In Rae Lawrence's Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls, Living Chilled Is the Best Revenge

Didn't read Valley of the Dolls, didn't see the movie: didn't have to. I was above it, or below it, or, more precisely, beyond it. I did the big hair/dark-eyed/damask dress/potty-mouthed vic routine on my own, without Jacqueline Susann's urging, and, as a house guest, I've thrown up other people's Xanax, chardonnay and linguine into other people's in-ground swimming pools. I've screamed from other people's doorways at other people engaged in sloppy flagrante delicto. It's easy to be a drama queen in a bad movie that no one will see: I'll tell you how. Wearing false eyelashes at noontime, midweek, and backcombing the hair is a bare beginning.

I've seen the widely published 1967 film still from Valley of the Dolls, where the three heroines recline atop a creamy comforter (on what must be a round bed), and stare fetchingly off-camera and into the middle distance. Staring at?what? An inquisitor? An assailant? An unswallowed doll? Or are they gazing at the sad knowledge that, by August '69, all of this pilled-out regalness would be flushed?literally?when the Manson Family crashed the party on Cielo Dr., slaughtering one of the Dolls costars (the terminally honey blonde Sharon Tate), and that subsequently all of stoned Hollywood, in a burst of terror and paranoia, would dump their pills and coke and pot in the toilet and wait for the cops to come knocking?

Jacqueline Susann, who wrote Dolls in 1966, wore loud silk outfits and wrote with a poodle on her lap. She died of cigarettes in 1974 and she had an autistic kid. She was petite. That's all I need to know. In addition, the softcover is fat and the cover is alluringly pink, like a bakery box. The time spent reading the book could be spent doing more constructive things, like plotting revenge, being shaken senseless by a frustrated, ruggedly handsome man or perfecting that crucial all-over tan, which is hard to do with a book resting on your breasts.

I read Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls (Crown, 305 pages, $22) in the only appropriate way to read a novel of the pink sort?on my back, hastily, alone. And indoors. Apparently the dying Susann had written a very rough draft of the sequel in the early 70s, but she expired before the novel could achieve fruition. Enter Rae Lawrence, a Harvard-educated writer (Satisfaction, her only other novel, was excerpted in Cosmo in the 80s), who was bridled with the task of continuing the lives of Neely O'Hara (the vulgar, low-born superstar singer/actress) and her friend/foe Anne Welles (the high-born model, now quietly married to a philandering alpha male) amidst the chum of modern antidepressants and Vicodin parties. The prose is easy on the eyes, to be sure, but without the penumbra of Jacqueline Susann, who pioneered the fag-haggy style of kiss-and-yell almost 35 years ago, this book would be...well, it just wouldn't be. But who cares? This is beach reading for the slow crowd. Shadow of the Dolls is for those who trust In Style magazine, or for those who looked forward to Scarlett, the first, couldn't-be-anything-but-bad sequel to the late Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Still, Shadow of the Dolls has its moments, if only because Rae Lawrence has a winky knack for the jaded, weary truism: "There is no Prince Charming, Anne wanted to say. Only Prince Charming-Enough."

Indeed, that's the theme of the novel?women who somehow have it all, the best of what money can buy, and they still settle for less. Maybe that sort of bourgeois dissatisfaction is the theme of every pink novel, I don't know. But Shadow of the Dolls is propelled along more cleverly than most?it begins with Anne (who, like the other characters, didn't age between 1966 and 1987) leaving Lyon, her husband, on New Year's Eve, 1987, after she discovers that he had recklessly lost all of their money in the stock market crash a couple of months before.

In truth, the fates of all of the characters are buffeted about by the market tides, which in turn dictate the pill on every player's tongue. Time is told by pills, which is real in a way that only a pillhead would understand. We move from old-school Valium to Xanax, the heavy-lidded doll of the late 80s, to Zoloft (for the low-serotonin early 90s), to Vicodin, the painkiller-of-choice for the long-suffering brat of the millennium. Vicodin, appropriately enough, lands Neely O'Hara in rehab and splashes her on the tabloids. Those who don't fall prey to the dolls fall prey to plastic surgery, another little helper that's evolved since Ms. Susann laid down her fountain pen and died. Gretchen, Anne's mall-chick nanny, runs away, finds two eccentric patrons and goes under the knife to emerge as a mysterious film star. Perfection is the goal, and the feather-down safety of the dolls is there when one falls short. In this story, no one stays pockmarked or wrinkly for long.

"You'll notice it first around the eyes. That's where it starts," Neely warns a young assistant (another heinous truth). Anne, the "Yankee beauty" (why do Jewish writers from New Jersey always think there is such a thing? I mean, there is, but she doesn't look like Rae Lawrence's vision of Anne Welles), goes to a plastic surgeon, thinking about getting some work done, only to find that most patronesses ask for her nose by name. Later, a rival taps Anne's forehead and says, "You go get some collagen for that, dear. It makes a world of difference. Even a monkey doctor could do it." In the final pages, Anne, who, for moral (?!) reasons, ditches her successful tv career as a "queen of nice" interviewer, dumps her kindly boyfriend, marries a rich, crazy media scion and moves to the prairie.

Happily, the book ends bitter, like a benzo washed down with Pellegrino: Anne, neither happy nor sad and "too expensive to divorce," finally gets her peace of mind. "Two baby dolls a day was all it took." Here, in a cruel mix of bitchy aphorisms, we find the deeply shallow meaning of life: living chilled is the best revenge.