Chick lit is in a tricky predicament these days, caught between prancing around enjoying yesterday’s frivolousness (running with bad boys and running up big bar tabs) and marching dutifully toward a New Mature Sobriety. When even Sex and the City scribe Candace Bushnell gets married, the point becomes clear: girls, it’s time to grow up.

Women About Town, the debut novel by Vanity Fair contributing editor and former Phoenix dance critic Laura Jacobs, seems stranded in the chasm between then and tomorrow, between fruity cocktails and classic martinis, between " postcollege, pre-everything " optimism and pre-spinster ominousness. It traces the lives of two women in New York, strangers who are linked by a feisty real-estate broker. Lana Burton is an ambitious theater and dance critic who’s waiting for her boyfriend, Sam, to kneel and propose already. She finds herself in ungratifying friendships plagued by professional jealousy; the rapport centers on quippy critical one-upmanship during interminable performance intermissions.

Lana’s counterpoint, Iris Biddle, is a blueblood-by-marriage divorcee who, clinging to the cachet of her ex’s name, launches a line of artisanal lampshades coveted by socialites, artists, and investment bankers’ cash-laden ladies. After being deserted by her ex for a mining opportunity in Tanzania and naively falling for a flirtatious gay man, Iris has sworn off dating, directing all her creative juices into her sconces.

Jacobs’s world is one where the Bergdorf shoe salon is accorded as much awe as the latest show at the Whitney, where tea-time conversation swirls around tactical namedropping, and where " everybody gets Blahniks cut down. " So on the face of it, Women About Town is a tale we’ve read before, incorporating elements of the stylish sensibility of Sex and the City, the dating frustrations and career ambitions of Bridget Jones, and a bit of the real-estate literary porn in High Maintenance. Single women deal with the standard menu of disappointments, aspirations, and frustrations.

But it’s not that easy. This novel is distinguished by its striving to be more than your average Hamptons beach read. When Lana researches the Martyre de Saint Sébastien of Claude Debussy and Gabriele d’Annunzio for an essay, we’re instructed in the intricacies of the work. And when Iris creates one of her Iris Original lampshades, we see every thread, every minute technique, as she positions twigs on bubble wrap to glue them into the perfect position. Yet though the needlework details and the critical theories are thoroughly and intelligently presented, they seem more exhibitionist than explanatory, bespeaking Jacobs’s skills as a reporter rather than a novelist. Page-long riffs on the shape of a dancer’s foot by self-indulgent eccentric critic types, or on the nuances of sconces, do little to develop her characters — they appear more an effortful protest to be separated from the cosmo-swilling crowd.

Women About Town works best when Jacobs acknowledges that these characters represent parts of her and allows herself to tell portions of their story. She captures the bitchy repartee of the dance-critic world. She lets us in to the world of magazine glosserati with the bemusedly raised eyebrow that only an insider is allowed, describing that " small, spidery creature from Vogue who hunched her bony shoulders as if against ancient winds, who styled her hair like the Sphinx and wore sunglasses into the darkened tent as if begging for a bulb. " She skewers publications’ formulas: a media-fueled gallery show of Iris’s lampshades receives " five sentences of puzzled enthusiasm in the Times, " a " tiny ten-sentence rave " in the New Yorker, a " dashing portrait " in Town & Country, Lana’s own " lyrical spotlight " in Vanity Fair, and a " vicious sneer " in the Village Voice. And she’s perceptive when getting into the brain of New York’s quirky, single, paranoid, obsessive women, displaying an always lyrical way with words. " To shop pleasurably together required true camaraderie, an easy intuition when it came to subjects like weight and wallet. "

Women About Town is a promising debut. And once the characters are allowed to slither free of the chick-lit bustier, it will be a pleasure to read about them as they age gracefully.