Midlife Manhattan: 'Sex and the City' With Wrinkles

ONE FIFTH AVENUE

By Candace Bushnell

Voice. 433 pp. $25.95

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 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.