Joe's View

Sally Koslow’s new novel, “With Friends Like These” (Ballantine Books), arrives in bookstores Aug. 10 with many ingredients that might lead some potential readers to dismiss it as yet another “chick lit” spin-off of “Sex & the City.”

The book tracks a quartet of professional women over the course of a decade in New York City, with the narrative juggling their professional and romantic adventures.

On the surface, Quincy, Talia, Chloe and Jules could be mistaken for clones of the four women in “SATC” and the characters in the countless books (and TV shows) that have lifted the format.

But Koslow digs much deeper than the standard pop novel aimed at a female readership. “With Friends Like These” is funny, but it’s also poignant and disturbing because the author offers no easy solutions to the serious problems faced by her four protagonists.

You don’t have to be a woman — or care much about shopping and other upscale consumer pursuits — to fall under the spell of this challenging examination of how time tests those tight friendships we form in our early 20s.

The story begins with a wonderful chapter set at the turn of the century in which the four women meet for the first time. Quincy is looking for roommates in her oversized Upper West Side apartment and Talia and Chloe and Jules are the ones she chooses. Actually, it’s the wildly outgoing Jules who makes the decision, by telling Quincy, when her intercom rings, “What do you say you tell whoever’s coming up that this place is rented?”

“I have a feeling about us,” Jules says to the other three women. “Something tells me we’re all going to be great friends.”

The author then jumps forward to the present with three of the women living with their husbands in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Jules still single but living in Westport.

Koslow shows us how marriage, the arrival of children, and professional rivalries can undermine even the closest friendships.

What comes between the women are two of the elements some New Yorkers value above friendship — real estate and higher paying jobs.

In a really daring stylistic decision, Koslow chose to write “With Friends Like These” from four different “first person” points of view, so that we keep shifting our perspective — and alliances — as Quincy, Talia, Chloe and Jules command center stage in alternate chapters.

It takes a few chapters to get used to the device — and to get the four very different first-person “voices” straight — but once you delve deeply into this very wise and very troubling novel you should find yourself rushing to the end, wondering if the women will ever be able to restore their friendships.

Did you see the pictures of the “Jersey Shore” cast ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange the other day?

A wag writing for the Associated Press dubbed the event “Tan Tuesday.”

The PR stunt demonstrated once and for all that reality TV is an entrenched genre and pop culture phenomenon, with Snookie and “The Situation” earning as much press attention as any movie star or traditional TV personality.

“Jersey Shore” and the “Housewives” series on Bravo are discussed and dissected with the passion that TV viewers used to bring to next-morning assessments of “MASH” or “Dynasty.”

The combination of genuine audience interest and cheap production costs means that “reality” — such as it is — is here to say, but I don’t think you’ll be seeing Austin Scarlett (above right) and Santino Rice (above left) opening the stock market anytime soon.

Scarlett and Rice are the stars of “On the Road,” a new series Lifetime is launching tonight at 10:30, following the season premiere of “Project Runway.”

The two designers were featured on “Project Runway” — Lifetime calls them “breakout stars” — but they don’t exactly burn up the screen with wit and personality.

The show looks like a mix of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” with the Paris-Hilton-and-Nicole-Ritchie-visit-flyover series “The Simple Life.”

Austin and Santino travel the country bringing their sense of style to women who live far from any trendy boutiques. In episode one, they go to a small hamlet in Texas to provide a gown for a teen rodeo performer to wear at a party honoring the girl and her fellow rodeo stars.

The half-hour show has some appeal as a travelogue and an introduction to a Middle American lifestyle most of us are probably unfamiliar with, but separately and together Austin and Santino don’t spark much entertainment value. The debut episode desperately needs the zappy editing that made “Queer Eye” rush by so quickly that you didn’t have time to object to the blatant product placements and gay stereotyping.

Where are Snookie and JWoww when you really need them?

The producers of the new AMC series “Rubicon” — debuting Sunday night — caught my attention when they announced that they were hoping for a contemporary equivalent of the Watergate era paranoid thrillers “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Parallax View,” “The Conversation” and “All the President’s Men.”

