The Barnacles of the title are not mollusks but a human family, originally Baranski, consisting of six sisters; their father, “New York’s Pantyhose Prince”; their mother, who lives upstairs with an adopted son; and a much younger stepmother. The Barnacles are rich. All of them, except the adopted son, have names that begin with B; and, like the protagonists of fairy tales, each is bestowed with extraordinary and superlative abilities and traits, such as “hearing better than some wolves”—but not the poor second wife, about whom little is said, all of it derogatory.

Barry and Bella Barnacle divorced because he’s an adulterer, but also because they disagree about heredity: He believes in nurture (though there’s no nurturing as such going on in this household, where one-upmanship reigns), she in nature. His beliefs are presented as Darwinism and manifested in the collections that fill entire rooms of their gigantic Fifth Avenue apartment: a jungle habitat, complete with bats and other wildlife, and a vast assortment of shells, etc., including barnacles, like those Darwin studied.

The six daughters share three rooms, the idea being to spur competition and a work ethic. The girls, ranging in age from 10 to 29, certainly are scheming, suspicious, jealous and self-interested. They’re said to be so varied as to hardly seem like sisters—but as written, they seem so much the same that little besides hair color or object of obsession distinguishes them. Each is obsessed with a different means to the same end: besting her siblings. (One sister, who gets only mere paragraphs among pages, may be an exception, but not so it matters.)

About a third of the way through the novel, Barry sets up a weeklong contest among the girls to decide who will best carry on the Barnacle name—and inherit his fortune. The contest is touted in the publisher’s press release and the advance reviews, but most of what happens in the book concerns the two eldest girls, Bell and Bridget, and their elaborate subterfuges to hook the WASP-y identical twins from the next apartment, Blaine and Billy Finch. (Darwin ultimately used finches rather than barnacles to demonstrate the processes of evolution.)

Bridget, the beauty of the bunch, has for years—since he wooed and dumped her—carried on a bantering game in which she and Billy set ideal or ridiculous scenes for marriage proposals; while Bell, who was also courted and dumped years before, but by Blaine, also now wants to marry her chosen twin: She’s pregnant, father unknown—she was too drunk to notice. (Abortion seems to have become illegal in fiction. The anti-choice folk must be the only ones left who think they haven’t won.)

The tale is narrated in a grand, lofty tone, as of a 19th-century taxonomist (or, more logically, ethologist) recording the behavior of species knowable only from observation rather than empathy and experience. The events are minuscule, greatly elaborated on and without consequence. If there were consequences, and if the tone were carried off with flair, the strategy might work.

Unfortunately, Ms. Niederhoffer never uses one word where three will do, and often uses them wrong. A sampling: One sister “receded back”; another “eschewed … facets” (one can only wonder how it was done, but people eschew like mad in these pages); again and again, “hateful” is used to mean full of hate rather than, as the dictionary has it, deserving of it; people “hone” in on things as I could only wish the author would hone her prose; they “sprout” loyalty; a film of grime “foretold” an aversion to showers; someone yearns “gradually”; a monkey’s tail is “stumped” (unlikely on two counts, since it’s neither docked nor could it be unable to work out a problem); something is “already intact”; the sisters are spurred to “conquer into three teams.”

I could go on, but you don’t really want me to, do you? And I’ve only gotten to page 53. I won’t go into the maladroit punctuation; with the profusion of typos, the suspicion grew that I wasn’t dealing with Joycean linguistic innovation and that, just possibly, no one had actually read the book besides me, including the author.

If she’d reread, wouldn’t she have noticed that if the Barnacle and Finch apartments share the top floor, Bella’s apartment couldn’t be upstairs? (It’s not only upstairs, but in “the edifice of the building.”) On page 59, the rules of the proposal game are that the words “will you marry me” cannot be spoken, but if they are, they cannot be “reversed”; on page 91 those words are spoken—and yet, for the next 276 pages, Bridget longs for Billy to want to marry her. If Billy and Blaine have the mutual telepathy attributed to them, why is their relationship plagued by secrets? And if Billy and Bridget have the telepathy alleged for them, why does Bridget spend 267 pages in the indignation, taunting, bluffing and second-guessing that constitute most of the book’s action?

And all this is quite aside from a basic confusion between nature-versus-nurture (shorthand for the debate about what determines individual personality and behavior) and Darwinism, which is concerned with biological adaptations over generations that, through breeding, physically change whole species. The author seems unaware that what Barry promotes isn’t a scientific theory but more like social Darwinism, a metaphor taken from science, or science misunderstood—but then again, the author ascribes feathers to bats.

