A NOVEL OF NAME-DROPPING

...Andersen assumes the answer is "yes": At one point in the novel, George compares finding a TV audience to "keeping Soccer moms and Social Security recipients all voting Democratic...

...Cubby Koplowitz, George's brother-in-law, a man bubbling over with truly bizarre get-rich schemes, has built a miniature futurist city in his garage...

...Turn of the Century may not be much of a novel, but—like this year's Bret Easton Ellis flop, Glamorama—it does relish its own in-the-know-ness...

...at another, Lizzie (stealing a line of Umberto Eco's) compares the animosity some people feel towards Microsoft to a religion...

...Their friends are powerful, upper-class types as well, and together form a sort of pageant of important social types, an ad hoc Manhattanite aristocracy...

...If Andersen had been willing to take his own question seriously, Turn of the Century might have been something more than the book that, this season, everyone knows...

...As Turn of the Century opens, the year is 2000 and George and his wife David Skinner is associate editor of The Weekly Standard...

...Lizzie live and work in the two most mercurial industries of modern-day America, entertainment and high-tech...

...If you think that using celebrities, journalists, businessmen, and politicians in a satire would make an author unpopular, think again...

...So too, when George visits Las Vegas, Andersen invents a theme park financed by an eccentric capitalist genius...

...And now he has written a novel, Turn of the Century, in which dozens of real-life characters, from Bill Gates to William Bennett, are pasted into the story of a modern Manhattan marriage...

...While the two big-deal plots lumber forward, the novel does manage to deliver a pair of enjoyable sideshows...

...And yet, an interesting question is raised in Turn of the Century, though the author has buried it in reams of meaningless description...

...Following no particular conception of what the future will be, he has instead pursued any whim that strikes him, and the result is a colorful and fantastic little cosmos...

...A NOVEL OF NAME-DROPPING Kurt Andersen's Millennium By David Skinner Kurt Andersen is most famous, or infamous, or notorious, or something for founding and editing Spy, the satirical magazine from the 1980s that pioneered, for instance, the amiable practice of pasting the faces of celebrities into compromising photographs...

...Kurt Andersen isn't exactly wrong...

...One would think Andersen was describing the pyramids of Egypt or the politics of ancient Rome, for all the digressive attention he devotes, for example, to cell phones...

...George and Lizzie's home life is equally au courant, with three kids whose lives testify to the sometimes morbid detachment from reality that proximity to celebrity and the impulse to be absolutely modern can effect...

...After a bit of corporate espionage, however, they discover that Lizzie is considering a deal with a wacko researcher who seems to be looking for the technological holy grail, the point at which humans are superseded by computers...

...But now he's a producer of two television shows that blend fact and fiction...

...This may be a great starting point for a celebrity article, but it isn't, one has to observe, a great starting point for a novel...

...Turn of the Century, in fact, reads as though it were written by a reporter with a voracious appetite for the anecdotal scoop, who has been granted almost infinite access...

...First the software giant lowballs her on the price and says it wants only a sliver of ownership...

...I know Kurt Andersen...

...George used to be a journalist, and he even lost part of his arm covering Nicaragua back in the 1980s...

...The passage describing the procession of white limos dropping off the dollfaces, the paparazzi who treat them like actual celebrities, and the many manifestations of Barbie inside the casino conveys far more than any of the scenes that drive the sordid stories of George and Lizzie's respective careers...

...Microsoft suddenly wants half of Lizzie's company and offers a breathtaking price...

...The great novel we are still waiting for will be the book that takes up the divide between these aspects of the American character...

...Called BarbieWorld, it is filled with hundreds of living replicas of Barbies and Kens...

...And this creates another problem: The most amusing characters turn out to be the one- or two-note secondary characters whose self-revealing riffs at least have the advantage of being reliably humorous...

...The thrill of seeing today's celebrities in a fictional context wears off quickly, however, and leaves one wondering about the half-life of any story that tries to score points with subjects that are studied well enough by picking up Variety or New York magazine (which Andersen once edited) or the New York Observer...

...The demands Andersen makes of his readers include an appreciation for contemporary detail that borders on fetishism...

...Along with NARCS, a successful law enforcement drama in which real-life present-day crime stories are dramatized and intertwined with real police busts, he is producing a new postmodern news show called Real Time that mixes fullblown news with heart-wrenching dramatic pieces, a sort of Nightline with soap-opera subplots...

...What one literary critic calls "the shlock of recognition" weighs down far too much contemporary fiction, and in Andersen's case, it smothers the plot with an almost pornographic interest in the mental ticks and creature comforts of the story's characters...

...Everyone knows Kurt Andersen," the reviewer in Time volunteered...

...The struggle to produce Real Time pits George against the huge entertainment empire that owns his television network...

...One does find computer geeks and style-conscious consumers who bring a sort of born-again zeal to their brand preferences...

...But the "mirage of millions" soon disappears, and Lizzie ends up working with George's corporate enemies as a technology vice president...

...Do our attachments to brand-names—a television show, for example, or a particular corporation's products—define us more accurately than does our religion or our politics...

...And meanwhile, in her own profession, his wife Lizzie faces an equally overwhelming beast: Bill Gates's Microsoft, which is forming a partnership with her company...

...The world where everyone knows is in fact a world wide open to a guy like Andersen, whose regular post these days is at the New Yorker, where highbrow celebrity-worship has become just another beat...

...Comic relief shouldn't be so relieving...

...But scratch the surface and you may find the same people have more enduring and more profound attachments...