12 марта 2016г.
Candace Bushnell (b.1958) is one of the most famous and prolific American women-writers who became widely known due to the movie adaptation of her first novel Sex and the City. We would like to consider one of her novels as a pattern of new genre – chick lit, that depicts those changes in the American society, which have taken place for the last decades.
Newspapers reviews and gossip columns gave Bushnell a lot of material that became the precursor for her bestselling novel Sex and the City. First, the life story of the four young women in search of love and career in New York had been turned into a successful TV-series and later on it was arranged as a text of novel.
To support the success of her luckily found plot Bushnell wrote two sequels to the Sex and the City under the same title (1999 and 2000) and two prequels to it – The Carrie Diaries (2010) and Summer and the City (2011). Between them there were a few more novels Four Blondes, Trading up, Lipstick Jungle. All of her books tell us about the life of a modern big city where most of the characters namely women are searching for personal and social success.
In general, Bushnell’s books received a positive acclaim in many American reviews where she was called “the philosopher queen of a social scenechick lit” [1]. According to these critics the writer managed to create a really true contemporary spirit of sex, love and relationships, to deliver clever, hilarious and socially relevant portraits of women in New York City [2]. It is true that her plots are entertaining, satirical and true to life, she is thoroughly exploring a new gender role of women in the American family and social life. From novel to novel Bushnell’s characters are becoming wealthier, far mature and powerful but still not happier. Literary critics say that the writer shows us how to stay ahead and keep laughing in the toughest city on the planet, in the society where succeeding in life could bring you a kind of sexual feeling: “success is a new kind of sex” [3].
In various reviews of Bushnell’s novels we can find the references to the writer’s ability of catching the Zeitgeist. In recognition of her merits, she was given several literature and television awards including Emmy Award bestseller. Her talent is compared to that of J. Austen [4] and D. Parker [5].
We cannot deny good literary taste of the author of Sex and the City. In one of her interviewsshe, for example, recommends the public to read Buddenbrooksby Th. Mann, Barchester Towers by A. Trollope and The Widows of Eastwick by J. Updike [6]. In One Fifth Avenue we also can find some other names and works of literature which, as we believe, also reflect Bushnell’s tastes and preferences in this field (H. Melville, I. McEwan, J. Rowling, etc.). The readers are also given the chance to appreciate the implied irony of the author when, for example she tells us about Philip Oakland’s commercial scenario Bridesmaids Revisited [10:224] alluding to the famous novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) by the great British satirist Evelyn Waugh.
Bushnell is considered to have influenced and shaped two generations of women in the western world [7]. We can’t say the same about the modern Russian public. It happened once in the history of Russian literature when the sentimental novels by S. Richardson really influenced the tastes and the moral code of our public in the early XIX century [8]. That is why we cannot agree to the reviewer of the novel Trading Up who calls this Bushnell’s book asentimental story [9] because her plots speak about the merciless world of vain people and her women do not remind us of Richardson’s characters at all. In Bushnell’s books the question of sex is given a lot of place and attention whereas we, Russian, en masse still think of sex as something accessory which is not of first importance. At least we are not apt to speak much about it. Besides, our middle-class is not ready to accept all the values of the western type of society yet.
In the novel One Fifth Avenue the writer locates her main characters in the luxurious apartments of the famous district in Manhattan where it is really forbidden to make noise and even play any musical instruments after 8 p.m. According to the plot of the book the flats in the house are occupied by the richest, most ambitious, callous and envious people. Everyone pursues his/her own aim and most of them are ready for anything to gain it. The intrigue of the story is based on the struggle between the characters of the novel for the right to occupy one of the best apartments in that building after the death of its owner. Three generations of people are shaped in the novel and all of them are engaged in that rat race stealing, betraying, hatching plots. The action is unwinding very slowly and somewhere in the middle of the book, you feel that you are losing your interest in the plot and only to the end of it everything develops much faster.
The problem of the generation gap found its traditional reflection in the novel. We come across teenagers obsessed by the Internet and computer handling (Sam Gooch); the so called Y-generation is trying to pave the way by grabbing a piece of somebody’s luck (Lola, Thayer Core). We also find here the generation X-ers (40-50 years old) who are afraid of ageing and trying to delay this moment as much as they could (Philip Oakland, James Gooch, Diamond Shiffer, Billy Litchfield, etc.), and the generation of Baby-boomers – those who exceeded their allotted span (Mrs. Houghton, Flossie Davis).