Those happen to be four of my favorite 1970s movies, so when AMC sent me a DVD screener of the first few episodes I was eager to watch.

This post-9/11 era we are living in is certainly reminiscent of the political climate of 35 years ago — we are bogged down in two military actions not unlike Vietnam, there is a nagging fear of terrorism added to such everyday activities as stepping onto a Metro North train or going to any large gathering in New York City, and more than ever, the country seems to be in the control of international corporations rather than elected officials.

Last night I watched two of the four episodes on the AMC screener and my hopes for a sophisticated contemporary political thriller sagged after only a few minutes. Two hours later, I pushed the stop button on the DVD player, and it seems unlikely that I will ever go back to “Rubicon.”

The show does a good job of capturing the look of the 1970s classics — specifically Gordon Willis’s memorably unsettling camerawork on “Parallax” and “President’s Men” — but the story moves at a glacial pace and after two episodes I didn’t really care where “Rubicon” might be heading in episodes three and four.

The producers looked to the 1970s movies but failed to see how tightly plotted they were — the atmosphere of paranoia and dread in those classics was woven through steadily building suspense and the development of  characters we cared about.

I doubt that the vise-like grip of “Parallax,” in particular, could be sustained for much more than the two hour running time of the Alan Pakula drama about a vast assassination conspiracy. It wasn’t a story suitable for commercial interruptions and week-long breaks in between the storytelling.

“Rubicon” is set in the downtown Manhattan offices of a vaguely defined government intelligence operation staffed by academics and nerdy young professionals — much like the New York subsidiary of the CIA set up in an East Side townhouse in “Three Days of the Condor.”

James Badge Dale is the protagonist Will Travers who starts to think his boss’s death in a commuter train crash was no accident. In the first two hours, we learn that his icy superior (Arliss Howard, trying too hard to be sinister) might have been behind the train crash and that another of Will’s co-workers (a woman who seems to have a romantic interest in Will) is the Howard character’s office spy.

The show gets off on the wrong foot in the first few minutes when we find out why Will walks around in such a funk (even before he starts seeing a conspiracy in his own office).

Will was meeting his wife and young daughter atop the World Trade Center on 9/11, we are told, but he was a few minutes late, and lost both of them in the terrorist attack.

It’s a jarring and rather vulgar plot point to those of us who are familiar with the WTC and the events of that terrible day — the observation deck at the top of the South Tower didn’t open until 9:30 in the morning, so there were no people there when the first plane hit just before 9.

And it seems highly unlikely that Will and his wife and child would have been part of the business breakfast meeting scene in the Windows on the World restaurant on the North Tower.

Yes, there is such a thing as dramatic license, but using 9/11 in this manner bothered me in ways I cannot quite explain.

The New York locations and the terrific camerawork give “Rubicon” lots of atmosphere, but I never got the feeling that the people pulling the strings were guiding me into a well-crafted thriller with a satisfying climax. They show good taste in their source material, but gave me little confidence in their storytelling skills.

Readers of the brilliant, Brooklyn-based journal n + 1 have been enjoying editor Keith Gessen’s interviews with an anonymous hedge fund manager for the last three years.

Because Gessen (below, left) is just a smart guy with a limited grasp on the world of finance, he asked HFM (as the source came to be known) lucid and common-sense questions about the disasters of 2007 and 2008.

The result was like taking a well-guided trip through a very foreign country (if, like me, you have a hard time grasping concepts such as “stat arb” or statistical arbitrage).

 HFM is neither a cheerleader nor a doom-and-gloom type so his dispatches from the front were all the more scary because of his cool explanations of things like the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the collapse of Bear Stearns and the dangers of automatic computer trading that can crunch numbers and buy and sell things much faster than any team of human beings.

Now Harper Perennial has published “Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager” which brings together all of the n + 1 interviews as well as some new material. It’s a terrific one-volume explanation of what went wrong and what might happen next.

In addition to our education in “stat arb” the book fills us in on “zombie banks” and “black box trading” (the latter is a computer system that sends out orders and makes trades faster than any human being).

