Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper at 1stDibs gallery. (Patrick McMullan)

While Fashion Week was winding down at Lincoln Center Wednesday night, Diane von Furstenberg was sequestered on the 10th floor of a nondescript Lexington Avenue building. Across the giant storeroom of the mostly digital antique dealer 1stDibs, Patrick McMullan was snapping Bill Cunningham as he took a picture of a small watercolor on the wall. Nearby, Anderson Cooper hovered around his mother, who, in a stunning red kimono, greeted guests to her first solo art show since 2001.

While most people might associate Gloria Vanderbilt with her fashion prowess--her jeans commercials in the ’80s helped define a culture of denim, after all--she demurred at any questions about the fashion world that was teeming nearby. "My work involves all my time," she told The Observer, referring to her current exhibition, "The World of Gloria Vanderbilt: Collages, Dream Boxes, and Recent Paintings." With images that included a doll on a crucifix alongside bright, whimsical portraits of Angelina Jolie and Joyce Carol Oates, "The World" is open to the public starting today, and will be going till mid-October. Proceeds from donations will be going to the Huntsville Museum in Huntsville, Ala., where New York Magazine’s Wendy Goodman (also in attendance that evening) held a party for the release of her biography, The World of Gloria Vanderbilt.

"We wanted to do something nice for the Huntsville Museum in return for their warm hospitality," she said. "And what better way than suggesting the opening of my show be a benefit for the museum?" She also praised 1stDibs founder and president Michael Bruno for his attention to detail while organizing the event.

Mr. Bruno was equally deferential. "Gloria has always been very forward-thinking," he said of the 88-year-old heiress. "Ever since I went to her studios to see her paintings, I've been obsessed."

And he had put his money where his mouth was, purchasing one of Ms. Vanderbilt's paintings himself: a large, brightly colored piece called Tenacity that hung near the center of the room.

On the way out, The Observer ran into Joyce Carol Oates by the elevators. We inquired if the author had seen Ms. Vanderbilt's painting of her.

She shot back, "You mean there's only one?"

After informing the AP that the 16 members of the academy had reached a decision, permanent secretary Peter Englund addressed the much-alleged "pro-Europe" agenda that has prevented an American from winning the lit prize since Toni Morrison captured it in 1993. Englund denied that there's any agenda, but admitted that the panelists may succumb to "subconscious bias," as all of them are European. "That is a problem," he said. "But we are aware of it."

This year, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are among the American writers poised to end the drought. But bear in mind that history is against the U.S. in this respect, and bet accordingly. 

Dressed in a frilly black camisole and a neon pink cardigan, the weightless and elegant 70-year-old author spent the pre-dinner cocktail hour floating around the century-old Gramercy Park den of culture’s densely decorated parlor, athletically greeting guests and posing for photos, but never straying too far from the critic-novelist Edmund White, whose office in the Princeton creative writing department is right across from hers, or her soon-to-be second husband, the bearded Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross.

As club members milled about and ate from the luxurious spread of cheeses and berries, Ms. Oates asked Mr. White conspiratorially if he’d noticed the “princely looking young man” in the handsome kurta who was sitting quietly by himself against the wall. “I wonder who he is,” Ms. Oates said, sneaking a glance across the room at the man’s regal-looking dress. “He looks like he’s just waiting for someone to come up and talk to him!”

Intrigued, Mr. White suggested introductions. Ms. Oates agreed but asked meekly if he would please make the first move. “Well, sure!” Mr. White said, cheerfully. “I’ll just say, ‘What an interesting shirt!’” Soon the lot of them were talking happily. Turns out, the young fellow was a former financier from India--and a club member, at that!

Mr. White was to deliver one of the evening’s dinner-time speeches in praise of Ms. Oates; he said he had been asked by the evening's organizers to keep his remarks brief. Others in Mr. White's boat: Ecco Press publisher and Ms. Oates' longtime editor Daniel Halpern; the painter Gloria Vanderbilt, whose work Ms. Oates has hanging all over her home; and former New Republic literary editor (and otherwise accomplished man of letters) Roger Rosenblatt, who served as the evening’s designated emcee.

When it came time to pack into the dining room for the evening’s main event, all of them sat together at one table. They were joined by National Arts Club president O. Aldon James, wearing a rosy bow-tie and his trademark pink spectacles, as well as Cherry Provost, the white-haired chair of the club’s literary committee.

“I look on this as my escape from the suburbs,” said Ms. Provost, who was born in Montclair, N.J., and currently resides in Glen Ridge. She became a member of the National Arts Club while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, when the club sent a letter out to students offering them affiliate status for the low price of $100. “A year later they canceled the affiliation because some RISD people probably got drunk and caused trouble,” she said. “At the bottom of the letter saying I was no longer affiliated it said, ‘if you truly want to become a member, call this number.’ It went to the bottom of my pile on my desk till I wanted to get out of the suburbs, and then I called up and got an application.”

