The Spare Wife » (Bargain)

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and writes “Feed Me,” a monthly column for the Times Dining section. She is the author of the novel Me Times Three and the autobiographical essay collection Girls Only.

Ponce Morris is a beautiful, rich widow who's known as “the spare wife” because she's the perfect companion to the wealthy, powerful, New York couples in her elite social circle. She throws elegant dinner parties, goes to sports events with the husbands, and shops with the wives. She's both flawlessly appropriate and coolly nonthreatening—everyone knows Ponce doesn't have a romantic bone in her body. Over the years, she has managed other people's lives—and her own—perfectly. Then Babette Seele, an ambitious, aspiring journalist, discovers that Ponce is having an affair with a socially prominent, very married man, and decides to break the scandal, turning Ponce's carefully calibrated world upside down. Witchel's sophisticated, witty, sexy satire provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives and loves of upper-class New Yorkers, sharply exposing the foibles of the fabulous.

Publishers Weekly

Witchel (Me Times Three) returns to the romances of Manhattan's upper echelons in this Gawkeriffic potboiler. Ponce Porter passed up college and left Harding, S.C., to try New York as an aspiring young model and quickly ended up married to Lee Morris, a very wealthy TV producer almost 40 years her senior. Childless by choice and bored, Ponce enrolled in NYU and then law school, eventually settling at a prestigious firm. Cut to the now-widowed Ponce-now 42 and dubbed "The Spare Wife" for her ability to gracefully attend social functions with any and all of upper New York-locking lips in a Chicago hotel with the happily married celebrity fertility doctor Neil Grossman, where she's spotted by Babette Steele, an aspiring 25-year-old assistant at the prestigious Boothby's Review. Babette knows she has the breakout story of her career, but Ponce and her delightfully crafted cast of friends aim to spoil Babette's feast. Witchel's drama-filled portrait of 40-something socialites in the Paris Hilton era has scandalous affairs and social to-dos to spare. It's extravagant and shallow, closely observed and entertaining. (Feb.)