“People call it ‘black box trading’ because sometimes you don’t even know why the black box is doing what it’s doing, because the whole idea is that if you could, you should be doing it yourself,” the fund manager tells Gessen.

“But it’s something that is done on such a big scale that a human brain can’t do it in real time,” he adds.

In August of 2007, “you had an avalanche where everyone’s black box was being shut off, causing incredibly bizarre behavior in the market…we had a loss over the course of like three days that was a ten-sigma event, meaning it should never happen based on the statistical models that underlie it. Why? Because the model doesn’t assume that everybody else is trading the same model as you are. So that’s sort of a meta-model factor. The model doesn’t know that there are other black boxes out there.”

And what’s a “ten-sigma” event?

“…It’s ten standard deviations from the mean…Meaning it’s basically impossible, you know?”

The HFM is “a friend of a friend” of Gessen’s who was introduced to the n + 1 editor in late 2006.

Although the man was described as a “financial genius” Gessen was “a little skeptical. I’d been to college with a great many people who later went into finance, but this was mostly so they could keep working a lot and drinking beer and watching football afterward.”

As Gessen writes in his introduction, “HFM was not like these folks at all. Finance was not a social event but an intellectual vocation for him; he spoke quickly, often too quickly to follow, and told very funny stories about the world he was in.”

The two men started meeting in a Brooklyn coffee shop in 2006 and the meetings continued through last year when HFM decided to cash out and relocated to Austin, Texas.

HFM is consistently witty and explains things without the insider lingo you hear on MSNBC and Fox Business Network.

When the market began improving last year, HFM noted “you hear a lot of talk about green shoots and recovery, and that we’re bottoming out. Like after a winter there are green shoots. A botanical metaphor. I guess they’ve never seen or read ‘Being There.’”

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko has scored one of the few major crossover hits of the summer with “The Kids Are All Right” which moved from limited art house release to a fairly wide multiplex opening on Friday.

The success of the movie, about a lesbian couple raising two teens in Southern California, is a reflection of both the high quality of the film and an underserved adult moviegoing audience starved for something substantial in the dog days of summer.

“Kids” is the sort of solidly written, directed and acted domestic comedy-drama that would have been produced by a major studio in the 1970s or 1980s, but has been relegated to the indie niche because mainstream Hollywood has given the summer months over to action films and comedies aimed at kids and teens.

You could practically hear the older audience sighing with pleasure at the “Kids” screening I attended over the weekend.

The movie is intelligent, as beautifully constructed as a classic play, and gives two of our finest actresses — Annette Bening and Julianne Moore — the chance to dig into the sort of meaty, funny starring roles that they would never find in an expensive Hollywood picture.

Bening is 52 and Moore is 49 and one of the most refreshing things about “Kids” is that these women have both opted to look their ages in the film (and Cholodenko seems to have eschewed the make-up and glossy lighting that might “protect” her stars).

Those of us who go to lots of foreign films are used to seeing “real” women of all types in French and Italian and British movies. The middle-aged beauties in those movies — the French stars Nathalie Baye and Isabelle Huppert and a new favorite of mine, the Italian actress Margherita Buy — connect with their characters (and with us) because they don’t look like the mannequins we see in too many American films and TV shows.

One of the main themes in “Kids” is the way that any marriage — straight or gay — is tested by the passage of time, especially the challenge of finding an aging partner sexually arousing after two or three decades.

Bening and Moore are still beautiful women, to be sure, but their faces and their bodies look like those of people we know rather than rich folk living in Los Angeles.

Wolfe Video has just released “8: The Mormon Proposition,” a strong documentary about the covert role the Mormon Church played in the passage of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California two years ago.

Filmmakers Reed Cowan and Steven Greenstreet show us how the Mormons channeled upwards of $20 million into California from followers all over the country.

Like the other churches in this country, the Mormons are considered a non-profit religion and reap the benefits of tax-exempt status.

