Cheap Diamonds

An early '70s coming to New York story, Mailer's second novel (following Windchill Summer) follows three Arkansas youths whose fates are bound up with the fashion world of Diana Vreeland and Helen Gurley Brown. At 22, DuVall University grad Cherry Marshall is old to be starting a modeling career, but her skinny six-foot-one-inch frame, pale skin and ""freakish"" white-blond hair catapult her from Sweetwater, Ark. to the top of the New York fashion heap. Cherry is soon shyly hanging out with Andy Warhol and entourage, and also ends up working with gorgeous male model Lale Hardcastle, from Buchanan, Ark., a runaway groom who left Cherry's friend Cassie Culver pregnant and abandoned. The paths of the three cross and re-cross, spinning out amid a parade of real and fictional characters. Mailer, the wife of novelist Norman Mailer, crafts a warm saga of youth, naïvety and vanity.