The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman, . 392p. , hardcover, $27.95 (9781558619104);, paperback, $15.95 The Feminist Press at CUNY

.

Prolific author and gay rights and AIDS activist Schulman, recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, and two ALA Stonewall Book Awards, is dedicated to telling stories of the discriminated against, the marginalized, and the overlooked. She is also steeped in literature, including the work of Balzac, from whom she ever so neatly, cleverly, and purposefully lifted the plot and characters for this delectable, mid-twentieth-century New York version of his Parisian classic, Cousin Bette. Balzac’s tale of rejection and revenge begins on a busy Paris street in July 1838. Schulman’s piercing, archly stylized novel of betrayal and vengeance begins on a lively block in Greenwich Village in July 1958.

Bette has been in exile from her Ohio home and family for three decades, working as a secretary at an advertising agency, first for the founder, now for his timid son, Hector. She has learned to cherish solitude, but is happiest sharing dinner with her only friend, her neighbor, Earl. Also in his fifties, he is African American, gay, and a long-struggling actor with a miserable day job in a slaughterhouse. Both have suffered scarring heartbreak, but unlike Bette, who cherishes their platonic intimacy, Earl hasn’t given up on love. Enter Hortense, Bette’s young, rich, naïve, and ambitious cousin, who has escaped Ohio to study acting. And Valerie, a sexy, tough, and manipulative consultant who lures Hector and Bette into an uncharted new world: television advertising. Writing with the same panache and mischievous ebullience as the authors who are retelling Shakespeare plays in the Hogarth series, including Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler, Schulman not only incisively revamps Balzac’s drama, she also summons the exquisite psychological nuances of Henry James, the daringly forthright novels of James Baldwin, and the milieu of Mad Men. As she orchestrates an escalating sequence of vicious schemes, cons, and double-crosses of breathtaking desperation, cruelty, and self-justification, Schulman takes precise and revealing measure of prejudice, mendacity, fear, and greed, creating a captivating, perceptive, and empathic novel of New York on the brink of the first stirrings of the civil rights and women’s movements.