Text and the City
By Lev Grossman
Candace Bushnell is the Evelyn Waugh of our time. Or she would be if Waugh had been a) a woman and b) a terrible writer. Waugh was a true wit and a master stylist who loved and despised his subjects (the English upper classes) with such a hopeless passion that he ended up capturing them completely. Bushnell does something very similar with rich people in New York City. Just without the wit or the style.
Which is still no mean feat, and One Fifth Avenue (Hyperion; 433 pages) is no mean book, except in the other sense of mean. So far, 2008 is looking like a career year for Bushnell, what with the success of the Sex and the City movie and the success--or, at any rate, the renewal--of her NBC series Lipstick Jungle. She also just announced a deal to write young-adult novels about the teen years of Carrie Bradshaw. One Fifth Avenue should round all that out nicely. It's certainly a page turner of practically Germanic efficiency. But it also reminds us of a weird truth about its author, which is that Bushnell on the page is a far darker, more interesting creature than Bushnell on the screen.
One Fifth Avenue is a novel set in One Fifth Avenue, "a magnificent building constructed of a pale grey sandstone in the classic lines of the deco era." There was a time when writers and artists could live there--a few still do--but now the apartments start at $1 million-plus, making it strictly the domain of the wealthy. ("Money wants what it can't buy," Bushnell writes, "class and talent.") The friction between those two worlds--rich and poor, crass and cultured, New York present and New York past--gives the book its heat. Well, that and all the sex.
The story begins with the death of one Mrs. Houghton, a patron of the arts and the occupant of the building's showpiece apartment, a three-story, 7,000-sq.-ft. (650 sq m) residence complete with a marble-floored ballroom. Into it, for $15 million, move Paul and Annalisa, a creepy hedge-fund manager and his sweet wife. Paul wants to install in-wall air conditioners, which is against the building's rules. That sparks a feud with Mindy, the shrewish president of the co-op board, who's married to James, an obscure literary novelist who has just authored a massive best seller. A few floors up, another writer, Philip, a Pulitzer winner who has fallen on hard times (he's at work on a screenplay titled--in a nod to Waugh--Bridesmaids Revisited), is sleeping with his 22-year-old gold-digging assistant, Lola, a viciously, flawlessly drawn avatar of the rising generation of postfeminist girl-women. But Philip still yearns for an old flame: Schiffer, an Oscar-winning actress whose new TV show is turning out to be a smash hit. Among these characters moves gentle, sophisticated, thwarted Billy Litchfield, a kind of freelance Guy Friday to rich people, who is very nice but way too poor to actually live in One Fifth.
Bushnell's prose is breezy and careless, as if she composed One Fifth Avenue in a helicopter on the way to the Hamptons with a cigarette and a martini in her free hand and didn't worry too much if a page here or there flew out the window. (She describes Mrs. Houghton's death as a "swift and speedy end," as if those two words meant different things. And it's amazing that anyone could write, let alone publish, the following sentence: "That was the defining moment of great sex--when the penis met the vagina.") Bushnell also seems to have no sense of self-preservation: she should never, ever write about blogs or indeed anything having to do with computers or the Internet or probably electricity.
But her pacing is flawless, and the trash level is just right. And One Fifth Avenue has other virtues that are harder to explain. It has an actual Weltanschauung--it gets at the deep truth of shallow people. Women control men with sex. Men control women with money. With rare exceptions, marriage is a Punch-and-Judy slugfest that ends with either divorce or one party's total subjugation. Power and pleasure are the only things that are real, and they endlessly swap places as means and end. Everybody in One Fifth Avenue, good and bad, is bound by these rules, and the only difference is that some feel bad about it and some don't. "You know New York never changes," Philip says. "The characters are different but the play remains the same."
These are bleak truths that Carrie Bradshaw could never grasp. Her life in Sex and the City is a fairy-tale fever dream of shopping and dating from which she will never awaken, no matter how many princes kiss her. She wouldn't last an hour at One Fifth Avenue. Bushnell knows this. She even slyly hints at it: Lola, the gold digger, "had watched every single episode of Sex and the City at least, as she claimed, 'a hundred times.'" Lola arrives in Manhattan expecting--nay, demanding--a West Village apartment and a Mr. Big. Suffice it to say that the show doesn't turn out to be a very practical guide to real life and real estate in the big city. She should have read the book instead.
FIRST LINE It was only a part in a TV series, and only a one-bedroom apartment in New York.