Social Studies by Fran Lebowitz (1981)

 As expected this was, as a whole, a vast improvement on Metropolitan Life. The points scored went deeper, were more "worked out". After a couple of sterling excursions in 'People' (great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine) and 'How Not to Marry a Millionaire' where she identifies a possible new trend of marrying down (generally speaking, the poorer person summers where he winters), we enter a peculiar space called 'The Four Greediest Cases'. This, I presume, was a response to someone or something of the time which appealed for help-in-desperate-circumstances despite being very adequately supplied. Thereafter there's the same 60/40 as in the previous volume for a while, displaying great notions and occasional misfires in the details. Then the ante is upped: 'The Frances Ann Lebowitz Collection' lists the grot appurtenances of apartment living as though they had place in a gallery catalogue, and 'The Pen of my Aunt is on the Operating Table' takes the reader into the outraged mind of the viewer of a furnished apartment of dubious arrangement, taste and cost. From these on, it's all good. We get LA (a great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster), we get cigarettes (a hospital is the singularly most illogical place in the world to ban smoking), we get her grandmother's business ethos, the seasons in New York, the annoyances of directory enquiries operators, original ideas for war recruitment, and a credo for taxing the poor heavily for reasons of fairness. I like her most when she's sticking it to the hopelessly lazy conceptions of the well-off and conventional.