As chair of the literary committee, Ms. Provost said, she has been working on booking authors and poets for events at the club, and had grown rather fed up with all the unhelpful publicists and agents she had encountered in the process. Her husband, she said, had procured for her some authors’ home phone numbers, so now she just uses those.

“Do you have any biographers in your stable?” Ms. Provost asked, turning to Mr. Halpern. He said there were probably one or two, yes. “Because here’s why,” she said, and told him about an art collector she had heard about whose life story would make a really terrific book.

At the conclusion of the three-course meal of salmon salad, lamb chops, and meringue with blackberries, and all the charming, complimentary speeches from her friends, Ms. Oates herself got up and thanked the club for awarding her the medal. “I’m speechless!” she said and went on to express her gratitude to Mr. Halpern, Ms. Vanderbilt, and Mr. White for saying such nice things about her during dinner.

She noted that she and Mr. White taught together at Princeton, and were due in early in the morning to teach. “We’re the only people probably in this room who actually work!” she quipped, to tentative chortles.

At a quarter of 10, Mr. James said a few words by way of closing—there was something about Ms. Oates being a “literary raptor”—and pretty soon everyone was heading for the coat check; complimentary copies of The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982, under their arms.

Since the book is a fictionalized take on the murder of JonBenét Ramsey (12 years later and still unsolved), Ms. Sachs asked the author "What do you think of tabloids?" Here's Ms. Oates' response:

According to Time, My Sister is Ms. Oates' 37th novel so we tend to believe her when she says her time is limited.

The NBCC honors books in six categories: Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, and Poetry.

In industry terms, Knopf leads the pack with four nominations (including three in the biography category), followed by FSG at three. The Poetry category did not include a single book published by one of the major houses.

The full list of finalists follows below—you’ll notice that Joyce Carol Oates rather distinguished herself, getting nods in both the autobiography category and the fiction category.

Note: the finalists are chosen by members of the NBCC board, who break up into committees based on category and after months of listserving come up with a short list of nominees which they then bring to the entire board. The entire board votes on a winner in each category. Find comprehensive notes on the process here.

In addition to the prizes in the six categories, the board gives out an award for book critic of the year (technically the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing); this year the winner was Sam Anderson of New York Magazine, who beat out Brooke Allen (who publishes all over the place, including The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Criterion), Walter Kirn (Times Book Review, New York), Ron Charles (The Washington Post), and Adam Kirsch (The New York Sun).

Autobiography: Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press; Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf; Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco; Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso; Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House.

Nonfiction: Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford University Press; Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday; Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s.

Fiction: Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead; Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men, Dial Press; Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter, HarperCollins; Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, Simon & Schuster.

Biography: Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press; Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf; Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, Knopf; John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf; Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press.

Poetry:
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf; Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf; Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood; Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood; Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago.

Criticism: Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon; Julia Alvarez. Once Upon a Quinceanera, Viking; Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt; Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,Farrar, Straus.

I am a bohemian.

This started before I was born. My parents lived on the second floor of a cold-water flat on the Bowery, an Armenian restaurant downstairs. There was a pull-chain toilet in the hall (shared), no sink, a cloth ceiling to cover exposed beams and mice scampering across them. We had no bed, but an extra-long sofa; the dining-room table (also a desk) was a door screwed onto metal legs; and the stove was where the former tenant had ended it all by turning on the gas. Sometimes, when not listening to their Shostakovich records, my parents would step out and take in a Soviet film. And, of course, there was a sociology major renting out the back room.

My dad was a Columbia student, writing his dissertation on communism in Chinese agrarian society. My mom, an actress-adding the only bombshell element-worked at Elizabeth Arden. Except for a gospel-singing, highly perfumed godmother and Southern-belle grandmother, I had little exposure to bombshells.

I admit to having at least a modicum of charm and to being a shameless flirt. I have high heels, false eyelashes and two satin Gucci cocktail dresses in black and hot pink for public appearances. I perch on chairs; curl coquettishly, and inappropriately, on armrests, car seats and desks, even at job interviews; and take all my clothing off at any opportunity.

For a writer, I don't look too bad. I don't know if you've seen many of them in situ , but most writers look like hell. (I have space at the Writers [sic] Room where I see them shuffling around in bedroom slippers, sweat pants, shapeless sweaters and glasses repaired with tape.) Yet nearly all the press-despite my lanky hair, glasses, economical silhouette and obvious lack of va-va-voom-has insisted on calling me a bombshell.

Of course, I'm trying to make a good impression and sizzle a little for the sake of my book. (You can bet no one expected Norman Mailer to "dress like a bombshell" when he was promoting his voluptuously conjectured and gutsy Marilyn . Or Joyce Carol Oates for Blonde .) I showed up at Joey Reynolds' studio in a leopard-print coat. But every time Joey said he had a Real Live Bombshell on the air at WOR, I felt compelled to counter the "compliment": I'm not a bombshell, I study them. Only Lenard Lopate of NPR understood; and a stinging review of our Barnes & Noble reading in the New York Press nailed it, asserting that my muse for the book, Christina Cooley, was the genuine article and that I was, alas, too Audrey Hepburn. (I never said I didn't have style.)

