[Evelyn Lau] and [Russell Smith] write with the narcissism of extreme youth, though both are creeping into an age where maturity is to be hoped for; Smith is 34 and Lau 28. The brutalism of the sexual marketplace is not a particularly new subject. Both writers are working within a tradition, albeit a relatively new tradition, and one that has always been considered minor, in that the pain that middle class people inflict upon each other in the name of passion is somehow laughable.

Yet, as anyone who has just lost a lover will willingly tell you, at seemingly interminable length, the torment is acute and searing, the youthful version of a terminal illness. Lau and Smith both face this anguish dead on: Smith in Young Men dissects the male predator, Lau in Choose Me, the prey. What they write is a politically incorrect distillation of the current sexual zeitgeist. That both suffer from a surface slickness in their writing and a certain lack of imagination in their plotting and characters doesn't diminish the intensity of the work, mostly because their characters have a certain shininess and appear to lack imagination themselves, caught as they are in sexual- and self-obsessions that demand a ceaseless spin around a hall of mirrors. Perhaps, one wonders, the stories would have been even better as memoir simply because of the power non-fiction brings to truth and both these writers have a reputation for an intricate description of their own worlds. In fact, it is arguable that their personal identification with their work has brought them the kind of attention that has stunted their growth as writers.

[Francoise Sagan] and [Colette] paved Lau's road. She spins along it, breaking the speed limit. Regretably she doesn't pack quite the power these two Frenchwomen once did, which may be why she doesn't have their commercial heft. Women don't have to live like Lau's heroines anymore. It is a sad and pitiable choice made by those who mistake shiny objects for real life. In particular, too much is known about Lau's difficult private life: it is too clear that she cannibalizes herself and it colours the work. Reading her is like poking through her underwear drawer. Her writing is cool and beautiful and bristling with insight, she writes one of the prettiest sentences around, but the suffering underneath is obvious. One wishes her some happiness and then a return to her readers with the dimensions of maturity, self acceptance and compassion attached.

Having stayed long past my sell-by date in the trenches of sexual competition, and had the dubious honour of being married to one of Esquire magazine's "25 Most Fashionable Men Ever, Living or Dead," I found Choose Me and Young Men, the two newest collections of short stories by Evelyn Lau and Russell Smith, moving and distressing at once. It was like re-visiting 10 years of regretful Sunday mornings or reading the collected works of Colette and Jay McInerney in one sitting -- all vanity and desperation and shopping.

Lau and Smith write with the narcissism of extreme youth, though both are creeping into an age where maturity is to be hoped for; Smith is 34 and Lau 28. The brutalism of the sexual marketplace is not a particularly new subject. Both writers are working within a tradition, albeit a relatively new tradition, and one that has always been considered minor, in that the pain that middle class people inflict upon each other in the name of passion is somehow laughable.

Yet, as anyone who has just lost a lover will willingly tell you, at seemingly interminable length, the torment is acute and searing, the youthful version of a terminal illness. Lau and Smith both face this anguish dead on: Smith in Young Men dissects the male predator, Lau in Choose Me, the prey. What they write is a politically incorrect distillation of the current sexual zeitgeist. That both suffer from a surface slickness in their writing and a certain lack of imagination in their plotting and characters doesn't diminish the intensity of the work, mostly because their characters have a certain shininess and appear to lack imagination themselves, caught as they are in sexual- and self-obsessions that demand a ceaseless spin around a hall of mirrors. Perhaps, one wonders, the stories would have been even better as memoir simply because of the power non-fiction brings to truth and both these writers have a reputation for an intricate description of their own worlds. In fact, it is arguable that their personal identification with their work has brought them the kind of attention that has stunted their growth as writers.

Lau, with her sixth book and after a great deal of success and acclaim, still writes from the point of view of an outsider who operates without context or community. Her young women protagonists are both hunter and hunted. What they hunt is power in the form of men whose lives they envy. Choose Me is all about money, those who have it and those who want it and how talented, pretty young women barter sex for money and connection.

It is almost pre-feminist in its attitude. The girls are all attractive, they have decorative jobs in what used to be called the delerious professions: photographers, newspaper columnists, poets, shopgirls and escorts. They see themselves as victims who have no hope of access to power except through the middle-aged or elderly men they date.

In a detached, slightly contemptuous way, Lau pillories the kind of man who dates women half his age, observes the wrinkles fanning from his eyes, the pouches of sagging flesh, the white spots of solar damage. Were one of her "nouveau riche players in penny stocks" to read one of her stories, he would never date a model or take an escort agency girl to dinner again ("... he put his hand on her knee and she trembled, from what she wasn't sure -- surprise, disgust"). The women these men crave are their sternest critics and every moment of self-doubt such a man experiences in front of his mirror is magnified in these women's minds as they look at the chicken necks, the wobbling jowls and puckered eyes, the thin spotted skin they are expected to embrace.

