Lauren Belfer is slight, what Americans would call petite, and wears a pink, short-skirted suit a la Monica Lewinsky. As we walk across the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club toward the dining room, old men's eyes swivel. Now 44, married to a much older husband and mother of a 10-year-old son, she laughs with pleasure. There is a touching innocence about her. She has never been to a place like this before. They don't have them in the US.
Being here, she says, is like finding a door into another world. She wonders whether John Singer Sergeant was a member. It seems she studied Sergeant's portraits of society women as part of her research for City of Light, but then it is hard to imagine anything remotely relevant that she didn't research for her novel about turn-of-the-century Buffalo: newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, government reports on hydro-electricity, weather reports, even menus, all seamlessly combined to make you feel you know the place as well as you've ever known anywhere.
With its six-figure advance and rumours of a major motion picture deal starring Michelle Pfeiffer, City of Light is being marketed as a blockbuster, which is a shame because this is an extraordinarily accomplished novel in the great American tradition of Edith Wharton and Thomas Wolfe and deserves better. Belfer is delighted to be bracketed with "the Victorian realists", however. Post-modern fiction is not to her taste.
"There is no need to parody or exaggerate reality to make an intellectual point. It's real life and let's take everything we can. It's all there, you don't have to play tricks. The more closely you look at it, the more minutely you see it, there's a paradoxical bursting into the universal."
What Belfer places under her microscope is a city that once was great. Growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s and 1960s, however, she had no idea of its illustrious past. It was, she says, a dying industrial wasteland. "Yet 100 years ago it was a place like Silicon Valley in terms of its technological achievement. It was truly the second city of the nation."
What transformed Buffalo was electricity, via the tapping of Niagara Falls. It is this seismic shift that forms the backdrop for the novel.
Six years ago Belfer had just completed her MFA at Columbia University when by chance she wandered into an exhibition at Buffalo's Historical Society while on a visit to her parents. It was a revelation.
"Often in America first novels tend to be very small, beautifully executed domestic stories. And I think when you're learning how to write it's much easier to work with material you already have. But when I went to write a novel I wanted to find something bigger, a canvas that would portray a broader society."
Her narrator is the headmistress of the Buffalo's most prestigious girls' school, based on the school that Belfer attended as a scholarship girl. "Louisa Barrett is not really based on any specific person but is an amalgam of all my reading, because I then set out to find out about women of distinction of that time."
All her central characters are outsiders from the world of privilege in which the novel takes place. "As an unmarried working woman, Louisa herself was outside that society," Belfer explains. "And she was also literally an outsider, she came from Boston. I was an outsider too, I was not from the world that is portrayed in the book, and I think in a way that's what gave me the perspective to write it. I felt that she and I became voyagers and together we were on a voyage of discovery to find this magical place that once existed."
What Louisa Barrett does have, however, is a past, secrets that are only gradually revealed. One of these turns out to be a sexual encounter with Grover Cleveland.
"People have said to me how can you put an American president into that situation without any evidence? But the first name that hits you in any research about Buffalo is Grover Cleveland and I had evidence enough." Buffalo's most famous son notoriously fathered a child by a woman named Maria Halpern. He accepted paternity but wanted to bring up the child himself. "He in fact imprisoned her in an insane asylum until she would accept separation from her child. If a person behaves like that once, he'll behave that way again."
Any echoes of the Clinton scandal, she insists, are pure coincidence; that particular strand of the novel was in place well before Monica Lewinsky scandal. But it is not the only area of the book that rings contemporary bells: the fight for hydro-electric power was perhaps the world's first environmental battle, and the issues are as complex as they are today: privatisation versus state ownership; profit margins versus safety; race, class, corruption, privilege and power.
Louisa Barrett's encounter with Grover Cleveland is far from being a bolt-on bit of spice. The story pivots around it. "Some people will say that was rape. But I can see a young woman, innocent woman falling into the situation. And a man assuming that if she's there he should go ahead with it." The episode is written with a taut, understated immediacy that rings alarmingly true to life.
Had anything similar had ever happened to her? Not exactly, she says. Though she has had first-hand experience of the magnetism exerted by men of power. In the early 1970s she worked on Jerry Brown's presidential campaign team. "Men like that do have extraordinary charisma you know. And as a young woman you are very vulnerable. You don't want to seem silly. Yet you want to be singled out. You want to feel special. All those things that Monica Lewinsky talks about."
Which was exactly what happened when Lauren Belfer was approached by Warren Beatty at that same Democratic convention. "The curious thing is he was truly like a walking mannequin of himself. We chatted for quite a while, then he said to me, so suave - `would you like to come back with me to my hotel room - to the Hilton hotel - for a drink?' And I looked at him and I was appalled. I just said, `Look I'm working here at this convention.' And he just turned away and wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the evening. I was so hurt. I really thought that he was interested in me, in what we had been talking about. It was awful." Even more instructive was her father's reaction. "I said to him, `You won't believe what happened, I was invited to Warren Beatty's hotel room'. And my father actually said to me, `And you didn't go? A once in a lifetime opportunity and you didn't go?' My own father."
Belfer agrees that it was difficult to write, but ultimately she had to stay true to Louisa Barrett's voice and Louisa's hands were tied if she were not to become a social outcast. Belfer says that we do Louisa Barrett and women like her a disservice by expecting attitudes and values of the late 20th century. "For certain a lot of these situations are about power. That is the issue." And as far as the Grover Cleveland episode is concerned, she says that such things are part of every woman's experience.
"I remember instances with older men . . . As years go by you just park that in a another part of your brain."
"But I can see now that certainly I drew on that completely subconsciously. Because what part of your brain writes fiction? I really think it's the subconscious part that's working. For me it's an eerie aspect of writing that I just open myself to whatever should come along."
City of Light, by Lauren Belfer is published by Sceptre, £10 in the UK