Consider this a time capsule piece. With $6 a gallon gas and when even (gads!) Ed McMahon and Evander Holyfield are feeling the mortgage crisis, there may not be any rich people left to make fun of by the end of the year.

But there seems to be a glut of fiction in the market in the past year poking fun at the upper crust, almost as if publishers have been trying to get in their Jay McInerney-throwback titles before it all becomes dated. From Janelle Brown’s Silicon Valley satire, All We Wanted Was Everything to Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions, it seems to be cool as ice cream to play comic blueblood sport. One novel that does it better than the rest is Katie Arnoldi’s The Wentworths.

The Wentworths are a Southern Calfornia family with as many children as Mexican maids. The head of the family is the philandering septuagenarian Gus, who even when he’s feeling his age, manages to coerce his mistress into a little harmless fellatio, even when she’s late to pick up her kid from school. There’s Conrad, a Patrick Bateman-esque womanizer who only invites his girlfriends to dinner when he’s ready to dump them. There’s Norman, who’s so sensitive (read: homosexual) that he can’t leave the house. And there’s Becky, who has her husband Paul so badly browbeaten that he can hardly touch her without her written consent.

The plot goes something like this: when Conrad brings his latest girlfriend Angela home to dinner, the whole family knows the relationship is over. Unfortunately, this time, Conrad has messed with a girl who’s determined to become a Wentworth or kill trying. Once Angela tells Conrad she’s pregnant, a chain of events is set in motion that ultimately wreaks havoc on each and every family member.

The targets of her satire seem somewhat familiar, but Arnoldi’s style of sparse prose is pitch perfect and cuts at the heart of the soullessness of The Wentworths’ motivations without diminishing their ability to redeem themselves. For example, the novel is told from a number of different points of view, all appropriate to the character. Hypersensitive Norman’s first chapter is entitled “I am Norman Wentworth.” Clocking in a curt 255 pages, Arnoldi wastes no time to give this family what’s coming to them. And when the tragicomic ending comes, prepare to be surprised by the surprising amount of sadness you’ll feel for these horrible, horrible Wentworths.