UNSUITABLE COMPANY

A real clunker by the author of Winners (1980) and Sometimes Paradise (1987), featuring an unfriendly corporate takeover, a battle over a Manhattan penthouse, and a motley collection of self- obsessed, otherwise unremarkable rich people. The penthouse at 823 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is going for eleven million dollars, but that doesn't scare off this voracious crew of wealthy status-seekers. Principal contenders over the right to inhabit this particular high-dollar co-op include Erica Wheaton, a big, blonde former Miss Nebraska and her CEO husband George; and kinky Zara, Lady Thorne, whose mega-millionaire Jewish husband, J.K. Kaplan, happens to be in the midst of an attempt to win George's life's work in a surprise corporate raid. To complicate the future housing situation further, Archer Blair, Zara's lover and her husband's best friend, lives in the apartment downstairs, as does Archer's sluttish daughter, Bettina, who's in love with Gary Dellos, a blackmailer and professional gigolo who was once the lover of Clive van Arlyn, Erica's WASPy real estate agent. All characters proceed to deceive, outmaneuver, seduce and scheme against one another until the apartment is sold, the corporate takeover is defeated, one poor soul lies dead of a heart attack and two of the previously unrelated survivors fall in love. Such venal characters, whose passions are restricted to the bottom line (to the detriment of the sex scenes) make this book's title unusually appropriate. A tiresome attempt to glamorize greed—this one already feels dated.