi (as in mwah mwah, not Daniel Arap), who is of Anglo-American heritage, and who works for a glossy in New York. So far, by the way, so Plum. But the glitteringly honest conceit of the novel is the venal propensity of unmarried rich girls to follow the money, and failing that, the title and/or the stately home, and to get a rock as big as a planet on their ring finger before their official best friend does.

Our heroine, though, is not quite such an ocean-going gold-digger as the other blondes. Moi, our front-row girl, goes for more 'creative types' and can tell whether she's in love or not by measuring her appetite. If she's in lurve, she stops eating for, like, six weeks and can't even look at the vanilla cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery that are literally her favourite food (the whole novel is in this ditsy voice). Moi thinks the best thing about being in love is the sex — which is described by repeated references to Brazilians and 'going down to Rio' that eventually become tiresome. The next best thing about love is it makes you so thin you are `ana', short for anorexic, a state of starved nirvana that Bergdorf blondes are striving for at all times, as well as waxed nasal cavities and highlights as day-glo white as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's.

Despite her stiletto-heeled skewering of the mating game as played in New York, Blondes is still just the kind of powder-puff book to appeal to anyone who can recite the jolly super identiplots of Octavia, Bella, Emily, etc by heart, not to mention all of us who have ever spent an entire girlienight seriously debating whether Pandora or Riders is the best book ever written.

I think Bergdolf Blondes is bliss, and so cheerful-making that it is impossible to feel as snide and ungracious about Plum as someone who hasn't read her delicious champagne bubble of a book otherwise might. Any girl who can make me laugh out loud on every third page is a goddess in my book, and I haven't had so much fun since rereading the Mitford novels. I know I am treading on sacred ground here, but Miss Sykes could be, along with the fab India Knight, a bit of a Nancy-girl herself. It may be no coincidence that both heavenly creatures are edited by Juliet Annan (genuflections all round) at Penguin, but I am going to be generous and give full credit to Plum for her frothy confection.

After all, Plum/Moi is adorably frank about her sex-life and all the times she has 'borrowed' clothes from designers and failed to return them, and she is pitilessly accurate about girls who chase titles and many houses with brown signs outside, and the way America loves an 'of', as in Prince Michael of Greece, doh!

And she is mercilessly funny about the following: book groups, dinner parties, beauty treatments, husband-hunting, airhead girls talking about their, like, careers?, sample sales, private jets, two-timing skunks, clothes, and the English.

And who could ask for more Plums than that in a first novel? Not moi.

The Distinguished Thing

to whom it may concern

Henry James, dying, Greeted death thus: Here it is, the distinguished thing.

A lesson for us.

Never let it show That you're in a jam. Get ready to go With an epigram.

Your birth was undoubtedly A common affair, A scowl, a cry And a gulp of air, So aim for distinction This time round.

With Jamesian diction Prepare the ground, Then, no doubting, As it carries you west, The distinguished thing Will be impressed. John Mole Be prepared, keep Your wit in good nick. Life may be cheap But polish the rhetoric.