Although the movie serves as a rather eloquent defense of gay marriage — how “sacred” are traditional male-female marriages when half of them end in divorce? — the most interesting question the doc raises involves the Mormons meddling in politics without endangering their tax status.

Under Internal Revenue Service rules, churches are not supposed to collect money from their congregations and then spend it on political advertising, polling and door-to-door lobbying.

The movie claims that while only two percent of the California population is Mormon, more than 70 percent of the money used to lobby for Prop 8 came from the Mormon Church.

In a subversive plot worthy of a John LeCarre thriller, the Mormons were well aware of the church’s image problems — the bizarre support of polygamy (until recent times) and the fact that Mormons kept blacks out of their churches until 1978 — so the sect secretly channeled the Prop 8 money to front groups (such as the National Organization for Marriage) that had no seeming ties to their religion.

What does it say about a religious political action group’s self-image when it hides in the shadows and pays other people to do its dirty work?

Reed and Greenstreet deserve kudos for giving us 80 minutes of pure, old-fashioned muckraking.

I can’t think of another writer who has given me more pleasure than David Mamet, but he talks some really crazy s**t — pardon my French — in the new issue of Men’s Journal.

Celebrities have long been tailoring their personalities to whichever magazine is profiling them — sharing recipes in Ladies Home Journal and sex tips in Playboy — but Mamet’s macho pose in Jann Wenner’s hyper-masculine monthly is a bit much.

After praising the virtues of owning black turtleneck sweaters and dissing the collected works of Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald — “Who cares?” says the playwright and film director — Mamet is asked “What’s your biggest regret?”

Here’s his answer:

“Not serving in the Vietnam War. It was the ’60s. I thought I shouldn’t go and wasn’t smart enough to realize that it was too easy an excuse because a lot of people were going in my place. It’s a young man’s responsibility to defend his country.”

Give me a break!

Our country was being “defended” in Vietnam?

Says who?

Even the architects of that disastrous attempt to keep the “Red Chinese” from taking over Asia admit it was a huge mistake (i.e. a certain Secretary of Defense named Robert S. McNamara) and had nothing to do with keeping us safe here in the U.S.

Former publicist Robert Rave delivered one of last summer’s breeziest beach reads — “Spin” — a novel based on his own experiences working in the PR jungles of New York.

Rave’s second novel “Waxed” (St. Martin’s Griffin) — set to be published August 3 — is another witty and smart look at fast lane life in contemporary Manhattan, but this time around the writer has come up with a much more complex plot and a larger cast of characters.

The story follows three sisters — born into a middle-class Queens family — who work together at a chic meatpacking district salon owned by the oldest of the trio.

Rave brings these three women — and their friends and the men they love — to vibrant life in a juicy novel that most readers will probably finish off in a few visits to the beach.

The author has a really acute sense of the way that a dizzying variety of people can come together in a commercial establishment like the waxing salon run by Carolina Impresario. “Waxed” keeps going off in interesting new directions with new customers and their crises.

Rave manages to mix high comedy with very serious interludes in the Impresario sisters’ lives without ever seeming to force things — the result is a romantic/social comedy with depth.

Middle sister Anna has just gone through a rough divorce that forces her to go back to work — she is both grateful to and resentful of Carolina for being her port in a storm.

Youngest sister Sofia is the hippest of the three girls — happily married to a handsome banker but still filled with 20something energy that she starts burning off in trendy nightspots with a male customer who becomes her new BFF, or,  in downtown Manhattan lingo, her “gay husband.”

Sofia is popular with her clients, but knows the score when it comes to revealing that she travels in the hippest circles when she is not working: “Sofia knew the exact club Alyson was talking about. In fact, she knew the doorman and breezed past the velvet rope during the club’s opening four years ago. However, there’s an unwritten rule in the service industry: Make the clients feel like they’re superior even when they’re not…It didn’t matter that Sofia took home more money than most of her young clientele. What mattered was the comfort they felt in believing that, even though they might not be where they want to be in their lives or careers, at least they were better than the service-industry workers.”

“Waxed” is a treat that delivers a completely satisfying finale for all three Impresario sisters while leaving the door open for a sequel.