It's true I have marabou and sequins sprinkled throughout my wardrobe, but I'm most comfortable in a black turtleneck or cotton paisley dress. Definitely un-bombshell.

Yet, surprisingly, there are many crossovers between bombshells and bohemians.

First of all, they both arrive late: bombshells for assorted and obvious reasons, like heels breaking, starting a hairdo over from scratch, staying up all night watching black-and-white movies; bohemians because they were up all night reading, writing, listening to jazz or watching black-and-white movies.

Both bombshells and bohemians love to undress: bombshells for calendars, centerfolds, plays and sleeping; bohemians to model for artists, performance art and sleeping.

But there's a big difference between bombshells and bohemians, and it's something I hadn't thought about until recently, when I began, as most of us have, to re-evaluate. I have questioned what it is I do for a living, namely naming lipsticks and beauty products. I do not heal, prescribe, mend, comfort, fix, serve, rescue or build. I have also questioned the value of my recent book.

The Bombshell Manual of Style , despite its upbeat, all-encompassing and generous outlook, seemed frivolous. It's not a novel; it's not epic. The idea of a bombshell manual seemed about as necessary as lipstick.

Until I looked deeper. What, I asked myself, would a bombshell do in the wake of tragedy, specifically post–Sept. 11?

A bombshell would take in a kitten, bake cookies for firemen and show up in her stilettos to present them, cheer rescue workers on the West Side Highway, make out with firemen or put flowers in front of the police station. And she would never stop shopping. A bombshell gets on a plane; a bombshell orders champagne; if champagne is only served in first class, somehow she'll manage some, even in coach. The bombshell would be thrilled to have a job, especially my job, naming beauty products for a company that doesn't do animal testing and donates 100 percent of profits from a lipstick to comfort and support people living with AIDS.

While the bohemian is reading Holocaustal, morbid, atomic, wartime, subversive or drunken poetry-Apollinaire, Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Toge Sankichi, Anna Akhmatova-and is too depressed to work on the novel or poem or screenplay, the bombshell reads something uplifting, like Walt Whitman.

Bombshells are patriotic. They adore national landmarks and Presidents-all Presidents, Democrat and Republican. They love the flag, they love their country and they love soldiers. This goes for sailors, the Coast Guard- just about any man in a uniform.

Bohemians are subversive and disagree with all Presidents, Democrat or Republican. Chances are, if a bohemian has a flag, it will be French or Soviet. An American flag? Hardly.

When I was in high school, I was the only student in my homeroom who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. But now?

I am thinking more like a bombshell. While I have always been a fan of a little fascism when it was in my favor (it was decidedly un-bohemian of me to think it swell when Mayor Giuliani curtailed smoking in public places), I was the expatriate type, romanticizing life in Paris, Scotland, Cairo. Now I want an American flag. I love Mayor Giuliani even though he doesn't understand ferrets, my pet of choice. I want the Pledge of Allegiance to be read every day (participation optional). Our firemen and policemen deserve a raise. Until there are no countries (i.e., John Lennon's "Imagine"), I want to love my country and Americans and not judge them so harshly. And stop dissing Norman Rockwell. I want to support American companies and goods made in America; I'll even try our shoes.

Kimberly Forrest, co-author of The Bombshell Manual of Style and former editor at W , climbed my fourth-floor walk-up in Birkenstocks that her artist boyfriend had spray-painted silver. Kimberly is disturbed by jingoism and flag-waving, and she looks disdainfully at those little pins and ribbons in red, white and blue.

She'll be the first person I ask to pitch in when I write The Bohemian Manifesto . I may have lost my bohemian edge.

The skinny on Gwynnie? Welcome to Shallow Hal , a movie that purports to be a parable about how fat people should be accepted by our culture -but which ends up offending on two levels: first, by actually making sport of fat people; and second, by asserting that the true ideal of "inner beauty" is a spoiled, silly Spence girl (a.k.a. Gwyneth Paltrow ). Redeeming factors: The film's other star , Jack Black , is an emerging comic force, and tonight's screening and reception benefit the pediatric programs of St. Vincent's, where Gwynnie apparently volunteers. Pull her aside and suggest that by showing her naked rump in Harper's Bazaar and plowing through Hollywood's B-list male thespians, she's on the wobbly path to becoming the next Sally Kirkland.

[Screening, Chelsea West Cinema, 333 West 23rd Street, 7:30 p.m., reception follows, the Tonic, 108 West 18th Street, 10 p.m., 534-7290.]

