“I’ve always hated articles about the joys of motherhood,” Janowitz writes near the beginning of the section of the book entitled “Family Life,” and she remains true to that predisposition throughout, never letting the slightest hint of sentimentality slip into her writing about her daughter. In fact, “Looks Good on Paper,” about Janowitz’s trip to China to adopt the fat infant she would call Willow, is entirely devoid of affection or emotion; it’s a fish-out-of-water tale of a cynical New Yorker who can’t believe that she has convinced herself that she wants to be a mother. And despite the 60-plus pages devoted to Janowitz’s family, Willow is a peripheral character, a source of frustration and inconvenience rather than a full-fledged kid. Janowitz is simply not the kind of writer who’s going to produce something like The Russian Word for Snow, the story of foreign adoption by Janis Cooke Newman, which manages to be both worldly and touching.

Janowitz is much more willing, however, to gush about her pets than her child (as is proven by the more than 50 pages dedicated to “Animals”), even though she claims that she “also despises pieces about dogs, children, travel and coming-of-age.” Unfortunately, here she fails to heed her own better judgment, and the book bogs down in essay after essay about her Yorkshire terriers and Chinese Crested dogs, her ferrets and squirrels she has encountered. Janowitz is sure we’d think less of her if she wrote emotionally about her daughter, but she doesn’t seem to realize that, for many of us, reading a grown woman’s drone about her adorable pets is not only infinitely more boring, but tremendously pathetic as well.

Area Code 212 is saved, though, by the fact that Janowitz quickly puts kids and animals behind her and concentrates on her real strength, which is cultural criticism, precisely targeted observations about her own rarefied world, the esoteric stratum of New York social life that she inhabits. She is comfortable in this intellectual geography, and her essays rise from stereotyped, jaded, urban angst to sparkling wit and ruthless opinion. She knows what she thinks, and, delightfully for us, she wants to tell us all about it.

The book’s strongest essays are those in which Janowitz exposes the sheer ridiculousness of New York, when she grouses about the folly of the real estate market or the narcissism of the city’s elite. She is not impressed by those who spend immense fortunes to decorate their multimillion-dollar apartments entirely in beige, or when the Four Seasons hotel serves pricey but mundane appetizers. She hates the way that New Yorkers feel that they’re entitled to be gruff and impolite, and she doesn’t love that they spend far too much money on things that don’t matter at all, things that are, actually, downright stupid.

Janowitz is at her aggressive best in “Art in the Early ‘80s,” in which she savagely - and entirely accurately - critiques the art of postmodern painters such as Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. “The work seemed banal, simplistic, pathetic cries for attention,” she writes, “rip-offs of commercial imagery from popular culture, art history books, a European tradition, television cartoons and product design - beneath the lack of originality there seemed to be no real strength or compulsion, the work did not have the purity of force that I had come to associate with what I considered to be great art.” Her criticisms are right on the money, and her deconstruction of the mythos of the New York art world is surely foreshadowing of art criticism to come.

Janowitz turns a bit myopic, however, when she addresses the art of 20 years earlier, a tendency rooted, no doubt, in the fact that Andy Warhol was her good friend. She seems unable to see that Warhol’s constructed milieu was the predecessor of the empty 80s art world, and that Warhol’s social circle, particularly in the 80s, could easily be described as a “pathetic cry for attention.” Janowitz’s account of the “Blind Date Club” - an experiment conducted by Warhol, Paige Powell, and herself in the 80s, during which the trio would drag unsuspecting participants to elaborate restaurant dinners - is funny, but it is also painful. Although Janowitz thinks it was thrilling and fun, can she not see how excruciating it would be for the average diner to spend an interminable evening listening to Andy Warhol talk about “peculiar diseases and psychic phenomena”?

Technically, Janowitz is a sloppy writer. She has tendency to misplace phrases and clauses, sometimes making it difficult to nail down what she’s trying to say in a given sentence. When she falls into self-absorption, when she writes about dogs or food, she can be an unbearable bore. And she has an irresistible urge to dwell in the seedy. In “Why I Love New York,” she writes, “I love the grit, the filth, the excitement and ... the unexpected.” Her cynicism can become tiresome sometimes, but on the next page, her writing can glow with originality and wit and intellectual prowess.

That unevenness, that swing from one extreme to another, is what makes New York so thrilling, and it’s part of what makes Janowitz a writer worth reading.

Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.