She arrives on Park Avenue via Michigan and the West Village, an enclave she views, in the 21st century, as just as culturally distinct from the Upper East Side as Latvia is from Barbados. What Ms. Martin discovers when she lands in her new milieu is that stay-at-home-mothers exercise compulsively, fill large closets with lots of clothes, dress up for school drop-off, go to charity events, obsess over their children’s enrichment (in ways presumably but of course not provably different from the way rich and ambitious parents everywhere obsess over filial achievement and Princeton admission from the moment of conception) and spend exorbitant sums on personal grooming. They also drink to relieve anxiety and pass the summers languishing on Long Island’s East End (a useful bit of information for anyone under the impression that people living between East 60th and 96th Streets cleared out for Asbury Park in August).

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That the mothers around her, largely acquainted through school, tended to socialize primarily with one another rather than in couples — a practice I have witnessed even in the distant colony of Brooklyn — is something Ms. Martin appears to find unique to the world she is describing and vaguely worrisome. In various instances, the women she portrays are shown to be petty, mean and adolescent, never saying hello and ignoring her requests for play dates, because, Ms. Martin concludes, she and her husband aren’t important enough — they are “low-ranking primates.” When something truly terrible happens to her — the sort of thing Ms. Martin rightly observes is too little discussed — some of these women reveal themselves capable of profound compassion, but a compassion that is dealt with only in a few pages at the end of the book, almost as an addendum.

One criticism of her approach has been that she has represented a part for the whole, immersing herself in a world of parvenus and allowing them to stand in for an entire uptown ruling class. “I am sure I don’t know the half of what goes on up and down Park Avenue,” an Upper East Side native and businesswoman wrote under the pseudonym Blair Schmaldorf in a blog post for Elle magazine. “But, in over 30 years, the only place I’ve ever encountered the audacious, extreme women Dr. Martin writes about is in fiction.”