You like Auster, I like oysters ! Wriggle into those $ 112 Earl Jean corduroys you bought in a mad rush to "stimulate the economy" and settle your fanny into the seats of the New School, where darklyhandsome(if slightlycrinkly) writer Paul Auster joins controversial lady intellectual Susan Sontag , thinking-woman's sex object John Turturro and other New Yorkers who are very big in France as they tell New York stories. There will be big stacks of the new book Mr. Auster edited, a collection of stories from National Public Radio listeners titled I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project . "It's real life, isn't it, presented in very raw, direct terms," said Mr. Auster from the Park Slope love den he shares with babe novelist Siri Hustvedt and their perfect children. "As I've discovered, NPR reaches into almost every crevice of the United States … you have the back hills of Kentucky, rural, urban, old, young-most fairly well-educated, though I did get some stories that were illiterate." Contrary to rumors, Mr. Auster will not be sharing how he watched the Twin Towers collapse from a Brooklyn stoop.

[Tishman Auditorium, the New School, 66 West 12th Street, 7 p.m., 800-709-4321.]

Thursday 8th

Remember canned food drives in your elementary school? Well, grown-ups do the same thing, they just have to be higher-concept about it-hence this evening's "Canstruction" competition. The gist: People bring canned food, teams of architects and engineers will whip up impromptu canned-food structures, which will then be judged by the local-celebrity draw of Stanley Tucci ( Big Night ) and Steve Buscemi (actor whose lovable loser act -see Ghost World -was getting old … until it turned out he used to be a real firefighter and was down at ground zero helpin' out, and not by just baking brownies); and then everything will be disassembled and distributed to the needy. Bring can openers. If you prefer platinum to aluminum , Samantha Boardman (nubile socialite, doctor and James Truman–dater ) and her rich pals on the council of the Museum of the City of New York co-chair a boozy bash and first viewing of the new second floor at Tiffany & Co. Watch with increasing horror as today's strapping, aerobicized socialites try to act gamine and Audrey Hepburn–esque amid the Brazilian granite, African hardwood columns, beveled mirrors and piles of coldly glittering jewels.

[Canstruction, New York Design Center, 200 Lexington Avenue, 6 p.m., 679-9500, ext. 30; Cocktail party, Tiffany & Co., Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 230-6557.]

Friday 9th

Knopf, Knopf: Who's there? Tonight Sonny ("We Love Oprah") Mehta , the poobah of the Knopf publishing house, clasps hands with original feminist temptress Gloria Steinem and welcomes guests at a soirée for former Smith College prez Jill Ker Conway , who has- brava! -polished off A Woman's Education , the third volume of her absorbing memoirs.

[Cosmopolitan Club, 122 East 66th Street, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 617-772-9453.]

Saturday 10th

Tuleh, too late? If you've been dragged to the Upper West Side by one of those aggressive brunchers (truffle season starts tomorrow!), get your revenge by skipping out on the bill and buying up everything still remaining at Tuleh's sample sale : frocks, trousers, separates, one-of-a-kind beaded items and a smattering of Manolos for those who feel it's safe to walk in heels again.

[175 West 81st Street, No. 5C, noon, 595-3879.]

Sunday 11th

Everything went to hell in the late 1960's, when white male writers began to think that their heroin addictions were pretty d*mned fascinating, don't you think? You remember Jerry Stahl, who wrote a drug memoir called Permanent Midnight ? Or,if you're like us, you remember how that wriggly little fellow Ben Stiller , trying to be a "serious actor" (mistake, though Zoolander may be more of a mistake), played Mr. Stahl in a movie? Well, now Mr. Stahl pops up again ( see brooding photo ) with a crime novel, Plainclothes Naked . First line: "Spongy buttocks exposed and wobbling …. " Now that's nice! Nevertheless, Benicio Del Toro (bad-boy actor), Anthony Bourdain (bad-boy chef), Nick Tosches (bad-boy biographer), Eric Bogosian (bad-boy performance artist) and Jonathan Ames (sex writer with strange prissy streak) all say they like it, so if you're on the prowl for a black T-shirted, sideburned, scowling fellow, by all means go to Mr. Stahl's reading tonight in the East Village.

[K.G.B., 85 East Fourth Street, 7 p.m., 505-3360.]

Monday 12th

Docs go glam! The city's doctors take their hands out of the buckets of ice water they've been submerging them in each night after a hard day of writing Cipro prescriptions and tighten their cummerbunds for a night of swank hobnobbing . Downtown at the Puck Building, it's the Doctors of the World benefit, at which New York clinical psychologist Ian Miller gets a spiffy award. Uptown at the Pierre, it's the American-Italian Cancer Foundation's 20th-anniversary gala (best chance for white truffles ). A few blocks away at the Waldorf, Julie Andrews snaps up a medal of distinction at Lenox Hill Hospital's Autumn Ball, which has a Gershwin theme.

