Beginning with Valley Of The Dolls in 1966 (and followed by Once Is Not Enough and The Love Machine), Jacqueline Susann delivered thick yarns about sex, drugs, social climbing, and people who resembled, but never quite libelously resembled, real-life celebrities. Best-sellers on a scale unprecedented at the time, Susann died at the height of her talk-show-enhanced fame in 1974, not living long enough to see her work fall out of fashion because of the wave of name-brand authors (Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, et al) for whom she's helped pave the way. After being out of print for some time—long enough to become a kitschy point of reference for the retro-conscious—Susann's triumvirate has recently been reissued, and, if anything, time has only made the author's work more appalling. Nominally set in the fast-paced world of show-biz between 1945 and 1965, Valley Of The Dolls actually takes place in an alternate universe governed by strict karmic laws wherein three beautiful, ambitious, pill-popping women suffer horrible fates seemingly custom-designed by a cruel and wrathful God. A large-breasted starlet, for example, makes the mistake of having had a lesbian affair, then compounds it by having an abortion, performing nude, getting divorced, and sleeping around. Her fate: suicide in the face of a mastectomy. There's probably an alternate way to read Valley Of The Dolls, pointing out that it does at times appear to be critical of the male-dominated system in which it places its characters, but such a reading grants the book too much depth. Shallowly drawn characters stumble through a plot that really feels as if the author were making it up as she went along. Susann occasionally gets faint praise as a storyteller, but reading Valley Of The Dolls now, it becomes increasingly clear that the now-tame sex scenes may have been the draw all along, and that any remaining appeal is simply the result of a perverse fascination. Covering roughly the same territory more effectively (even without explicit references to oral sex) is Edith Wharton's 1927 novel Twilight Sleep, also recently reissued after a few decades out of print. Set in upper-class New York, Twilight Sleep finds Wharton trying her hand at satire: The novel's Jazz Age characters, drawn not with gentle humor but with thinly veiled hate, follow fashion, religious fads, and other hollow pursuits, all the time keeping each other from happiness while disguising the prevailing self-interested hollowness with a public front of propriety. If there's a complaint to be had with Twilight Sleep, it's that its characters have less depth than those in Wharton's other work; one does have the surname of "Klawhammer," after all. But the book is wickedly funny, and its characters are real characters, not just puppets with libidos, like Susann's. Reading Susann is as much a chore as a guilty pleasure, and nothing about Valley Of The Dolls has aged well. And though Twilight Sleep is set within and targeted toward a specific time period, Wharton's skill and command of characters allows it to transcend its origins easily.