Lau writes firmly within the tradition founded by Colette and Francoise Sagan: lust, financial ease and status form the parameters of this world. The houses are all pretty, the views are gorgeous, the floors marble and the seating leather. The cultural upheavals of the '60s and '70s gave us reason to hope that these accommodations were over. Feminism demanded that women earn their keep and stop trading up. That we think such activity actually stopped is sheer naivete and Lau reminds us that some women will always barter their youth and sexuality for a big house, charge accounts at Birks and Holts, and position, the only possible mistake being emotional vulnerability, or falling in love with someone who hasn't the means to provide those things.

In Lau's most unsettling story, "The Outing," a recently divorced man takes Sybil, an escort agency girl, to a house across the border where people have sex with each other's partners. This is the underside of the Story of O, whose sad little lead character has a stronger modern counterpart in Sybil, who is doing it because she is being paid and because "his world had been one she had always wanted for herself -- when she used to visit him in his house while his wife was away she would pretend that what she saw there belonged to her." With such clarity she should become a stock trader. Sybil knows she can walk out, but she's made a deal, she has been paid, so she has sex, detaches herself so completely that she observes with contempt her partner's "seeking directionless face full of vulnerability, of the pain of wanting what kept eluding his grasp."

Francoise Sagan and Colette paved Lau's road. She spins along it, breaking the speed limit. Regretably she doesn't pack quite the power these two Frenchwomen once did, which may be why she doesn't have their commercial heft. Women don't have to live like Lau's heroines anymore. It is a sad and pitiable choice made by those who mistake shiny objects for real life. In particular, too much is known about Lau's difficult private life: it is too clear that she cannibalizes herself and it colours the work. Reading her is like poking through her underwear drawer. Her writing is cool and beautiful and bristling with insight, she writes one of the prettiest sentences around, but the suffering underneath is obvious. One wishes her some happiness and then a return to her readers with the dimensions of maturity, self acceptance and compassion attached.

In direct contrast, Russell Smith belongs. His characters define who and what is cool and who not. His Young Men are suburbanite predators, terribly impressed by downtown Toronto, hunting the big fix of sexual obsession. In another 20 or 30 years, without a lot of growth, Smith's protagonists will be Lau's powerful men paying escorts and preying on the young women they employ to keep their film and advertising companies going.

Smith claims an affinity with Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. The latter connection may be true, particularly given Amis' misogyny, but Smith does not have the lightening wit or gaiety of the great Waugh. His work is less blithe and graceful, a sour unhappiness pervades his characters' lives. They thrash around trying to find surcease for the pain of excessive self regard. They can't measure up to their own standards: their women don't look like magazine ads, they can't quite make the big score. They secretly yearn for the comforts of suburbia.

Smith is a more insightful writer than Jay McInerney but, like McInerney, he is trawling the territory of the '50's British writer, Harry Green, of Living, Loving and Party Going fame. Equally as derivative as Lau, he is equally as useful as a looking glass, though the casting of Toronto as a city of hipsters is slightly risible.

The stories in Young Men are polished little morality tales, some apparently extracted and beautifully condensed from Smith's last novel, Noise. Smith's writing is spare, charmingly without artifice, which would be terrific if his characters weren't so dull. Dominic and Lionel and James are on-the-make film-makers and magazine writers and TV programmers. They choose women who their friends fancy because that gives them a leg up on the competition. They get stiffed, they dump their girlfriends because they are bored, they steal their girlfriends' dreams and get rich, they feast on the fat of the boom years. This is lovely frankness, admirable in its self criticism, and no doubt absolutely accurate. But like Lau's stories, the stories in Young Men lack connection and engagement and compassion. They are sparkly toys for the silly at heart.

To my mind, the point these two books best illustrate is that the cult of the Writer is something else long past its sell-by date. In their work, writers tend to reflect the depth and richness of the lives of the people they write about. Lau and Smith have chosen as their subject the glamorous underbelly of big city life. Unfortunately, the characters they've chosen to explore are shallow and foolish and the work reflects that. Both writers have been celebrated because they are glamourous, and complain they want to be taken seriously. If they want to be great, they will have to give up some of the glitter and find a roost among the grey, ordinary pigeons of the cities, the ones with the real lives and tragic, transcendant stories.

Elizabeth Nickson is a writer who lives on Salt Spring Island. Her work has appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent, The Guardian, Vogue, and Time Magazine.