To enter the world of Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst is to join an uneasy sorority of sniping, snark and impeccable taste. It's an invitation to buoy oneself against reality with beauty. It's not that these privileged women, groomed on Bennington's leafy New England campus, have everything; it's that they expect it, and their plummet to earth takes turns both devastating and delightful.
What John Updike did for the minutiae of men's lives--brand names, domesticity and office trivia--Silver does for the Bennington graduates she follows from Vermont to their apartments in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Like the spritz of L'air du Temps Cassandra sprays on a letter to her ex, the novel is positively infused with sensory details, mostly in the form of luxurious objects--orange silk scarves tied just so, artisanal oatmeal sprinkled with extra cranberries, Hermès, Italian suede and silk lingerie. To say that Silver steeps the reader in these details is only appropriate, since their cumulative effect is that of a heady brew, permeating the post-grad disasters and discoveries that propel these characters forward. In this way, she asserts that the objects furnishing women's lives can be telling and evocative, important despite and because of their superficiality.
The plot, like life, is a series of episodes, tracing the pair's path from wide-eyed dewiness to urbanity. Even at the novel's close, you'd be hard-pressed to call either protagonist "likable," but it's their tenacity that makes them winsome, two "easy" Bennington girls whose shells have grown just hard enough. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer