Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz (1974)

 On the assumption that these essays a.k.a. magazine pieces are presented chronologically, Lebowitz got a lot better over time. (But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it was the cover that heightened expectations. This book forms the first half of a reader published recently by Virago, with utterly glowing praise presented five times on its outer. Two of these from David Sedaris and Martin Scorsese, the others from names not known to me.) Initially I slumped in my chair, as the recognition dawned that she had an occasionally snappy turn of phrase, but things otherwise kept landing dully. I like particularly an aspiration she has of setting up an amusing commentary on life and society, and then taking the notion further by itemising. There'll be three things that matter about a particular issue, or questions that need answering by a critic of some new fad, or contrasts to make about the sides of an argument. She'll give a witty outline, and then the rest is divided into sections answering each angle in turn, providing further opportunity for wit. Or at least that's the plan. The model is a potentially great one, and almost all the examples here give some hints of it. But they're then undercut by attempts at furtherance which are just a bit too thin, or even a bit too broad, to be contrary. Her hammer at the fair doesn't whack down hard enough on the plate, and the doobrie resultantly doesn't ring the bell. As time went by, though, I wriggled up in my chair a bit and started taking notice. I laughed properly for the first time on page 32: Breeding Will Tell uses her trademark distanced commentator's connoisseur-like style ("I neglected, however, to take into consideration that I number among my acquaintances some people of decidedly lofty background.") to game up a society resume from very indigent materials. Thereafter, things looked up, and also drooped occasionally - the mixture improved from 30/70 to 60/40. 60/40's not a bad place to be, and there are moments in the last third which sing. A Brush with Death is a lot of fun, using hostage-taking as a pretext for art criticism ("A frightening number of conceptual artists (two) occupied space in downtown Manhattan and, when no one noticed, were obliged to go uptown.") The far higher quality of the latter material here is a good portent for her following book Social Studies, which forms the second half of this reader.