The city of 'fabulouse' angels

The world of Jackie Collins's Lovers & Players may, at first glance, seem superficial and sordid, but there lies beneath a beautiful idealism, says Alexandra Jacobs

It's considered good sport in America to sneer at Los Angeles – the smog, the sprawl, the supposed superficiality – but British people, notably the phenomenally successful English expatriate author Jackie Collins, truly seem to appreciate this geographically and otherwise heartless city. Maybe it's because London is also a bit smoggy and sprawling; maybe it's because the Southland's temperate clime is so pleasant a switch from the Anglo perpetual foggy damp; maybe it's because both places have such gorgeous gardens.

For whatever reason, Collins – who lives in Beverly Hills and continues to embody its moneyed, soulless 1980s ethos in perpetuity, as if pickled in a vat of Giorgio perfume – is one of Los Angeles's proudest, albeit most misrepresentative, ambassadors; her prodigious output (24 novels, which according to her publisher have sold more than 400 million copies in more than 40 countries) includes such titles as Hollywood Wives, Hollywood Husbands, Hollywood Kids, Hollywood Divorces, Hollywood Wives – The New Generation and LA Connections: Power, Obsession, Murder, Revenge. Now she has produced Lovers & Players, a soapy bicoastal epic that could easily have been adapted from Dynasty, the nighttime melodrama that starred Collins's sister, the actress Joan Collins. It's a hydra-headed beast involving a crusty billionaire patriarch, his disaffected mistress, his three variously dissolute sons and a very temporarily virginal heiress.

Jackie Collins's former countrymen show their appreciation of the author, typos intact, in the fan section of her touchingly low-tech website. Collins is fond of bragging that she gets people who otherwise don't read into bookstores, a claim that is not dispelled here. "Hi Jackie, for someone who never really reads books i have been addicted to all your novals and find i can not put them down once i have started, i have read all of them," writes one Sharon R in London. Danny Lyons, a 19 year old from Scotland, freely admits that he hasn't read any of Collins's books, but he did see her on The Paul O'Grady Show and would like to compliment her on her "beautiful and desirable good looks. What a fabulouse figure". "Fabulouse" would actually be an apt neologism to describe the characters in Collins's bulging oeuvre, which began with a bang in the decadent year of 1968 with the breezily titled novel The World Is Full of Married Men. Then and since, her pages have been positively larded with fabulous louses who drink, do drugs, gamble, cheat, scheme, manipulate, lie, abuse and commit the occasional rape or murder without mussing a single strand of their coifs. The author is more finicky about personal appearance (and designer clothing, and gossip-column mentions) than a Studio 54 doorman. Hence Liberty, the main heroine of Lovers & Players, is "milk chocolate skinned, with lustrous long black hair, elongated green eyes, thick brows, impossibly long lashes, cut-glass cheekbones". The hero, Jett Diamond (the characters tend to have vaguely pornstar-sounding names), a dashing male model and recovering alcoholic, has "sexy Mediterraneanblue eyes, sculpted cheekbones," a "tousled lock of dirty blond hair," an "athletic body" and a "cocksure attitude".

In addition to the patriarch, the mistress, the scions and the evanescent virgin, there is a sullen Russian socialite given to diaphanous negligees (does anyone wear a diaphanous negligee anymore except in Collins's fevered imaginings?); a hip-hop mogul (the author's attempts to replicate African-American dialect are as quaint as those in Gone With the Wind); a Britney Spears-esque pop star named Birdy Marvel; and a Greek chorus of high-class call girls and "toy boys". All are given to sudden ejaculations like "Jesus Christ!" and "God, she'd slept with a total stranger", along with words not printable in this newspaper. Move over, Mrs Dalloway: the action, and there is plenty of it, takes place in a single week. And sneer though you might at the ludicrousness of the entire enterprise, at some point you are going to find yourself shaking your head and saying: "That's it. She sucked me in. She got me good."

At first look, Collins seems to have a terribly cynical, sordid worldview – cash reigns supreme, men are faithless cads, etc – but a beautiful idealism lies at the heart of Lovers & Players. One of the Diamond brothers' drunken onenight stands might result in lasting love! True talent might eventually be discovered and rewarded! Liberty's elongated green eyes might widen still farther as she takes in Santa Monica's dingy palm trees and thinks: "Wow! It was paradise."

LOVERS & PLAYERS

By Jackie Collins.

498 pp. St. Martin's Press. €16