I don’t ordinarily write mean reviews, especially of first novels. If this one hadn’t come with impressive endorsements and publicity behind it, I would have let it pass in silence. As it is, I feel compelled to flag the false advertising—anything to slow the spread of the kind of virus Lynne Truss has raged about, a pandemic that decimates language and meaning, that elevates intent and pretense over achievement. It’s the kind of virus that could wipe out literature, because no one would have the means either to produce good writing or distinguish it.

Anna Shapiro’s third novel, Living on Air, will be published by Soho Press in May.

The Barnacles of the title are not mollusks but a human family, originally Baranski, consisting of six sisters; their father, “New York’s Pantyhose Prince”; their mother, who lives upstairs with an adopted son; and a much younger stepmother. The Barnacles are rich. All of them, except the adopted son, have names that begin with B; and, like the protagonists of fairy tales, each is bestowed with extraordinary and superlative abilities and traits, such as “hearing better than some wolves”—but not the poor second wife, about whom little is said, all of it derogatory.

Barry and Bella Barnacle divorced because he’s an adulterer, but also because they disagree about heredity: He believes in nurture (though there’s no nurturing as such going on in this household, where one-upmanship reigns), she in nature. His beliefs are presented as Darwinism and manifested in the collections that fill entire rooms of their gigantic Fifth Avenue apartment: a jungle habitat, complete with bats and other wildlife, and a vast assortment of shells, etc., including barnacles, like those Darwin studied.

The six daughters share three rooms, the idea being to spur competition and a work ethic. The girls, ranging in age from 10 to 29, certainly are scheming, suspicious, jealous and self-interested. They’re said to be so varied as to hardly seem like sisters—but as written, they seem so much the same that little besides hair color or object of obsession distinguishes them. Each is obsessed with a different means to the same end: besting her siblings. (One sister, who gets only mere paragraphs among pages, may be an exception, but not so it matters.)

About a third of the way through the novel, Barry sets up a weeklong contest among the girls to decide who will best carry on the Barnacle name—and inherit his fortune. The contest is touted in the publisher’s press release and the advance reviews, but most of what happens in the book concerns the two eldest girls, Bell and Bridget, and their elaborate subterfuges to hook the WASP-y identical twins from the next apartment, Blaine and Billy Finch. (Darwin ultimately used finches rather than barnacles to demonstrate the processes of evolution.)

Bridget, the beauty of the bunch, has for years—since he wooed and dumped her—carried on a bantering game in which she and Billy set ideal or ridiculous scenes for marriage proposals; while Bell, who was also courted and dumped years before, but by Blaine, also now wants to marry her chosen twin: She’s pregnant, father unknown—she was too drunk to notice. (Abortion seems to have become illegal in fiction. The anti-choice folk must be the only ones left who think they haven’t won.)

The tale is narrated in a grand, lofty tone, as of a 19th-century taxonomist (or, more logically, ethologist) recording the behavior of species knowable only from observation rather than empathy and experience. The events are minuscule, greatly elaborated on and without consequence. If there were consequences, and if the tone were carried off with flair, the strategy might work.

Unfortunately, Ms. Niederhoffer never uses one word where three will do, and often uses them wrong. A sampling: One sister “receded back”; another “eschewed … facets” (one can only wonder how it was done, but people eschew like mad in these pages); again and again, “hateful” is used to mean full of hate rather than, as the dictionary has it, deserving of it; people “hone” in on things as I could only wish the author would hone her prose; they “sprout” loyalty; a film of grime “foretold” an aversion to showers; someone yearns “gradually”; a monkey’s tail is “stumped” (unlikely on two counts, since it’s neither docked nor could it be unable to work out a problem); something is “already intact”; the sisters are spurred to “conquer into three teams.”

I could go on, but you don’t really want me to, do you? And I’ve only gotten to page 53. I won’t go into the maladroit punctuation; with the profusion of typos, the suspicion grew that I wasn’t dealing with Joycean linguistic innovation and that, just possibly, no one had actually read the book besides me, including the author.

If she’d reread, wouldn’t she have noticed that if the Barnacle and Finch apartments share the top floor, Bella’s apartment couldn’t be upstairs? (It’s not only upstairs, but in “the edifice of the building.”) On page 59, the rules of the proposal game are that the words “will you marry me” cannot be spoken, but if they are, they cannot be “reversed”; on page 91 those words are spoken—and yet, for the next 276 pages, Bridget longs for Billy to want to marry her. If Billy and Blaine have the mutual telepathy attributed to them, why is their relationship plagued by secrets? And if Billy and Bridget have the telepathy alleged for them, why does Bridget spend 267 pages in the indignation, taunting, bluffing and second-guessing that constitute most of the book’s action?

