One Fifth Avenue
My darling picked up a few crisp new books at the Sally Ann’s downtown store closing out sale, $1.00 each.
One was Candace Bushnell’s One Fifth Avenue. In hardcover no less. It was worth every penny my darling paid for it.
One must not judge a book by its cover but, frankly, the cover art was the best thing about this book. To be fair, my expectations were low, I was never a fan of Sex in the City, in either book or television form.
About the best thing in One Fifth are Bushnell’s sly little references to SITC which is now part of the culture of the habitues of One Fifth. These are, I am afraid, the only glimpses of humour in the entire book.
Bushnell is very, very earnest about her characters. Each is a cliche in his or her own right and there will be no wry asides, thank you very much. A billionaire, a quant aspiring billionaire, a bright teen, a forty-something writer who has an affair with a 20-something caricature of what the Bushnells of this world think of as modern youthful self-obsession, a recently dead socialite, a rising socialite, a gay walker, an old and sage aunt/crone, and a rather nasty couple who live in the luggage room. There might be a joke there somewhere, Bushnell missed it.
Nope. Bushnell moves her clichés through a series of, dare I say it, cliché New York moments, and, for spice, from one murder fifty years before the action begins to another, near murder to close such action as there is.
Not that it matters. Bushnell is a brand and her name is an instant draw. Lazy writing? Why not? Muddy plot? Doesn’t matter. When it came out in 2008, One Fifth Avenue was the latest Bushnell and the best seller machine really only cares about the brand.
As the proto-typical New York City walker, Truman Capote, said of Jack Keroac’s On the Road, “That’s not writing, that's typing.” Lord knows what Capote would have made of Bushnell’s leaden word processing. But it would have been more interesting than One Fifth Avenue.
But the cover art is very nice.