Word: gilbert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Beautiful Life, Gilbert...
...EDWIN Gilbert has made a career out of prose peep shows. A kind of strait-laced Tom Wolfe, he milks the various segments of the American elite for all they are worth and then uses the material for novels. Past Gilbert victims include the prestigious families of Westchester (Silver Spoon), the wealthy American businessmen in France (The New Ambassadors), and the automobile society in Detroit (American Chrome). Now Gilbert wants to tell us about the rich of New York City, the beautiful people of Park Avenue who grace the back pages of Time magazine. He's discovered something...
...Novelist Gilbert is a journalist who won't admit it. The contrived, never-say-die plot of The Beautiful Life is simply a device to move his characters through the inner circle. Exclusive restaurants and discotheques, the Plaza, "molto snob" boutiques and hair salons, Parke-Bernet, Sutton Place, a round of Capotesque parties, and assorted Upper East Side bedrooms...
...Gilbert divides the beautiful life into three camps--Old Society, high society, and pop culture -- and his main characters show remarkable social mobility in flitting from one to another. Old Society consists of dowagers who use the Social Register instead of a telephone book, the Episcopal Church, and Rolls Royce Phantom II town cars. No one gets in without proper credentials. But in The Beautiful Life those with proper credentials are leaving for more lively high times. For Dexter Knight, a homosexual society columnist and staunch defender of permanence, Old Society is the true, classic currency, or to switch metaphors...
...hipsterism came out of a drug dream heading for a star. But Gilbert's beautiful people use them as gimmicks to gain recognition and buy style, even if it is mass-produced. As the parties go on and on, the beautiful people become more pathetic than a middle-aged couple twisting to the jukebox in a Peoria roadside cafe...