And all this is quite aside from a basic confusion between nature-versus-nurture (shorthand for the debate about what determines individual personality and behavior) and Darwinism, which is concerned with biological adaptations over generations that, through breeding, physically change whole species. The author seems unaware that what Barry promotes isn’t a scientific theory but more like social Darwinism, a metaphor taken from science, or science misunderstood—but then again, the author ascribes feathers to bats.

I don’t ordinarily write mean reviews, especially of first novels. If this one hadn’t come with impressive endorsements and publicity behind it, I would have let it pass in silence. As it is, I feel compelled to flag the false advertising—anything to slow the spread of the kind of virus Lynne Truss has raged about, a pandemic that decimates language and meaning, that elevates intent and pretense over achievement. It’s the kind of virus that could wipe out literature, because no one would have the means either to produce good writing or distinguish it.

Anna Shapiro’s third novel, Living on Air, will be published by Soho Press in May.

Just about every woman in New York City at some point secretly fears that she's going to wind up alone, alcoholic and jabbering to herself in a dark one-bedroom apartment, having devoted the best years of her life to taking care of her mother. That's precisely what happened to Dare Wright, the subject of a probing and profound new biography by Jean Nathan; and yet in Ms. Nathan's sensitive hands, Wright's fate takes on a certain fluttering romance-an indignant poetry.

The late, under-lamented Dare Wright was the author of a series of children's books published between 1957 and 1981-little girls' books, really, despite the spirited efforts of the Marlo Thomas–Free to Be You and Me generation. The mere mention of Wright's books tends to elicit a gasp of recognition from anyone who's encountered them (two of the more popular were The Lonely Doll and The Doll and the Kitten). The series chronicled the adventures of a gingham-clad miniature mannequin named Edith and her two stuffed companions, naughty Little Bear and gruff Mr. Bear. The story line was always less memorable than Wright's elaborately staged, airless photography and the toddler-like, tow-headed protagonist's slightly risqué outfits (a flash of petticoats when she was upended by Mr. Bear for a spanking, etc.). Predating Barbie, Britney and JonBenet, Edith was a sort of innocent haute couture Goldilocks for the 10-and-under set.

Except, it turns out, she was more of a Hitchcock blonde, a porcelain-skinned, well-varnished call for help.

Inexplicably haunted in adulthood by half-forgotten images of Edith and her cohorts, Ms. Nathan, a former staffer at The Observer and Connoisseur magazine, stumbled Nancy Drew–like onto a treasure trove of unexpurgated background material about Wright, a onetime Maidenform model and Cosmo cover girl. There's enough fodder here to keep a departmentful of post-Freudian grad students in nail polish for a decade. But Ms. Nathan wisely refrains from all but the most basic psychological analysis. (Even more remarkable for a writer these days, she removes herself entirely from the body of the narrative).

The doll Edith was the namesake of Dare Wright's domineering mother, Edie Stevenson, a noted and ambitious portrait painter whose commissions included Calvin Coolidge and Greta Garbo (most of her time, though, she spent daubing the crème de la crème of Cleveland, Ohio). Stevenson, who also had a gift for fiction-at least where her own life story was concerned-split early from Dare's ne'er-do-well father, and abandoned their son, Blaine. The father died young, leaving Blaine to a stepmother, yet one senses that the little boy got the better part of the deal. The strikingly pretty and intellectually gifted Dare wasn't reunited with her brother until well into adulthood, at which point they developed a creepy, almost carnal attachment reminiscent of another children's book: Flowers in the Attic (1979), the trashy incest classic by V.C. Andrews.

In the interim, Edie managed to be both totally neglectful and terribly controlling of her daughter, fashioning her into a kind of compliant Mini-Me or "handmaiden," dressing her in fancy outfits and refusing her any contemporary playmates. A despairing Dare developed an unhealthy obsession with the mirror and, eventually, a more fruitful one with the camera. Mother tried to co-opt that one too, snapping nude shots of her fully grown daughter as they sunbathed, vacationing on a primitive island off North Carolina. They also liked to share a bed, spooning together well into adulthood. As they say in Bonnie Fuller's Star Magazine: "Not Normal!"

