Book Review: One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell

One Fifth Avenue

by Candace Bushnell

I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say Candace Bushnell is still the world's most celebrated sex columnist. She fashioned her insightful New York Observer columns into the book Sex and the City, which became reincarnated as a deservingly popular and entertaining TV show. Our ideas about Bushnell may be shaped by the engaging TV series, but as a writer she's more sober and more serious than we might expect from the HBO show alone. Her prose is straightforward but not as finely crafted as her plots.

One Fifth Avenue (2008) is a novel set in a prime piece of New York City real estate, albeit the real address has been fictionalized. Like Lipstick Jungle, the book is full of strong female personalities. The men are once again less interesting. Nowhere is there much psychological depth.

Still, it's a fairly complex tale interweaving the various loves, intrigues, careers, and egos of those who live in or wish they could live in this landmark building. To her credit, Bushnell has let her characters age along with her and quite a few of them here are in their mid-forties. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly given Bushnell's changing perspective, the twenty-somethings don't come off very well in the novel at all. No one in fact is particularly nice, and it's not easy to relate to most of the characters. The result is that we really don't care all that much. Bushnell has at least five of her characters writing for one medium or another, but even she doesn't seem to empathize with any of those practicing her craft.

In the end, we are asked to believe that fate has a way of giving nasty folks their comeuppance. We are told that couples who have really good sex should find a way to spend their lives together. And we learn once again that money can't buy happiness, but it can buy real estate.


Note:  I have other book reviews posted here.

Election Day is tomorrow. The relevant blog posts are here.

0938

Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried (1990)
Tim O'Brien

I was privileged to hear author Tim O'Brien give a reading at Colgate University for Frederick Busch's "Living Writers" class in the very early 1980's. Mr. Busch, a well-respected writer of fiction himself, would arrange for a contemporary author to visit his seminar, and the week prior he would have his students read a book by that author. The writer would come in and give a reading with some discussion. It's an excellent format and the course is still being taught today, although I no longer recognize the names of the authors.

Busch introduced O'Brien warmly, saying that his students knew how highly he regarded Going After Cacciato (1978). Indeed, the book had been a national phenomenon, one of the first important works of fiction about the Vietnam War. In my household, it was the only contemporary work which we all had read, even my mother who didn't read war books. How could I not come to a reading by Tim O'Brien? The event was open to all, but it was held in a classroom in Lawrence Hall, not an auditorium, and I was one of the few in attendance who was not taking the class.

O'Brien himself was a regular guy wearing a baseball cap. He read two excerpts from The Nuclear Age (1985) which was still a work in progress. By way of introducing his novel about growing up in 1950's America, he explained to us that he had previously written quite a lot about Vietnam and he had said pretty much all he had to say about the war.

In retrospect, this was a pretty remarkable statement, and I wish I could recall his words more exactly. Here we were almost a decade before The Things They Carried was published, and Tim O'Brien had told us he had nothing further to say about Vietnam! Well, I don't think even he could have imagined what was coming. The Things They Carried is very good, impossibly good, obscenely good.

It is a work of fiction. O'Brien tells us this right up front, but then things get complicated. The book is more or less in the form of a memoir where the main character is named Tim O'Brien, a 43-year-old writer recalling people and events before, during, and after the Vietnam War. He explains his belief that there are just wars like World War II but Vietnam was never in that class. He gives a fascinating account of how he almost ran off to Canada, although this may or may not be the case. He has a lot to say about storytelling and memory. He discusses his book Going After Cacciato and the various versions one of his stories has gone through, very plausible things that a writer might relate. In other words, it is unclear just what is fiction in this avowed work of fiction and what is not. O'Brien's assertion late in the game that almost everything is made up doesn't really help given the biographical framing devices in most of the book. Some of the events described certainly could never have happened, and some seem to be hallucinations a la Cacciato. The overall effect is quite powerful.

Incidentally, after Tim O'Brien finished his reading, Frederick Busch announced, "I'm going to buy this man a beer." A group then head down to the Pub. I wish I had tagged along.

0575

Book Review: Inherent Vice (2009) by Thomas Pynchon

Inherent Vice (2009)

Thomas Pynchon

It's been about thirty years since I last read Thomas Pynchon. I really enjoyed and thought the world of his first three novels too. Gravity's Rainbow, of course, was particularly amazing, a real apocalyptic masterpiece like no other, and it ended with such brilliant finality that it was possible to believe for many years after 1973 that Pynchon was not going to have anything more to say ever. It now seems apparent to me that Pynchon never stopped writing, and a book such as Mason & Dixon was decades in the making. The fact of the matter is, while Pynchon got back into the habit of publishing, I did not get back into the habit of reading him. Until now, that is.


Inherent Vice, Pynchon's seventh novel, is his hallucinogenic take on the noir novel. With Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles, the liquor cabinet was never closed. In this 2009 novel, Doc Sportello seemingly is perpetually stoned. The result is a private investigator with the incredible ability to follow the many threads of a bewilderingly complex case, threads the sober reader may well get hopelessly lost in, but Doc also has a doper's seeming inability to recall a plain conversation even while he's having it. Pynchon returns to this dope-induced memory loss again and again. I must have laughed out loud every time.

Yes, the book is funny, often outrageously so, but this is still a serious work of literary fiction with many of Pynchon's quirks and hallmarks. It's actually nice to see Pynchon enjoying himself so much, but one only has to pay attention to all the discussion about Charles Manson, Vietnam, greedy real estate developers, President Nixon, and Governor Reagan in the California of 1970 to realize that powerful forces are going to put an end to the hippie paradise that Pynchon may or may not be romanticizing. I'm not sure the convoluted plot itself has the kind of meaningful payoff one hopes for, but perhaps Pynchon is wise not to have every conspiracy look like the Tristero system in The Crying of Lot 49. He's after something much vaster here, something that encompasses all the tentacles of capitalism. I think this is a mistake, but then I was never a hippie.



December 18, 2011 Update:  Thomas Pynchon narrates this promotion for his book.

Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

0171