[Doctors of the World, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street, 7:30 p.m., 226-9890, ext. 228; American-Italian Cancer Foundation, Pierre Hotel, Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, 7 p.m., 628-9090; Lenox Hill Autumn Ball, Waldorf-Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, 6:30 p.m., 434-2544.]

Tuesday 13th

Sam, I am, Iman: It's the eternal New York battle of the self-consciously low-key versus the unapologetically narcissistic ! Choice A: Astoria author Sam Lipsyte -whom we hear fronted a band called Dungbeetleat Brown University (but who didn't, really?)-is fêted in a Chelsea gallery for his novel, The Subject Steve , about a guy with a mysterious terminal illness. Bonus dirty excerpt! "It felt good in my hand, throbbed there like some wounded bird you've just found in the woods." John Cheever just wished he could write like that! Choice B: Proud hubby David Bowie hosts a party for his Somalian supermodel of a wife, Iman, who has written an homage to herself titled, naturally, I Am Iman . Bonus dirty excerpt: see photo.

[Sam Lipsyte, Greene Naftali Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 463-7770; Iman, Donna Karan New York, 819 Madison Avenue, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 564-6367, ext. 35.]

Sow some Oates: She writes about 27 novels a year -so it was only a matter of time before someone in this wacky "creative" town turned one of them into an opera . Black Water , based on the Joyce Carol Oates novella inspired by the Chappaquiddick scandal, opens tonight. Eight-Day Week intern Tamar Kaplan-Marans , who was bravely opening our mail with plastic gloves until her parents put a stop to the whole business, spoke to composer John Duffy , who said: "I had thought of doing an opera on Joe DiMaggio. I thought it would be like Othello . I tried to get writers, but they all wanted to do their own works. I lived on 70th Street at this time; it was a Saturday night, and I was reading The New York Times Book Review . I read a great review of Black Water , jumped out of bed and went to buy it. I wrote a letter to Joyce, and she also was not keen on the DiMaggio idea. She had a play about Thoreau and wanted it done, or wanted to take a Henry James work." Oh, these damned intellectuals ! But she came to her senses and agreed that an opera about a political scandal was really the way to go-she even penned the libretto. "There are moments that sound like a Broadway show, and other moments that are very operatic," said Mr. Duffy. "There is a chorus, a reggae dance, duets, trios, arias. It is not a very happy ending. But Butterfly, La Traviata and West Side Story don't end happy, either." Well, if it doesn't work out, there's always Thoreau.

[Cooper Union Great Hall, 7 East Seventh Street, 7:30 p.m. discussion with Ms. Oates,

performance to follow, 279-4200.]

Wednesday 14th

It wouldn't be autumn in New York without the warm, auburn-haired, politically palatable, sensibly-single-yet-solidly-attached, sexy-maternal presence of actress Susan Sarandon at a bazillion small-scale benefits in "hip" little pockets of town. Tonight she accepts an "Inspiration Award" from fellow Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden at the Lower Eastside Girls Club's Willow Awards ; admittance is a mere $85, and the dress code is "Hi-Lo Couture" -that means midriffs, sister girlfriends!

[Eyebeam Atelier, 540 West 21st Street, 7:30 p.m., 982-1633, more information on girlsclub.org.]

It's not enough that those silly boomers are so absorbed in their big, fleshy, collective midlife crisis (see every Time cover and John Updike, Philip Roth and Minot sisters novel of the past decade), now their kids are kvetching as well? Take this book Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties please! We found co-author, bachelorette and Yale grad Alexandra Robbins at her desk in The New Yorker magazine's Washington bureau (where, unlike the New York bureau, the female contributors aren't yet encouraged to pose suggestively and bra-less for the magazine's pages). It's a small bureau, just four rooms, one of which contains a copy machine where Joe Klein likes to Xerox his buttocks. "People think that the 20's are this wonderful, wonderful time, but there's a dark side," said Ms. Robbins. "Twentysomethings today waffle over decisions. They find decision-making to be a burden. There are so many options out there, it makes it harder for them to choose. I was going through one of these things and then I wrote this, and just hearing all these twentysomethings say, 'God, you know, I have problems,' hearing other people doubt themselves, now I'm fine! I'm gonna be 25 soon and " Click. Meet Ms. Robbins and co-author Abby Wilner when Mademoiselle, which used to publish the likes of Sylvia Plath back when people in their 20's read Sylvia Plath instead of Harry Potter, throws them a book party tonight. Crash strategy: camisoles!

[Glass, 287 10th Avenue, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 286-4306.]