Ms. Nathan's subtitle-"The Search for Dare Wright"-is apt. Though she spent four years visiting the aged authoress before the latter "expired" (as the attending doctor put it) at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and though she spent several more years doing meticulous secondary research, the result only proves the essentially frustrating thing about even the best "human-interest" stories: No personality is ever truly fixable. In this instance, it's a nearly insurmountable case of "How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?" "Maybe Dare was born in a seashell," muses one of the scores of acquaintances interviewed. "She didn't look like a New York woman at all," comments another. "Much more ethereal than that, like a ghost, like some wonderful blithe spirit." Another calls her "a pixie, a fairy, full of imagination and in another world." Her goddaughter adds: "It was almost as if, if she walked on sand, she wouldn't leave footprints. It seemed as though she was only half there, but because she was only half there she was twice as much there, if you see what I mean." Indeed: A flibbertigibbet, a will o' the wisp, a clown! (A very sad one.)

The characters surrounding Dare emerge a bit more clearly. Edie Stevenson is a complete monster, of course, but also funny-somehow reminiscent of the meddling mother-in-law Agnes Moorehead played on Bewitched, given to nibbling on candied rose leaves and complaining to a friend that she's "so weary of looking at fat derrieres in shorts." Though as winsome and elusive as Dare in his way, handsome brother Blaine is a much more reassuring, resilient figure: flunking defiantly out of Collegiate, buying an island he calls the Isle of Pot so that visitors can say they're "going to Pot," and inventing a fishing lure he calls the Phoebe. (Really, this family trumps anything invented by J.D. Salinger.) They all drink a lot of cocktails. Blaine valiantly tries to hook Dare up with a friend of his, a dashing R.A.F. pilot named Philip, but it ends-you guessed it-in tragedy, leaving her a latter-day Miss Havisham, rebuffing all suitors so as to keep her carefully preserved world of childhood fantasy intact (not to mention her virginity).

Wright was wedded only to her work, though even that relationship seemed slightly corrupt. "You looked so pretty last night," effused Random House chairman Bennett Cerf, half-paternally, half-predatorily. "Come in one day and let your publisher kiss you!" (After he died, the company abandoned her.)

This is a deeply creepy story of a painful life, and there's little solace in the ending, despite Ms. Nathan's painstaking and sympathetic intervention. But then again, it's Dare Wright whose books are now being brought back into print to be etched onto the tender consciousness of a new generation; it's Dare Wright whose beauty and curious visions still intrigue us (while those who trapped her in a private horror lapse into deep obscurity); and it's Dare Wright, the madwoman in the one-bedroom, whose achievement and sorry fate we will remember.

Alexandra Jacobs is a senior editor at The Observer.

Ye gods, not another novel with footnotes. Not yet another metafiction, the writer writing while gazing at himself as he writes. Not another quasi-autobiographical offering laden with irony.

Well, yes. But Mike Bryan's The Afterword is somewhat different from the usual 21st-century meta-icons. First, it's short. Very short, in fact. Second, it isn't, in the customary sense, a novel at all, but the afterword to a novel called The Deity Next Door that has already broken three longevity records on the New York Times best-seller list, thus prompting the publisher to ask for an afterword for the next edition, an aid for reading groups. And no, the novel does not exist and never will. If all this sounds a little too cute for you, then perhaps it is.

"A new messiah: how does our secular, more or less post-Christian popular culture handle this little problem? … And how does this new deity understand his incredible situation, come to terms with it, and figure out his next move …?" The writer named Mike Bryan-just like Mike Bryan, the author of this book-tells us how he first got the idea for his novel. Details needed to be worked out. Modern Manhattan would be the venue-not only because Mr. Bryan was familiar with it but because Manhattan, these days, is where it's at. This "possibly Protestant" messiah would have grown up with Ronald Reagan as President and a material-girl Madonna on the airwaves. His name would be Blaine: "a simple, modern, generic, Waspish name with no biblical connotations and minimal cultural aspirations, a name that would implicitly establish both the secular cultural setting and the irony of the new situation." He's got a wife, Melanie, and a son, Tim, and he would live in Bryan's own apartment on the 24th Street side of London Terrace (which has a swimming pool in the basement, in case he needed to walk on water). Blaine and Mike would sit at the same desk working on the same computer, Blaine a software designer and Mike the first-time novelist writing about Blaine, spying on an assortment of neighbors across the way and trying to figure out their next moves.

Blaine, at first, has no idea that he is anything but ordinary. He's "a nice man, a reliable breadwinner, a dutiful husband, a doting father, Mets fan, left-handed Aquarius, somewhat superstitious, careful to get out of bed on the same side that he got in on-this kind of thing." But then he performs a miracle: He cures young Tim of cancer. And this starts things in motion, though, it has to be admitted, not very much motion. Jesus had a much more exciting time of it than Blaine does; he performs a few lamp levitations, perfect hoops on the basketball court and so forth-cheap tricks. His major miracle is winning $100,000 at blackjack in Las Vegas, which he guiltily donates to a homeless shelter. He never has a ministry, disciples, enemies who want to kill him or anything else, because he's far too modest to tell people of his divinity. (This casts more than a little doubt on the popular appeal of The Deity Next Door , but we are in the land of irony here.)

