When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth

New York's avant-garde art world in the free-spending late 1980s is the background for Eberstadt's sharp-witted third novel, in which the protagonist of Isaac and His Devils finds his metier as an artist. Much in the way The Bonfire of the Vanities defined a certain time and place in New York's social history, this novel dissects the art scene with the intelligence of an insider who knows it well and the elan of a writer who intends to spill its dirty secrets. Isaac Hooker, still an almost comically naive country bumpkin despite his short stay at Harvard, endures desperate months as a homeless menial laborer in lower Manhattan until he discovers his genius as a painter and is discovered in turn by the Geblers, a rich, mutually incompatible couple who are patrons of the arts. Mrs. Gebler's inheritance is the basis of the Aurora Foundation, and they are part of the crowd that drops money and gossip at gallery openings, experimental theater and Park Avenue parties. Eberstadt's gimlet vision doesn't miss a thing- from momentarily hot painters in designer overalls to pretentious gallery owners stepping out of limousines. She convincingly describes the process by which Isaac discovers his biblical subject (his huge, violent, rankly sexual paintings depict the orgiastic minglings ""when the sons of God came into the daughters of man""), and his artistic credo. With amazing range, she sketches New York's neighborhoods, from the Geblers' posh digs on the Upper West Side and their country house in Long Island to storefront SoHo galleries and the projects on Avenue C. But while Isaac's odyssey is a strikingly contemporary Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eberstadt spreads her palette too thin. She follows too many minor characters, with the result that the novel's texture is deep but its narrative drive is sluggish. Even more problematic is her attitude toward the Geblers, from whom she keeps an ironic distance. Eberstadt's unconcealed dislike of these pretentious, self-deluded people and their acquaintances distances the reader too. Thus, despite its teeming social and cultural panorama, the sour tone, in the end, defeats cleverness and wit. (Mar.)