Oh My - Stop My Heart - We Are In Loooovvvve!!!

Four women sit at a table attempting to counsel a fifth. The youngest of the group has brought up that, while her much older and very wealthy fiancé is dying of cancer -- he is languishing in the hospital as they speak -- and she has been his primary caretaker for the last two years, she does not know if she is a beneficiary of either his will or his insurance policy. What should she do?

In the hands of a novelist or playwright, this would be one of Those Moments, in which the small tap of a simple question shatters the brittle facade of social convention and reveals the true nature of things. Marriage or money, the bitter complications of love or the irreducible chasm between expectation and reality.

Instead, the conversation quickly devolves into a petty power play, suffocated by a narcissism so dense you would think it was made of Spanx. Vicki Gunvalson, Jeana Keough and Tamra Barney all advise Gretchen Rossi to get on that beneficiary list before it's too late, because that's what they'd do. When Lynne Curtin disagrees, Vicki accuses her of being rude and confrontational, and flounces off.

So it's true then. John Updike is dead, and we are left with “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”

Chronicling the bourgeoisie is a rich and significant literary tradition. Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton measured the exquisite tension between love and money, integrity and comfort, investigating the lives of women and men who used income as a measuring stick and marriage as a social upgrade. A century later, writers such as Updike, John Cheever and J.D. Salinger explored what became of people when they were removed from the glorious, grimy business of city life to this new world of green lawns and identically echoing houses. Nothing good, it seemed. The social tapestry grew monochromatic and stifling. Women seethed silently as they waited for the commuter trains to disgorge their army of suits and narrow ties so everyone could start drinking hard and working their way toward adultery.

But while other recent forays into suburban fiction -- basic cable's " Mad Men," the film version of "Revolutionary Road," the novels of Tom Perrotta and Rick Moody -- remain true to the palettes of the masters, the truly modern version is, for better or worse, Bravo's "Real Housewives" series (10 p.m. Tuesdays). Here is a truly postmillennial prism.

-- Mary McNamara, on what has to be TMR's new favorite show, courtesy of The Los Angeles Times.