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One Fifth Avenue
by Candace Bushnell
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Synopses & Reviews Review: "Sex in the City goes middle-aged, mordant and slapstick in Bushnell's chronicle of writers, actors and Wall Street whizzes clashing at One Fifth Avenue, a Greenwich Village art deco jewel crammed with regal rich, tarty upstarts and misguided lovers. When a 'Queen of Society' dies, a vicious scramble for her penthouse apartment ensues, and it's attorney Annalisa and her hedge-funder husband, Paul Rice, who land the palatial pad, roiling the building's rivalries. There's Billy Litchfield, an art dealer who slobbers over the wealthy; strivers Mindy and James Gooch, and their tech-savvy 13-year-old Sam, the most hilariously bitter (and strangely successful) family in the building; gossip columnist Enid Merle and her screenwriter nephew, Philip Oakland, who struggle to uphold traditions and their souls; actress Schiffer Diamond, who lands a hit TV series, and her old love; and Lola Fabrikant, a cunning Atlanta gold digger whose greatest ambition is to become Carrie Bradshaw. Here are bloggers and bullies, misfits and misanthropes, dear hearts and black-hearts, dogfights and catty squalls spun into a darkly humorous chick-lit saga. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: Rather than structuring her tale around a group of girlfriends as she did in her previous print-to-screen successes, "Sex and the City" and "Lipstick Jungle," chick-lit matriarch Candace Bushnell focuses in her new novel on a Manhattan landmark: a fabulous, towering, art deco co-op (real) and the intertwining stories of its posh residents (fictional). They range in age from a 13-year-old computer whiz ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to an 82-year-old gossip columnist. Don't be fooled by the age spread, though. At its heart, "One Fifth Avenue" is about middle age and its discontents. Which are many, apparently, even for the obscenely overprivileged. One hallmark of middle age is full-throated alarm upon glimpsing the rows of unlined faces in the rearview mirror. And so the book's most memorable character is the supremely smug young Lola Fabrikant, fresh out of college with a degree in fashion marketing and a tastefully enhanced bustline. She has come to Manhattan to find "her own Mr. Big," a blatant reference to the ultimate bachelor in "Sex and the City," the Mr. Darcy of the new millennium. And "if Mr. Big weren't available, she would happily take fame, ideally becoming the star of her own reality show. Either option was acceptable." Lola, who "believed in herself so purely, it was almost inspirational," pounces into the lives of One Fifth denizens, snagging an eligible, 40-something author-screenwriter and in the process upsetting the plans of his wealthy old aunt and movie-star ex-girlfriend, also residents of the building. So far, so "Sex and the City," no? Ah, but there's a difference. Yes, Bushnell's iconic characters were man-obsessed, sex-obsessed and shoe-obsessed. But they also had jobs, work that defined them and that they cared about. Not so, Lola. Work doesn't interest her, and according to the novel, this is par for her generation, a "new democracy where every young person was equal to every older person ... (a) new culture where it was difficult to find young people who even cared to work, who could even tolerate discomfort." The girls whom Lola knows all plan to wed ASAP and begin birthing immediately thereafter. Why? "They don't want to end up like their mothers," Lola explains. "What's wrong with their mothers?" asks her middle-age lover-to-be. "They're unhappy. Girls my age won't put up with unhappiness." Let the all-girl generational wars begin. And indeed, the middle-age mom character in the book — Mindy, a bitter career woman with a 1980s bob, the least-desirable apartment in One Fifth and a husband who is taking too long to become successful — is most certainly unhappy. She channels this into abusing her power as head of the co-op board and starting a blog, "The Joys of Not Having It All," which soon goes viral. "I don't have it all, and I'm coming to the realization I probably never will," she writes. "One Fifth Avenue" is definitely not a book to read for plot. An odd, interwoven strand about art theft is more of a distraction than anything else. Murder and attempted murder also make brief appearances, but in less-than-believable ways. And the thwarted love story at the novel's core — middle-age love, of course — doesn't quite hold the suspense it should. This is a book you read because it takes some of the challenges of modern, middle-age urban life and has the characters try to meet them amid a swirl of heliports and Hamptons visits, and because Bushnell has a track record of channeling the N.Y.C. zeitgeist. Which, if she's right, includes a burgeoning backlash against the nastier parts of Internet-driven celebrity journalism. One of her particular targets is Snarker (a look-alike of the real Manhattan celebrity and media blog Gawker.com), which has begun picking on Mindy. "Each week, Snarker made fun of her blog in a weekly feature called 'Middle-aged Mommy Crisis.' It wasn't healthy to read hateful comments about oneself (some of the comments simply said, 'I hate her. I wish she would die'), but Mindy was hooked." The author of this particular feature is one of the book's other less-than-attractive young characters, Thayer Core, who works out of a shared and smelly apartment and gets paid $20 a blog entry (ouch). Core, Bushnell writes, is "a bully, and like most bullies, he lacked courage ... striking out at the world instead from behind the safety of his computer." You won't be surprised to know that even before publication, the real-live folks at Gawker blogged back: "Writers always get thin-skinned once they've had a taste of success. We'll be so audacious as to say that if Candace Bushnell came of age in the early aughts, she'd be holed up in her apartment with a laptop, gleefully throwing e-bricks like the rest of us. (As they say, if you want to be famous, throw a brick at someone famous.) Nothing personal, just business." Bushnell has made the personal her business, and in this sense "One Fifth Avenue" is part of her thriving empire. And throw what virtual bricks you will, the lady is making more than $20 an entry. Reviewed by Claudia Deane, who reviews regularly for The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Synopsis: Using one of the trendiest areas of Manhattan--known as the gold coast--as a backdrop, the bestselling author of "Sex and the City, Trading Up," and "Lipstick Jungle" tells the stories of five women all living in the same swanky downtown apartment building.
Synopsis: In her fifth novel, Bushnell traces the lives and loves of the aspirational sophisticates in New York City, using the trendiest areas of Manhattan as the backdrop for the stories of five women living in the same swanky downtown apartment building.Hyperion
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781401301613
- Author:
- Bushnell, Candace
- Publisher:
- Hyperion Books
- Subject:
- General Fiction
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Young women
- Subject:
- Manhattan (new york, n.y.)
- Subject:
- Contemporary Women
- Publication Date:
- September 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 433
- Dimensions:
- 9.48x6.40x1.23 in. 1.61 lbs.
- Age Level:
- from Al to l0
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