Advanced Placement.('Gossip Girl' books)(Book review)

As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, "That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store." This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the best-selling "Gossip Girl" novels for teen-age girls, excels in. Von Ziegesar writes in the language of contemporary youth--things are cool or hot or they so totally suck. But the language is a decoy. The heartlessness of youth is von Ziegesar's double-edged theme, the object of her mockery--and sympathy. She understands that children are a pleasure-seeking species, and that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness. She also knows--as the authors of the best children's books have known--that children like to read what they don't entirely understand. Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult.

As the first book opens, Blair Waldorf--who is almost seventeen and lives in a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street, with her divorcee mother, Eleanor, her younger brother, Tyler, and her cat, Kitty Minky--is sulking in her room. Blair, in the description of a classmate, is "the bitchiest, vainest girl in the entire senior class, or maybe the entire world," and an antiheroine of the first rank: bad-tempered, mean-spirited, bulimic, acquisitive, endlessly scheming, and, of course, dark-haired. The blond heroine, Serena van der Woodsen (who lives at an even better Fifth Avenue address, right across from the Metropolitan Museum), is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring. The series belongs to awful Blair, who inspires von Ziegesar's highest flights of comic fancy.

Blair is sulking because her mother's new boyfriend, a Jewish real-estate developer named Cyrus Rose, "a completely annoying, fat loser," and her mother are in the kitchen eating breakfast in matching red silk robes. When dressed, Rose "looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saks--bald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit. He jingled the change in his pocket incessantly. . . . He had a loud laugh." What? We're only on page 6 and already reading about a fat, vulgar Jew! Doesn't von Ziegesar know that anti-Semitic stereotypes are no longer tolerated in children's literature? Of course she does. Cyrus Rose is only one among many tokens of her gleeful political incorrectness. An elderly guest speaker at Blair's high-school graduation is another:

"Auntie Lynn," some old lady who'd basically founded the Girl Scouts or something, was supposed to talk. Auntie Lynn was already leaning on her metal walker in the front row, wearing a poo-brown pantsuit and hearing aids in both ears, looking sleepy and bored. After she spoke--or keeled over and died, whichever came first--Mrs. McLean would hand out the diplomas.

Only someone very hard-hearted wouldn't laugh at this. The way von Ziegesar implicates us in her empathic examination of youth's callousness is the Waughish achievement of these strange, complicated books. And in Blair she has found a powerful pivot for her feat.

She has equipped this girl with an excess of the most unattractive but also perhaps most necessary impulses of human nature--the impulses that give us such up and go as we have. Unlike her forerunners Becky Sharp and Lizzie Eustace, who ruthlessly elbowed their way into wealthy aristocratic society, Blair already has all the money and position anyone could want. She is pure naked striving, restlessly seeking an object, any object, and never knowing when enough is enough. However--and, again, unlike her prototypes--Blair never harms anyone but herself. She thinks malevolent thoughts about everyone, but she does not act on them. It is her own foot that she invariably shoots. Her goals of the moment--to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, and to get into Yale University--elude her. Something always gets in the way of her doing it with Nate, and her Yale interview is a catastrophe beyond imagination.

Nate is a kind of Vronsky manque, with a grande-dame mother, like Vronsky's, and a Navy-captain father who is "a master sailor and extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department." (Too bad Tolstoy didn't think of a father like that for V.) Nate "might look like a stud, but he was actually pretty weak." This is because he is stoned most of the time. He lives in a town house in the East Eighties and is a senior at St. Jude's, a private school that appears to be modelled on the Collegiate School, as Blair and Serena's school, Constance Billard, is modelled on von Ziegesar's old school, Nightingale-Bamford.