Mike Bryan is a Christian hobbyist. That is, without believing a word of it, he finds Christianity weirdly fascinating-its paradoxes, contradictions and excesses. About a dozen years ago, he (and Mike Bryan the Deity novelist, too) took time off from his regular sportswriter gig to hang out at a Texas Bible college while working on a book about evangelicals ( Chapter and Verse: A Skeptic Revisits Christianity , 1992). Though a professional writer, he is an "amateur" (his own term) at fiction. This book thus has several points that it wants to make. The first, of course, is "What would Jesus do?", in the wince-inducing slogan. The second is "What does a novelist do?", and here we follow Mr. Bryan the real-life author observing the trials of Mike Bryan the novelist as he struggles with ideas, tries them out on friends, rejects long passages (related to us first), revises and corrects before publishing his best-seller. If Blaine is the messiah, then Bryan is God: He created Blaine, and indeed every single thing in this book, all its wayward ramblings and ponderings (and it rambles and ponders nearly continuously) as it examines belief and doubt, creation, responsibility and the nature of the divine. "How could Jesus be both God and man?" is an old question. Well, Mr. Bryan (the God of Gods, we might call him) has created a fictional Bryan (God) who in turn creates Blaine-therefore do they not share one being?

This is not exactly a new idea in fiction; one novel that springs to mind from 30-odd years ago is Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (JayHoWaugh, get it?). Mr. Bryan's problem, I fear, is that there are few religious hobbyists among readers. (Full disclosure: I'm one.) Writers, yes. William Gaddis was one ( The Recognitions is an immense, learned and scatologically funny novel structured on church history), and perhaps Jack Miles is another ( Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God ). But people are mostly of the faith or reject it, or their eyes simply glaze over. This does not bode especially well for Mr. Bryan's book, which isn't particularly gripping, though it has a winningly congenial tone and gets off some good lines. (I liked the one about the swimming pool in the basement.) But metafiction with no plot and no payday-if one can call the Crucifixion and Resurrection a payday-is not everyone's notion of something to curl up with.

On the other hand, Mr. Bryan can take pleasure in the exquisite little package his publisher has given him. Smaller than a rack-size paperback, the book has beautiful creamy paper, elegantly designed margins, a jacket engraving taken from Lynd Ward (who published the wordless novel Gods' Man in 1929) and set against three different colors of cover. Best of all, separating both chapter breaks and line breaks, there's a sly and charming series of dingbats (and no, I'm not referring to Edith Bunker; a dingbat is a typographical ornament). These, in context, are the cleverest modern ones I've ever seen, and an artist is nowhere credited. Hmmm … a miracle?

Alice K. Turner, the former fiction editor of Playboy, is the author of The History of Hell (Harcourt).

Broads," my probing tribute to the gutsy, hand-bag-swinging chutzpah of the

collective New York psyche. Last week, we put Susanne Bartsch-party-promoter,

mom, Nivea devotee and Chelsea Hotel resident for more than 20 years-under the

microscope and found out how she survived the last two decades, and how she's

coping in post-catastrophe Manhattan. This week, we head uptown to meet former

pouf-skirt-wearing princess royal of 80's Nouvelle Society, Blaine Trump. The

big shocker? She's even more uptown than I thought.

Unscathed Broads, Part II: Blaine Trump.

"I go to 125th Street-the Mount Moriah Baptist Church on Fifth

Avenue-every Wednesday at 11 a.m.," chortled the friendly and glamorous Blaine

Trump, wife of Trump Management chief executive Robert Trump and sister-in-law

of Donald and, formerly, Ivana. "It's the Hour of Power with Reggie Williams

and the A.R.C. [Addicts Rehabilitation Center] choir." According to Ms. Trump,

this hour of gospel singing lifts the spirits and leaves an optimistic

afterglow that helps a girl combat post-traumatic stress.

The already incredibly optimistic Ms. Trump and I were seated in

the Sixth Avenue offices of God's Love We Deliver-the charity that brings meals

to homebound AIDS sufferers, of which she's vice chair-within yodeling distance

of ground zero. "On Sept. 11, we opened this building," on the corner of Spring

Street, "to the stampede of people coming up Sixth Avenue. Then the Red Cross

called us to set up food stations. We all pitched in." Ms. Trump, who was

wearing Celine jeans, high-heeled Celine boots, a kingfisher blue silk shirt

from Pink and a sporty leather Gucci jacket, and whose attractive hands were

kneading the well-clipped torso of Pearl, her Yorkshire terrier, said, "We were

not able to resume normal deliveries until the following Monday."

