PEORIA SOCIETY

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, out boy. As he puts it, "WEALTH and WITH-ITness. BLUE-BLOODED HIPSTERISM. All the most INteresting people." Yes.

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, the official yard-stick by which to measure (and discard) every new wildness and fad.

High society is the tepid wasteland between Old Society and pop culture. Buy an apartment with a spectacular East River view of the National Biscuit Company. Furnish it with Louis XV furniture and a Monet, any Monet--and you're in. Except you are not. In their frantic battle to retain Youth and Style, the beautiful people have discovered pop culture and all its childish play things.

As part of this worship of youth, this attempt to crack the mold of middle-age with newness, the beautiful people frug frenetically, bounce in and out of underground movies, wear mod clothing, and buy pop art. But they aren't hip. Above all, they aren't hip. They may posses all the equipment but they can't buy the spirit--that Frodo Baggins--Emmett Grogan quality described in the March issue of Ramparts, that spontaneity and excitement which should accompany granny print shirts and paisley pants.

Mod and 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.