BOOKS: BIRDS DO IT, CREEPS DO IT

Devotees of Candace Bushnell,--a journalist who looks like Suzanne Somers with a polo-club membership--approach her writing the way they might a car wreck or a Peter Greenaway movie: they know it might repel, but they are forced to have a look. For two years Bushnell's column "Sex and the City" has appeared regularly in the New York Observer--a salmon-colored weekly paper doted on by Manhattan's media elite--offering bleakly funny reportage on dating rituals among the city's most physically and financially privileged. Now 25 of her pieces have been compiled in a book, also titled Sex and the City (Atlantic Monthly Press; 228 pages; $21), which should serve to dissuade any single person in America from ever moving to Manhattan.

What Bushnell, 37, presents is a nightmare New York in which the city is actually Los Angeles: men just want to go out with models; women just want to marry moguls; and no one goes anywhere that isn't Aspen or St. Bart's. Her cast of pseudonymously named, boite-hopping subjects includes people like Walden, a corporate lawyer who takes up with a Harvard graduate but refuses to introduce her to his friends because she is not sufficiently well proportioned. Those who win on Planet Candace are beauties like Camilla, 25, a woman who says things like, "Most of the girls in New York are just idiots. They don't know which fork to use. They don't know how to tip the maid at someone's country house."

Bushnell has compared herself with Edith Wharton, which is awfully grandiose for someone who churns out sentences like "Welcome to the age of Un-Innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember." But despite hokey prose, she is valuable as an arch and knowing observer of her Chateau Latour-imbibing universe. She mostly avoids the temptation to lay it on too thick, never making her "characters" more absurd than they prove themselves to be. Mercifully too, she has the good sense never to venture beyond her demographic. Reporting on the world of size-10 women and the actuaries who love them, she would be a confused soul indeed.

--By Ginia Bellafante