Their proximity to the tragedy left Ms. Trump and her team

profoundly traumatized, yet focused and determined. How come-you're no doubt

asking yourself-a prissy society broad like Blaine wasn't at home in the fetal

position on her Aubusson rug? I hate to disappoint you, but she's just not

prissy.

Blaine's foofy-socialite period started when she careened onto

the Women's Wear Daily Eye page in

the mid-1980's. "I look back and think, 'Oh my God, did I really do all that

crazy stuff? Did I wear that?' It was all too-oo

insane!" Mrs. Trump said of that period when Christian Lacroix was, justifiably,

the most important designer in the world. Blaine Matterhorned to Park Avenue

prominence in 1987, when she chaired the annual Memorial Sloan-Kettering

benefit. "Yes, I wore a Lacroix dress," she recalled mistily. "In fact, I still

have it. Christian and I became friends." The following year, she hosted the

American Ballet Theatre gala of La Gaieté

Parisienne , the ballet for which Lacroix designed brilliant costumes.

Monsieur Lacroix also dressed a phenomenal number of attendees in his signature

lampshadey folklorica, with hilarious results. This seminal event is etched

into my unconscious: It was the last big blowout before rich ladies eschewed

szhooshy junk-bond opulence and went all modern and slick. Quel drag!

The poufs didn't survive, and neither did the Mortimer's-lunching

Nouvelle Society. But Blaine did. She tore off her tiara, threw preconceived

notions of WASP appropriateness out the window and embraced the quotidian, sort

of. Today Blaine still goes to fancy parties, but she also rides the subway,

eats Cal Ripken bars (800-682-2760; $20 plus shipping for a box of 40), takes

her makeup off with Vaseline, cooks on a George Foreman grill and, most

shocking of all, sells blouses on QVC.

"I started three years ago," said Blaine. "We pulled things out

of my closet-handbags, sweater sets and cotton shirts-interpreted them and

called it 'American Classics by Blaine Trump.' The money goes to God's Love. My

next on-air [segment] is Nov. 9 from 2 to 4 p.m.," enthused Blaine, with the

air of a woman who enjoys the gritty déclassé of hard-core salesmanship.

Whatever do mater and pater make of all this?

Blaine was born in Orlando,

Fla., the daughter of Joe and Jean Beard, but not raised there. "My dad worked

for I.B.M.," she said. "I grew up in Japan in the 1960's, when the sewers were

open and people wandered down the street in their underwear to the bathhouse."

The Beards encouraged their four kids to take full advantage of this

unconventional location. Egged on by Jean, the Auntie Mame–ish matriarch ("lioness

hairdo, caftan, cigarette holder"), Blaine developed a freewheeling confidence.

A stint at a Swiss finishing school gave Blaine her poise and good manners, but

her biggest advantage is probably that her college education-a liberal-arts

degree-took place in Japan. Were she to have attended college in America circa

1974, she would undoubtedly have undone all the good work of her mother and the

mademoiselles at La Chatelaine-i.e., she would have become an irate,

introspective, self-doubting, unhappy, man-hating freak with bad posture.

Instead, she moved to New York in the mid-70's, worked at Christie's, married,

had a son (who is now 22) and divorced. Then, in 1981, she met Robert Trump.

They were married in 1984 and are currently living happily in the Trump Plaza

building on Third Avenue and 61st Street.

"Robert and I are big on

chocolate bars," said Blaine, with a sugar-lovin' grin. She feels that candy

and comfort food are the best antidotes for post-traumatic stress: "This isn't

a time for egg-white omelets!" Blaine also strongly advocates nesty home

cooking with close pals and family. "I just bought a Ron Popeil Rotisserie

& BBQ Oven. You know the one: 'Set it and forget it,'" she said, referring

to the infomercial. Her fave eatery? After their Hour of Power, Ms. Trump and

Reggie Williams are wont to head to Sylvia's (328 Lenox Avenue) for a

life-affirming lunch of "fried chicken, fried catfish, dirty rice, black-eyed

peas, topped off with peach cobbler."

It's hard to believe that the

tall, svelte Ms. Trump is the down-and-dirty, gravy-guzzlin' blue-collar

gourmand she claims to be. Does her wartime coping regimen include a workout?

"In 2000, I gave up physical fitness for a whole year and I felt fantastic,"

she said. "And now I'm crawling reluctantly back to Lotte Berk [23 East 67th

Street]. I went to two classes last week and one this week, which is not a good

sign."

