Word: fifthly
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...