MoMA-ney! Spring is a time when the cheapskates suddenly flee Manhattan for Europe, since they know if they stick around they will be hit up for megabucks by the benefit brigade . Tonight's money train starts at the Museum of Modern Art's fabled "Party in the Garden," co-chaired by Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, the only woman in Manhattan who's never had a bad hair day. Count the number of women who blindly outfit themselves in this season's Prada decadent-flower number . Meanwhile, the slightly blonder socialites Jennifer Creel, Tory Burch, etc. make a plucky, vaguely unsettling attempt at "white-trash chic" (ankle bracelet) at the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering's "High Rollers" gambling party. Lots of fun and squeals around the roulette wheel! Meanwhile, suspiciously pneumatic model Stephanie Seymour puts her lips together and blows at a private fund-raiser for Jazz at Lincoln Center with jazz big-shot Wynton Marsalis and a curious, if not exactly fun, crowd: underused actress Glenn Close, puffing pillar of society Fran Lebowitz, actor-turned-social-butterfly Matthew Modine, plus Diane von Furstenberg, the woman who wrapped scores of women like so many burritos in those little dresses and then married Barry Diller for the year's best punch line. All will shimmy and half-gyrate in the way "cultured" people do when they listen to jazz.

[MoMA Party in the Garden, 11 West 53rd Street, 6 p.m., 708-9680; High Rollers, Metropolitan Club, 1 East 60th Street, 7 p.m., 639-7972; Jazz at Lincoln Center, somewhere in the West Village, 7 p.m., 258-9829.]

Thursday 17th

Ring her Belle! If you've had it up to here with lanky social-whirligig author Thomas Beller, why not try petite, grounded authoress Jennifer Belle? Her first novel, Going Down, zoomed to the top of our best-five list in 1996, and ever since then we've been anxiously awaiting her second, High Maintenance, and here it is! Woo-hoo! The plot: Woman divorces man, misses her apartment, becomes a real-estate broker, complications ensue oh, just buy the damn book. (It irks us that Ms. Belle has not gotten the attention that certain inferior novelists have received simply because they are quick to pose for semi-naked photos, blinding unprincipled male editors . ) Anyway, tonight Ms. Belle celebrates High Maintenance at a fancy-dress store downtown. "I just thought it would be very beautiful and fairy-princessy," she said. Our big-cheese editor is revving up his pumpkin.

[Morgane Le Fay, 67 Wooster Street, by invitation only, 366-2737.]

Friday 18th

Me so Sehorny! We have little love for golf though those scalloped Lilly Pulitzer skirts are pretty cute but for those of you who enjoy a "sport" where your heart rate doesn't budge for two hours, don't miss your chance to see Lisa Ling (View lady), Jason Sehorn (football player) and Hallie Kate Eisenberg (incredibly annoying child actress who appears in those insufferable Western-style Pepsi pre-movie "trailers") putt their way around the city to raise money for Sehorn's Corner, which benefits underprivileged single-parent families which, one presumes, does not include Calista Flockhart. Who's sponsoring: porno mag Maxim and ESQ, a Swiss watch company not to be confused with "ironic" porno mag Esquire.

[Tee-off, Modell's Sporting Goods, Vanderbilt Avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets, 2 p.m., 849-8261.]

Gimme shelter magazine! So this magazine called Dwell along the same lines as Nest, Wallpaper and those other fancy real-estate rags for ambisexual Gen Y'ers with shiny, clunky shoes, nasty cigarette habits and too much time on their hands threw a contest: design a brand new White House! What's wrong with the old one (besides the fact that there's a man with the I.Q. of a monkey running loose in there)? As for the 80 submissions, "It's fairly top secret," said a flack, "but there's one that was modeled on the idea of a Rubik's cube, there's one that was designed as a drive-in, there's one that was modeled on the idea of a New York apartment." Is Bill Clinton judging this contest? Tonight, Dwell editor in chief Karrie Jacobs announces the winners at a "kickoff" for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair coming up at the Javits Center.

[Dwell magazine, the Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street, sixth floor, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 255-8455, ext. 25.]

Saturday 19th

While you were sleeping, The New Yorker ratcheted up its ongoing self-celebration. Last night they kicked off that dreaded New Yorker Festival (the Lilith Fair for the self-styled literary set) with readings, including two Brits who used to be pals, then loathed each other for a while, and now who knows? We're talking about Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. This morning, the magazine throws all reason to the wind and sticks O.J. Simpson expert Jeffrey Toobin at the Harvard Club, financial writer James Surowiecki at the Yale Club and Malcolm ("Hello, ladies") Gladwell at the Princeton Club, while Woody Allen is interviewed by New Yorker editor David Remnick, finishing up tonight with a Bob Dylan– themed benefit for P.E.N. featuring (who else?) Dave Eggers and some group calling themselves the Esquires (no relation to the magazine, unless editor David Granger has been brushing up on his harmonica skills) at Town Hall, and then a dance party (be afraid, be very, very afraid) thrown by New York's resident "hip" Brit writer, Nick Hornby, at Shine (hey, is that place still in business?). All this because the magazine itself hasn't been any fun since Harold Ross left?

[Call 1-866-LIT-FEST for all the details.]

