One Fifth Avenue
Candace Bushnell, 2008
Voice Publishers
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401341404
Summary
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."
This book 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 the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 1, 1958
• Where—Glastonbury, Connecticut, USA
• Education—attended Rice University
• Currently—lives in New York City
Candace Bushnell is an American author and columnist based in New York City. She is best known for writing a sex column that was turned into a book, Sex and the City, which became the basis of the immensely popular television series of the same name, and its subsequent film adaptation. Bushnell married New York City American Ballet Theater ballet artist Charles Askegaard on July 4, 2002.
Bushnell was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Upon dropping out of Rice University in the late 1970s, she was known throughout New York City as a party-goer and socialite. One of her favorite places was Studio 54. Later on in life, she got a job as a columnist in the New York Observer.
In 1994, her editor-in-chief asked her if she wanted to write a column for the paper, and she accepted the job. She wanted a column based on the adventures she and her friends usually spoke about, and she called it "Sex and the City."
In 1998, HBO started airing a show, Sex and the City, based on, but not exactly like, Bushnell's column. The Sex and the City television show enhanced Bushnell's already growing fame. The television series ceased original production in 2004, with the last episode airing on HBO in February 2004. It is now in syndication.
Many other writers have compared the Carrie Bradshaw character on the television show to Bushnell because Carrie, like Bushnell, is also a newspaper sex and lifestyles columnist who enjoys the New York nightlife and, indeed, Candace's initials are the same as Carrie's. Bushnell has stated in several interviews that Carrie Bradshaw is her alter ego. Bushnell was one of three judges for the 2005 reality television show Wickedly Perfect on CBS. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
One Fifth Avenue is less of a novel than it is an aggregation of characters who periodically bump into one another. Ms. Bushnell’s way of dividing her text into Acts I, II, III, IV and V confirms the not-strictly-literary nature of its ambitions.... Peeping into glamorous lives is Ms. Bushnell’s specialty — and she is less interesting about the blandly affluent than she is about the disgruntled. Thus Mindy Gooch and Lola sound like her most honestly observed creatures. They also come closest to providing humor, which is something that One Fifth Avenue could have used in larger doses. Its funniest sections involve Lola’s flagrant ploys for extorting favors from various men, which turns out to be the second thing she is very good at.... Lola is different from the book’s other characters... [she] is sure of herself. And there’s something else that separates her from Ms. Bushnell’s more seasoned New Yorkers, and from the grim undercurrent running through One Fifth Avenue: She isn’t terrified of growing old.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
One Fifth Avenue is definitely not a book to read for plot…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.
Claudia Deane - Washington Post
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.
Publishers Weekly
Bushnell most definitely had a good summer. The movie version of Sex and the City was a hit, and the NBC based a drama on her last novel, Lipstick Jungle. [One Fifth Avenue is her] entertaining new novel. Female friendship is usually Bushnell's uniting theme, but, here, it's a landmark building and a beyond-fashionable address that connects the myriad characters introduced: an aging but still beautiful actress named Schiffer Diamond; Enid, a powerful gossip columnist; Annalisa, a former lawyer and now the hesitant wife of a hedge-fund manager; Lola, an obnoxious young social climber determined to manipulate her way to the top of society; and Mindy, the owner of the building's least glamorous apartment yet head of the building's board. Bushnell is at her best here—frothy and fun but also absolutely sharp. There are even a few sly references to Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big thrown in for good measure. Recommended for all public libraries.
Library Journal
The residents of a historic Manhattan building are thrown for a loop when an elderly socialite dies, leaving her spectacular apartment up for grabs. In the glittering world of Bushnell's latest (Lipstick Jungle, 2006, etc.), where you live is easily as important as how (and with whom) you live. So when Louise Houghton passes away a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, her Greenwich Village neighbors are anxious to have a say in who ends up living in her coveted 7,000 square-foot space. The players include octogenarian gossip columnist Enid Merle, her successful screenwriter nephew Philip Oakland, and the embittered middle-aged head of the co-op board, Mindy Gooch. Long resentful of the fact that her family inhabits One Fifth's "worst" apartment, Mindy pushes through a quickie sale of Louise's place seemingly just to thwart Enid. The new residents, Paul and Annalisa Rice, certainly seem suitable. Annalisa is a down-to-earth beauty who gave up her law practice to accompany her math-genius husband to New York, where he is developing some super-secret financial software. Paul, unlike his wife, is cold and entitled, and as his fortunes grow, a sinister, paranoid side of him emerges that alienates everyone in the building, including Annalisa. But is Paul just a creep, or something worse? Philip's love life, meanwhile, takes a complicated turn when movie star ex-girlfriend Schiffer Diamond moves back after years of living in Los Angeles. The two share a deep connection, but reconciliation seems iffy when Philip starts sleeping with his 22-year-old "researcher" Lola Fabrikant. A pampered schemer who sets her sights on marriage—and Philip's apartment—Lola hedges her bets by dallying with snarky celebrity blogger Thayer Core, who in turn uses her for information. Mindy's hen-pecked novelist husband James also develops a crush on the lissome Lola, who begins paying attention to him when his new book becomes a surprise success. With a breezy pace that brings to mind a Gilded Age comedy of manners, the novel might not have anything new to say about New York society, but there are enough twists to keep it fun.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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