Lotte will have to wait: Currently, Blaine's waking energies are

focused on keeping God's Love afloat. "When I started, we were serving 50 meals

a day. But thousands were at home dying of AIDS. We had to expand." She started

a capital campaign and somehow talked David Geffen out of $1.5 million. Blaine

used some of that cash to acquire the current 18,000-square-foot headquarters,

the David Geffen Building. "In 1993, we bought it at auction from the city for

$570,000," she said. In 1996, 10 years after Blaine got involved, GLWD moved

into its current space. Having been so instrumental in facilitating its growth,

Blaine is determined not to lose funding because of the World Trade Center

disaster. "People have to dig deep and keep the existing charities alive. Our

clients rely on us." Blaine and her team plan to meet their annual fund-raising

goal of $7.8 million through a plethora of upcoming events, including the Race

to Deliver (Nov. 18) and the Swatch Wristory Auction at Sotheby's (Dec. 3).

If you are too lazy to run four miles and you don't happen to

fancy a Sam Francis paint-spattered Swatch circa 1992, then at least buy your

gifts from God's Love (800-889-6515). This year's holiday catalog is jammed

with spiffy designer items: e.g., tree ornaments from Gucci ($100 for a set of

three) and Versace ($75), and a Burberry stain-resistant nylon cook's apron

($75). The catalog also sells amusingly snotty items: e.g., David (Viscount)

Linley's potpourri ($22.50) and a Blaine Trump candle ($32), created by Slatkin

& Co. and "inspired by Blaine's favorite mulling spices." Don't mock!

You're just jealous because you don't have a favorite mulling spice!

Before departing, I probed

the well-preserved Blaine for any last beauty and survival tips. Her answers

were tinged with her signature blue-collar pose: "I wash with Ivory soap. I get

my mani-pedi done at the Nail Nook on Third and 61st. I use Philip Kingsley's

shampoos and volumizer spray [$16 and $23, respectively, at Philip Kingsley

Trichological Clinic, 16 East 53rd Street]; Stephen Knoll's Healthy Intensive

Rehydrating Treatment [Sephora, $38.50]. Garren cuts my hair [841-9400].

Heather does it when he's not available, which is quite frequently. I paint my

portrait with M.A.C.: I love Spice lip pencil [$11] and Plum lipstick [$14].

M.A.C. has great glitter [$13] for the holidays, which I use on my hair and

eyelids."

Blaine, refreshingly, did not mention yoga or aromatherapy once

during our interview. Her only crunchy tip: Bach Flower Remedies for unblocking

your energy frequencies (GNC stores, $9.99). "I use the 'comfort-and-reassure'

remedy. A couple of drops will get you through anything."

Blaine saved her best tip for last: "Slow down on the media-fest.

I never watch TV, and I gave up looking at the newspaper a week ago. We lost 11

firefighters in our local firehouse, and I'm still trying to deal with that."

video of Waiting for Guffman , which

sends up theater as This Is Spinal Tap

satirized rock 'n' roll. Christopher Guest (of Spinal Tap ) plays a campy choreographer, Corky St. Clair, who's

hoping to get back to New York and into the big time of Broadway via an amateur

musical entitled Red, White and Blaine .

Performed by the stage-struck locals of Blaine, Corky's show celebrates the

150th anniversary of the little town, and in the end everything goes

disastrously, touchingly wrong.

"Let us rest awhile by this campfire here," the narrator of Red, White and Blaine says, staggering

on gamely as he continues with the

story. He rests awhile by the fire, which has been created sweetly with strips

of red cloth that are blown by a fan in front of a light. My goodness, I

thought, that's exactly the same amateur effect they use for the fire in Jane Eyre !

With all of its multimillion-dollar Broadway technology and

sophisticated cyberspace effects, Jane

Eyre 's pivotal fire scene-lit by that Victorian madwoman in the attic,

Bertha the pyromaniac-is little more than the good old standby of many an

amateur production. They use silk ribbons blown by a fan, just like the folks

of Corky St. Clair's Blaine. Small wonder the big moment goes for little or

nothing on a Broadway stage. It's over in a flash, too-as if the distinguished

designer, John Napier, and the gifted co-director, John Caird (who also wrote

the book), couldn't face it. One senses them clutching their heads in

rehearsal, moaning despairingly, "What do we do with the fire scene?" The movie version could easily solve the

problem with digital magic. What's a poor stage version to do?

