The lives of rich folks dabbling in the New York art scene of the 1980s makes for surprisingly entertaining reading in When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth. Fernanda Eberstadt mines this fertile ground with fierce and funny results. Her cast of characters features Alfred Gebler, poor boy made good through his marriage to heiress Dolly, the daughter of a Midwestern pharmaceutical mogul who inculcated his favourite child with the view that obscene wealth requires penance--preferably in the form of a non-profit arts foundation--and Isaac Hooker, naïf, painter, Harvard drop-out, former soup-kitchen cook and part-time framer who enters the Geblers' orbit with unpredictable results.

Half the pleasure of reading Eberstadt's novel is her masterful send-up of the patrons and poseurs who populated New York's overheated art scene during the Reagan-Bush years; the other half is in the unsentimental, yet sympathetic portrayal of her main characters. Frequently funny, always penetrating, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth offers a delightful journey into a world most of us only experience through the pages of glossy magazines.