Sunday 20th

From Eggers to eggs: Remember when everyone was so scared of cholesterol, you couldn't give away eggs in this town? But that was before eggs-citable New York Times food critic Biff ("One Star") Grimes single-handedly revived interest in the lowly orb with his sad, sad tale of a wanderin' chicken that plunked down in his Astoria backyard . Today, Maison Louis Jadot sponsors an "Egg-Stravaganza" (yes, that's what they're calling it) on a yacht (no escape) to benefit Share Our Strength (feeds the hungry) and the French Culinary Institute Scholarship Fund. Good eggs André Soltner, Jacques Pépin and Alain Sailhac will demonstrate how to cook the perfect omelet; author Marie Simmons will discuss her book, The Good Egg; and they'll be raffling off "surprises" (uh-oh) from various restaurants. Hey, it may cost 75 bucks, but it sure beats facing those pram-wielding people in their 30's aggressively brunching at Bubby's.

[World Yacht, Pier 81, West 41st Street at Hudson River, noon, 630-8100.]

Monday 21st

Harvard needs cash? Tonight you can reprise that whole New Yorker Lollapalooza feeling at the first installment of the George ("I wore short pants as a boy!") Plimpton reading series benefiting The Harvard Advocate. Tonight's readers: stormin' Norman Mailer and slick Rick Moody the Star Jones and Milla Jovovich of the readings circuit. The overbooked Mr. Plimpton must then pop some Ephedrine and head to the Park (the Moomba of 2003), where Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington and Aidan Quinn co-host a dinner for the Artists for the African Rainforest Conservancy. Tell Mr. Quinn you loved his work in Desperately Seeking Susan.

[Harvard Advocate, The Paris Review, which is located somewhere we're not supposed to tell you exactly where on the Upper East Side, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 861-0016; Artists for the African Rainforest Conservancy, the Park, 118 10th Avenue, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 228-5555.]

Tuesday 22nd

Feelin' your Oates: Hall and Oates? We wish, girlfriend. It's another Joyce Carol Oates book. Right on the heels of that short-story collection, Faithless, is this murder mystery titled The Barrens, about yet another real-estate agent . Tonight she gets a book party. If you're still reading her 378th book, and have yet to get to the last 50, hit the opening of the Rink Bar, the new outdoor venture in Rockefeller Center from Restaurant Associates, the mysterious claque that brought you the Condé Nast cafeteria and, hence, this summer's disturbing Rice Krispies Treat bloat. Thanks, guys!

[Joyce Carol Oates, the Players, 16 Gramercy Park South, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 765-0923; Rink Bar, Rockefeller Center, 49th and 50th streets, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 866-430-1780.]

Wednesday 23rd

Lunch with Mike Wallace? Actually, make that Don Hewitt; Mr. Wallace had a scheduling conflict. Join a bunch of nice people like Helen Gurley Brown, Katharine Graham, Brooke Astor, Pat Buckley, Pauline Trigère and Barbara Walters as they honor former Time Inc. editor in chief Henry Grunwald for raising public awareness about age-related macular degeneration (A.M.D.), which we think is just another term for good old-fashioned "Somebody bring me my damned glasses!" Bring a lorgnette.

[Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 East 42nd Street, noon, 821-9300.]

Joyce Carol Oates brims with testosterone, and her new book is aggressive and daring. She wants us to re-see a mythic character not through the camera's eyes but through human eyes. She means to show us how a squalid male culture industry distorted our understanding of Marilyn Monroe. She means to replace the distorted picture with an artist's understanding of Marilyn as a desperate girl who herself became an artist.

And she does it. Joyce Carol loves Norma Jeane (and adds an E to her name) and has somehow managed to meld her skinny, dark, curly, ivory-tower, East Coast-woman soul with Marilyn's busty, bleached, trampy, California-girl soul. She has imagined Monroe's inner life, from childhood to death at 36, in 1962, and Marilyn will never be the same: an intelligent girl-woman with a distant view of her own body and an indifference to sex, a father-searcher who climbs the ranks of men using her body even as they are using it, a whore-celebrity looking to reinvent herself as she's being eaten alive.

Blonde is out of control, too, but that may be the price of admission. Ms. Oates offers a swaggering rationalization: "What is 'technique' but the absence of passion?" she writes, in the voice of Marilyn's third husband, who is called the Playwright (Arthur Miller).

I don't think I've ever read such a messy and brilliant book. The story often sags, and there are a hundred climaxes. Meanwhile Ms. Oates commits countless literary offenses. Here's a partial list:

Point of view . First-person narrators pop up out of nowhere, sometimes halfway through a paragraph. A surfer. A reporter. Even Marilyn, speaking from the grave.

Obscurity . Ms. Oates' names are harder to keep track of than Dostoyevsky's: Z, W, O, the Prince, the Dark Prince (Marlon Brando), the Playwright, the former Athlete and so on.

License . An answering machine in 1932, a video camera in 1954.

