COLLEGE FUND

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Before the onset of its Disneyfication, New York City's Times Square boasted a grim-looking strip club that successfully distinguished itself from the area's many other grim-looking strip clubs. In big pink letters on a white marquee, this establishment proudly alerted passersby that it featured LIVE GIRLS WORKING THEIR WAY THRU COLLEGE. Patrons, presumably, found topless women who had taken the SATs to be more tantalizing than those who had not.

It's a proposition with which young Jennifer Belle cannot argue. The 28-year-old Manhattanite has received a great deal of publicity for her comic first novel, Going Down (Riverhead Books; $12; 254 pages), primarily because of its subject: a year in the life of a young woman who becomes a prostitute to pay her tuition at New York University. Right away we know we are in for humor of the zanily incongruous sort because Belle has given her heroine a some-of-my-best-friends-went-to-Exeter name: Bennington Bloom.

Bennington is the daughter of a math professor with a Greenwich Village apartment and a country house, which makes her choice of after-school job seem even more implausible. She is not so much a hooker with a heart of gold as she is a hooker with nerves of creme brulee. She is comically neurotic--her heels and condoms are always spilling out of her book bag--and prone to ulcers and indigestion. "What's wrong with you?" she asks herself at one point. "Men smile at you on the subway, women ask you what shampoo you use; be happy." Why Bennington isn't, say, an assistant in the copywriting department at Ogilvy & Mather is anybody's guess.

Jennifer Belle is an exceptionally funny writer, but it's hard to get past the fact that she never gives us a believable reason for Bennington's particular work-study program. Belle herself supported her writing habit by working in real estate. That will be the subject of her next, and surely more realistic, novel.

--By Ginia Bellafante