SOURCE: “New Girl in Town,” in Wall Street Journal, July 22, 1986, Vol. CCVIII, No. 15, p. 28.

In the following excerpt Sokolov objects to the substance of Janowitz's prose in Slaves of New York.

Uptown in the shabby genteel offices of The New Yorker they have been waiting at least a decade for the aged editor William Shawn to step down. At age 80, he has become a laughingstock, devoting his once-distinguished, once-amusing magazine to n-part screeds on staple grains and vanished airplanes, indulging an old man's whim for young women writers of dubious (literary) virtue.

The latest of these Shawn-genues is Tama Janowitz, whose stories mostly chronicle clothes-conscious young women caught up in the current Manhattan art-and-club scene. Ms. Janowitz is in a position to know about her subject. In her real life, she is the queen of the art mob, goes to parties on the arm of Andy Warhol, has...