Here Come the Yuppies!

A new impulse book goes beyond preppiness

Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course, for Young Urban Professionals, and the one true guide to their carefully hectic life-style is The Yuppie Handbook (Long Shadow Books; $4.95). Tongue firmly in chic, Authors Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley tirelessly chronicle the ways of the Yuppie, along with its lesser-known subspecies the Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) and Puppie (Pregnant Urban Professional). Both writers are accredited Yups: Piesman, 32, is a lawyer, and Hartley, 38, is an editor.

The slim volume is yet another clone of a reigning champion in the impulse book market, The Official Preppy Handbook, which appeared three years ago and has more than 1.3 million copies in print. The new manual is aimed at an affluent, surefire market: the upscale young singles and dual-career couples gathered in or near big cities. Long the darlings of the advertising world and the media, these fast-trackers are now united under a sassy name and invited to smile along at their own trendiness.

Yuppies are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy. The Yuppie wakes to a digital alarm, sets down the dog food for the akita and jogs for the beta-endorphins before putting in a typically grueling day at the office, followed by an hour of therapy and meeting of the condo board. There is no time for sex, so for many Yuppies celibacy is a way of life. Yuppies eat tortellini, tuna sashimi and chefs salad, and favor restaurants with ceiling fans and dark green walls. No instant food ever passes Yuppie lips. The kitchen features scores of exotic appliances that cannot be washed in the dishwasher, window herb gardens and a double sink for draining pasta.

Yuppie meals are served on plain white plates, set down on straw place mats. The dining table, preferably butcher block, glass or marble, must never match the dining chairs. Yuppies angle for Queen Anne service as a wedding gift, then use their half of the service for everyday flatware after the divorce. As wedding presents, Yuppies give ski wax, an ounce of saffron or a specially written home-computer program, the Yuppie equivalent of a handmade quilt.

The Yupification of a neighborhood is an awesome spectacle. Say the authors:

"Yuppies descend in swarms and leave nothing behind but Dumpsters filled with discarded linoleum." Some signs of imminent Yupification: forced relocation of candy stores and laundromats, the proliferation of gourmet-food stores and the appearance of disoriented bums trying to figure out why their favorite bar now has an asparagus fern in the window. Yuppies do not reside in houses or apartments but in "living spaces," often in run-down neighborhoods from which their immigrant grandparents fled. "Yuppies will live anywhere," says the Handbook, "as long as the floors are genuine parquet and there's another Yuppie on the block."

Yuppies never take naps (except on New Year's Day), never have anything plastic in their living spaces (except the push-button phones) and never vacation anywhere their parents might have been.

The Yuppie prefers Aruba, Fiji or some presumably undiscovered inn, "only to find the dining room packed with M.B.A.s ordering cassis sherbet for dessert." Favored movies include Annie Hall (in fact, anything by Woody Allen), Casablanca (because of the ceiling fans), An Unmarried Woman (excellent footage of SoHo lofts) and Chariots of Fire (crucial emphasis on athletics, competitiveness and expensive clothing).

Under the mild satire, the book suffices well enough as a how-to guide for aspiring Yuppies from the provinces who desperately want to avoid appearing gauche in the big city. Having it both ways probably means that the authors will achieve a cardinal Yuppie goal: an income in six figures.