There is a spider dangling from Kurt Andersen's hair. The bespectacled American reaches for it, misses, then tries again until the tiny black creature spirals wearily onto the back of his hand. With a sharp slap the spider is no more and Andersen picks up his conversation exactly where he left it in the hyper-real web that is his first novel, Turn of the Century.
" . . . so I sat down and I thought `what would I like to read that I haven't already seen done in contemporary fiction'," he says, explaining the germ of this very original novel. The result has already been dubbed The Great Millennial Read. Andersen has produced a 597-page epic that dips a zeitgeisty toe in all the worlds that as a journalist, essayist and cultural commentator he has passed his satirical pen over during the past two decades.
Set in the year 2000 ("it gave me scope to invent," he says) the novel zooms along through a plot that spans show-biz, software and the vagaries of the stock exchange. The vulgar excesses as well as the buzz of working in these fields are explored with ingenious insight and invention. In Anderson's year 2000 New York, buses are shaped like Absolut Vodka bottles, TV cop shows inter-cut script-reading actors with real-life criminals, and there is mint-flavoured Prozac for children. (This last "invention" is not an invention at all, Andersen explains, as - bizarrely - it is already on the market in the US.) Turn charts a year in the life of George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, a high-powered couple (he a cutting-edge TV producer, she a cutting-edge software developer) and the way in which professional rivalry can come between even the most decently-motivated marrieds.
Since its publication, Andersen has been, in his own quiet way, very pleased at the response of friends and strangers who tell him that he "nailed" a particular aspect of their professional life. "There was definitely a journalistic aspect to it; I was very conscious of getting the details right," he says.
At 44, Anderson is already a member of a surprisingly small coterie of well-known journalists; if American writers, like actors, imprinted their hands in cement for posterity, he would be up to his elbows in it with the likes of Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities author was a journalistic hero of Anderson's growing up, and Turn has been compared favourably to that novel, praise Anderson finds "flattering". Equally pleasing are the references to Turn as a slimmed down Ulysses set in a year instead of a day.
His career credentials include six years at Time magazine, a stint as editor of the New Yorker and the author of a selection of critically-acclaimed essays. Now a columnist with the New Yorker, he is perhaps best known as co-founder of Spy magazine, a funnier version of the UK's Private Eye, which he says in its heyday managed to "piss off most the establishment".
With this novel he gets up the noses of yet more establishment figures, notably Bill Gates of Microsoft, at whom he delivers some hilariously stinging blows. Piety is not his style, and while there is no moral agenda visible within its pages, the book heaves with questions about where society is going and whether all the technology promoted by the likes of Gates is really necessary - in the book there is a TV that cannot be turned off, and whole families are hooked up to a household email system through which they regularly communicate.
Andersen thinks society's obsession with the material, with money, with the increasingly frenetic world of work, can all get a bit "extreme". "The degree to which people judge what they do and how successful they are by entirely financial criteria is something much truer today than it was 20 years ago," he says. "People used to say how is your movie going or how is your play going, and they didn't just mean how is it selling. Now it's all they mean." This "astounds" him. "I think this is unparalleled in my lifetime, maybe in this century," he says.
Was he trying to cash in on millennium fever with a book set in the year 2000? Of course. That was the whole point, he smiles. Then seriously: "I wanted to try and capture the fact that at the turn of the century everything is in so much flux, all the rules that seemed clear 10 years ago are so volatile . . . it is a fact that there are now hundreds and thousands of couples who could be in the exact same positions of professional rivalry which just wasn't true 10 or 15 years ago."
Going to interview Andersen people tell you that "he knows everyone". This pale and interesting, cufflink-wearing figure, who smokes a solitary Marlboro cigarette self-consciously and says "you know" in a Woody Allenesque manner after every sentence, does not suggest "party animal of Manhattan", his most regular caricature.
"Do you really know everyone?" "Bullshit," he says. "Once you have worked in a community of journalists for 23 years you know a lot of people but it is not like I have cultivated it." He looks back fondly on a description of himself in the New York Post two years ago when he showed up at some "stoopid party" and they said the "reclusive" Kurt Andersen was there. "Now I'm a social butterfly," he remarks.
And he doesn't quite know how he got here. Anderson grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and began his journalism career by winning an essay competition at school. He went to Harvard to study sociology which was "the easy way to write my Marxist ideology in papers and get passing grades". Apart from that brief period he says he has never been an "idealogue" but has kept his "eyes open, ears open and mind open . . . that way you see things clearly". At 22 he went to New York without a job when everyone else was "going to law or graduate school". "I don't know what I was thinking," he muses. "I was just plunging in." He found work straightaway writing scripts for a morning TV chat-show. "It was a great job right out of school but once I had figured out how to do it was pretty boring," he says. His break into journalism came with the publication of a book of essays called The Real Thing, which caught the eye of Time magazine. He describes it as his "due-paying period" of journalism, when he was writing hard-hitting articles, not giving "airy fairy" opinions on things. He is "100 per cent" motivated by fear and had always thought of himself as being "risk-averse and sort of chicken as a person until we started Spy and I quit a perfectly good job in Time to do it . . . I love the experience of being just competent enough to think you can pull something off but not really knowing," he says.
This book, written at home in Brooklyn, in a four-storey brownstone he shares with his wife and two children, was "an extraordinary mountain climb of a professional experience . . . writing this at its best was by far the most thrilling thing I had ever done."
"The trick now is to figure out other things that seem scary in the right way," he says. He has a couple of other ideas for novels set either in the 1960s or in the 19th century and has just signed another year-long contract with the New Yorker. "I have never had a five-year plan," he says. "Whatever looks the most interesting and fun at the moment, that is what I will do, you know." Spoken like a true 21st-century boy.
Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen is published by Headline at £17.99 in UK