Afterthought . Strands of plot are left hanging, as though forgotten, and then resolved in a parenthesis when the author remembers.

Hysteria . "Miss Monroe, you forgot this," a bathroom attendant says, handing Marilyn an aborted fetus, weeks after an abortion.

Pretense . A cock "engorged with urine"; "citizens of the City of Sand" for Los Angelenos.

Throw in some cockamamie conspiracy theorizing–it's amazing that an author can triumph over such problems. But Ms. Oates does, with scenes of vast emotional and visual power, like Brando's visit to Monroe's Greenwich Village sublet. Brando has had so many women he's indifferent to Monroe, and so adored he wears filthy clothes. He passes out in her bathtub, and Monroe wipes the vomit off him when she lifts him out. Later he sends her flowers: "Angel, I hope if only one of us makes it, it's you."

The author is a jealous lover. When she hates her rival, like Jack Kennedy or Joe DiMaggio, the novel gets cartoonish–DiMaggio getting the same feeling from hitting Marilyn as from hitting a home run. But when she has some sympathy for the man, her story achieves great heights.

Such as the section dealing with Monroe's first true lovers, the bisexual sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson.

"'Don't be nice to us,' Cass warned. Eddy agreed vehemently. 'Yeah! like feeding a cobra. I'd use a 10-foot stick on me myself.' Norma Jeane pointed out, 'But at least you two have fathers. You know who you are .' 'That's exactly the trouble,' Cass said irritably. 'We knew who we were before we were born.' Eddy G said, 'Cass and me, it's a double curse–we're juniors. Of men who never wanted us born.'"

Better yet are the Arthur Miller chapters. Ms. Oates' insights are cruel and terrifying. The Playwright, middle-aged, storklike, "eyes like frayed socks," is so egotistical he dismisses all the trampy stories about Marilyn as unbelievable because he connects with her serious side. Still, he holds his verbalness and Jewishness over Marilyn: "When he entered a room, words flew to him like magnetic filings to a magnet. Norma Jeane, faltering and stammering, hadn't a chance."

Ms. Oates gets back at him. She makes Mr. Miller out to be status-conscious–"How many actresses, how many actors, have been on Time 's cover?" he marvels–and she isn't too crazy about his work, either: "In his doggedly crafted plays there were no … Chekhovian flashes, for the Playwright's imagination was literal, at times clumsy."

The Miller stuff is so good because Ms. Oates knows writers, knows Jews, knows intellect, performance, sex. When she knows her stuff, she seems to move among us like a fierce ungendered god.

On identity: "When you believe you are acting, you will suddenly discover your truest self."

On art: "A merely talented actor can play any role. A true actor can play only what he apprehends as Truth."

On love: "To love a man is not to know him but rather to not-know him."

Having transcended gender, the author wills this transcendence on her subject. From time to time Marilyn produces a kind of cock from her crotch, a "curious, poking-out sexual organ." No wonder the sex in this book isn't very sexy. This isn't Norman Mailer's Marilyn, who froths with "the sugar of sex." The goings on here are violent, clinical. Marilyn imagines a slash between her legs. Kennedy's cock is a "slug." There's anal rape–"a beak plunging in. In, in as far in as it will go." Ooh.

Happily, the gruesomeness ends when Ms. Oates is working above the waist: "Nipples big as eyes," "her breasts ached with a ghostly milk-to-be-sucked," "swelling breasts nearly spilled out," "big bountiful breasts," "breasts jutting out as if about to burst with milk."

Jeez Louise–the author is a tit man. Even Brando gets ogled, his "nipples like miniature grapes."

If the author's eye is ungendered, her ideology is straight-up feminist. Marilyn is used as a whore is used, up the ladder of power, till she's raped in the Presidential Suite of the "C Hotel" on Fifth Avenue, all but under the nose of a contemptuous Jack Kennedy.

Did that really happen? This book invites a rumble over the use of facts. Ms. Oates calls her novel a "radically distilled 'life'" (a misrepresentation–Ms. Oates can't distill), and it's seldom clear whether what she's telling us is something she imagined or something that happened. The author's curt response to such concerns–"Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde , which is not intended as a historic document, but in biographies of the subject"–is a dodge.

We know these characters, and Ms. Oates means to exploit our knowing. (Maybe some legal froufrou surrounding Mr. Miller would explain why he only appears as "the Playwright.") Is it true that Marilyn never saw her father? Did Charlie Chaplin Jr. really introduce her to masturbation? Did DiMaggio beat her? Is there a C.I.A. dossier that states that she slept with Lassie? This bothers me.

Which is a sure sign that Ms. Oates has hit another one of her targets. This vengeful history is about the majesty of imagination. Marilyn's self-imaginings were cruelly curtailed. Comes now the artist to accord Marilyn her rightful status, as artist. The artist uses flesh and fact, the artist transcends them.