From one of the most consistently astute and engaging social
commentators of our day comes another look at the tough and
tender women of New York City--this time, through the lens
of where they live. One Fifth Avenue, the Art Deco beauty
towering over one of Manhattan's oldest and most
historically hip neighborhoods, is a one-of-a-kind address,
the sort of building you have to earn your way into--one way
or another. For the women in Candace Bushnell's new novel,
One Fifth Avenue, this edifice is essential to the lives
they've carefully established--or hope to establish. From
the hedge fund king's wife to the aging gossip columnist to
the free-spirited actress (a recent refugee from L.A.), each
person's game plan for a rich life comes together under the
soaring roof of this landmark building. Acutely observed and
mercilessly witty, One Fifth Avenue is a modern-day story of
old and new money, that same combustible mix that Edith
Wharton mastered in her novels about New York's Gilded Age
and F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated in his Jazz Age tales.
Many decades later, Bushnell's New Yorkers suffer the same
passions as those fictional Manhattanites from eras past:
They thirst for power, for social prominence, and for
marriages that are successful--at least to the public eye.
But Bushnell is an original, and One Fifth Avenue is so
fresh that it reads as if sexual politics, real estate
theft, and fortunes lost in a day have never happened
before. From Sex and the City through four successive
novels, Bushnell has revealed a gift for tapping into the
zeitgeist of any New York minute and, as one critic put it,
staying uncannily "just the slightest bit ahead of the
curve." And with each book, she has deepened her range, but
with a light touch that makes her complex literary
accomplishments look easy. Her stories progress so nimbly
and ring so true that it can seem as if anyone might write
them--when, in fact, no one writes novels quite like Candace
Bushnell. Fortunately for us, with One Fifth Avenue, she has
done it again.
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