Better than this, I'm afraid. Mr. Caird and Mr. Napier last

worked together on Les Misérables ,

but there's a tired, uninspired flatness to their work here-a failure of the

imagination that sinks Charlotte Brontë's Gothic romance novel and

proto-feminist weepie into the drudgery of a dutiful uphill slog. "My story

begins, gentle audience, a long age ago," Jane Eyre tells us coyly at the

start. And we have a long age to go, gentle reader, before her story ends

almost three hours later.

Jane Eyre the

musical is a somber piece, lit with deliberate, moody murkiness by Jules Fisher

and Peggy Eisenhauer. Lightness-a light touch-is rare. The "lovable"

housekeeper of Thornfield Hall, Mrs. Fairfax, is therefore as Dickensian as a

jolly cartoon, the pro forma period

party scene over-bright, under-witty. "Galloping up the drive / All the

beautiful people arrive / The cream of the crop / Clippity-clop."

There's quite a bit of

clippity-clopping going on. Broody, turbulent Rochester gallops onstage to the

sound of offstage clippity-clops. The dialogue is Victorian arch: "What the

deuce are you doing out here alone?" "There'll be a storm tonight, I'll wager!"

The music and lyrics by the relatively unknown Paul Gordon, whose previous

musical was the pop opera Greetings from

Venice Beach , is mostly characterless recitative or the familiar Sturm und Drang school of Andrew Lloyd

Webber. Tortured lovers wail about living in agonized turmoil without revealing

any. Mr. Caird wrote "additional lyrics," which haven't helped at all.

"Damn the passion. Damn the skies / Damn the light that's in

her eyes," cusses glowering Rochester, who's played a little woodenly by James

Barbour, formerly Beast in Beauty and the

Beast . "The darkness that invades my soul / It sucks my blood / It takes

control / But I will not endure it any more!" Oh yes he will.

But we have a pious Jane, even a smug one. "When they bruise

you with words / When they make you feel small / When it's hardest to bear /

You must do nothing at all." This is a holier-than-thou, preachy Jane Eyre,

blessing everyone and everything in sight. When cruelly abused, she believes we

must do nothing at all because "forgiveness is the simplest vow." A noble

thought, but the simplest ?

Simple-minded solutions

for the Broadway masses, nice and trite. "I can't help but sense the darkness

in his mind / But I keep looking for his goodness / Afraid of what I'll find."

There she goes again! Goody-goody Jane's unexciting, sensible heart moves

gingerly toward Rochester's on quiet seas, as she prays a wave may come and

carry her "closer to his troubled tide." His troubled tide is heaving for her.

And so it goes, including the rousing maritime metaphors. "Over mountains, over

oceans / How her restlessness stirs …."

Marla Schaffel does well in the demanding role of Jane, I

thought, which will be fat consolation to one and all. It's a quibble to point

out, perhaps, that her plummy English accent makes the Queen of England sound

common. This is meant to be Masterpiece

Theatre onstage. It craves our sleepy Anglophilia. And to that, I say,

"Clippity clop."

The House of Wax

Jane Eyre left me

out of sorts, as you can tell. The Wax ,

Kathleen Tolan's "existential farce," which was inspired by her getting her

legs waxed, didn't help, either. "A few years ago, the playwright Kathleen

Tolan decided she needed smoother legs," The

Times informs us. "So I went to this wax person," Ms. Tolan recalled

recently, "and I just found it hilarious to lie on this slab getting my hair

torn out by the roots-and paying for it!"

So now you know. Ms. Tolan, who appears to have been

previously living hairily in a cave, went on: "The woman who did it happened to

be Russian, and we had this amazing conversation about Chekhov and Tolstoy

while she was pulling. I thought, 'I've got to put this in a play.'"

And I thought, to be honest, "Must you?" But that's how The Wax at Playwrights Horizon was born.

And you never know . Because the waxing scene, in its unhinged nuttiness, was the

only one in this most unhappy comedy that began to approach the intended

giddiness of Ms. Tolan's version of classic French farce.

The action takes place in the hotel room of a poet who's frigidly

married to a foolish scientist (scientists are in ; I wish I could say the same for poets). They're attending a

wedding and a number of other unfulfilled people turn up in the room, but I

wasn't sure why. The dramatist is laborious on the subject of sexual identity,

and promiscuous with ill-digested ideas. There's much rattling of door keys to

allow for much unnecessary hiding under beds, and far too much over-acting. No

one except for Frank Wood, blinking with deadpan bewilderment at what's going on

around him, reveals any flair for farce. Ms. Tolan's talky, confessional

characters, meant to be comic or wittily cultivated, are merely neurotic or

pretentious and sometimes nasty. Their identities get stripped away, I

guess-like, well, like hair on legs. The

Wax embarrassed me.