Fans of Candace Bushnell may be surprised to learn her latest book focuses more on high-rises than high heels.
The “Sex and the City” author turns her trenchant wit and eye for social folly to real estate with “One Fifth Avenue,” which focuses on characters inhabiting a landmark art deco building in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
In addition to “One Fifth Avenue” and “Sex and the City,” which began as a series of columns for the New York Observer, Bushnell has written three other novels, including “Lipstick Jungle,” the basis of the NBC series. She hosts a New York-based Sirius radio show called “Sex, Success, and Sensibility” and is working on two young-adult books for HarperCollins about “SATC’s” Carrie Bradshaw during high school and college.
The idea for “One Fifth” sprang from her own youth. Bushnell grew up in Glastonbury, Conn., where she learned firsthand how crazy people can get over their property. Her mother, Camille, was a real estate agent.
“She taught me how real estate is so deeply ingrained in people’s psyches, very deep-rooted and complicated,” Bushnell says. “It really goes back to the caveman days.”
In “One Fifth,” one hilariously disturbing episode is when nouveau-riche tech guru Paul Rice is thwarted in his efforts to buy, at any cost, the building’s sole parking space, which is distributed via lottery each year. Despite his gazillions, Paul discovers that, as Bushnell puts it, “Money not only can’t buy you happiness, it can’t even buy a parking space. And there is still some fairness in life — but it may not be fairness as Paul sees it.”
The real-life One Fifth Avenue skirts Washington Square Park and is home to Blythe Danner, Sam Shepard, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, among others, according to the New York Post.
In her novel, Bushnell populates it with the likes of Paul and his nicer-than- he-deserves wife, Annalisa; Philip Oakland, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who’s now slumming with screenplays; a 40-something movie star who’s slumming with television and who is the author’s ex-lover.
Hovering over them all is the figurative ghost of Louise Houghton, a Brooke Astor- like society doyenne whose death sets off a frenzy over the disposition of her fabulous three-story apartment.
Bushnell pays tongue- in-cheek homage to both “Sex and the City” and her own heritage in the book.
In addition to the horrors of real estate, Bushnell notes, the book also touches on how the new always eventually replaces the old — people, buildings, this week’s most-wanted bling — despite one character’s lament that “all the best people are dead.” And of course, if they can’t get that parking space, they might as well be.