Bushnell is known for a new approach to the question of sex and its role in the life of modern people, which found rather an extensive reflection in her novels. The book One Fifth Avenue is not an exclusion in this respect. An upper-middle-class exasperated feminist Mindy Gooch speaks of sex as something unnecessary, but her husband (as well as his counterpart and neighbor Philip Oakland) is preoccupied with his sexual relationship to a young girl.
On the one hand, the author as an essential token of the American contemporary life marks a cult of youth. Young people are not apt to respect the elder ones only for their former achievements. They are irritated by the fact that all the money and best jobs have been grabbed and shared by the baby-boomers. A 40-year old Diamond Schiffer is afraid of becoming one of those aged actresses who make plastic surgery and write autobiographies that nobody reads [10: 2]. We can suppose that young Lola would turn into Schiffer and the latter into a grumbling man-hater Mindy Gooch in 20 years. On the other hand, the author paints repulsive and grotesque pictures of the disabled and aged people who are sneered at by the young [10: 1]. However, the author has also fixed a change in peoples’ attitude to the problem of life expectancy: Billy Litchfield says that his mother is onlyeighty-three and he expects her to live another decade or so.
There are many author’s maxims in the book we got used to by her other novels. Here we find such aphorisms as “the ballet is the antidote to surfing the Web” [10:3] or about the funeral repast that it is only “another excuse for a party, where people could drink champagne, eat caviar and talk about their latest projects” [10:4].
The story bears the distinctive marks of American life and the time of action: Opra’s talk shows, Bushnell’s Sex and the City series, the celebrities of the period – Mick Jagger, Donald Tramp, Nicholas Sparks, Harvey Wiley Corbett and many others. However, for Russian readers some of these names should have been commented on in the footnotes, which are too short to our mind (only 21 points). By the way, the author of the book does not lose the chance of indirect advertising her popular series SATC (Sex and the City) mentioning it several times on the novel pages, as well as speaking about her implied ancestor David Bushnell, a submarine builder (10:78, 93, 94).
A new reality connected with the life of modern people is the computer, which has become an important instrument of their activity. The characters of the novel consider Internet the most remarkable sign of the contemporary life: having and keeping your own site becomes a new obligation, which is as natural an obligation as having children [10:73]. The author reminds us about a new tendency in this field – “the graying of the Internet” [10:28] which means that more and more aged (gray) people have been engaged in active using of the net. Just as in the J. Rowling’s social novel The Casual Vacancy, Internet plays a very important role in unfolding the One Fifth Avenue’s plot. Bushnell speaks about a lot of popular Internet blogs and sites in the book: The Huffington Post, Slate, The Green Thumb, Perez Hilton, Snarker, Peephole, Defamer, giving us the patterns of the Internet communication and messaging [10:184,191, 331,425, etc.], “the culture of the parasite” according to the words of James Gooch, one of the characters of the book [10:96].
This plot has exhausted to a certain extent the range of problems raised by Bushnell and the types of characters depicted in her novels. We believe the author could use her powers of observation watching some new characters, which she has not painted in her books yet, as the writer will not probably want to be criticized for losing topicality and the monotony of her plots.
References
1. The New-York Times book review. – URL: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ lipstick-jungle-candace-bushnell/ 1100012063?ean=9780786893966
2. C. Bushnell bio. – URL: http://www.amazon.com/Candace-Bushnell/e/
B000APL42S
3. ИА "Росбалт" сo ссылкойнаInopressa. Опубликовано: 13.09.2005, 11:58 – URL: http://www.owl.ru/content/openpages/p57304.shtml
4. The Guardian. – URL: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/microsite/about.aspx?authorid=33992
5. Freeman H. Rereading Sex and the City by C. Bushnell. – The Guardian, Friday 19 April 2013.
6. The Interview given by C. Bushnell. – URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWfxRNrHaM0
7. Summer & the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel. – URL: http://www.amazon.com /Candace- Bushnell/e/B000APL42S
8. Новосельцева Л.А. Д.Дефо в русских переводах и критике./NovoseltsevaL. D. Defoe in the Russian translations and critics (1762-1917)/. – Germany: Lambert Publishing House, 2014, p. 21-22.
9. БушнеллКэндес Все на продажу. – URL:http://knigi.ws/roman/8685-kendes-bushnell-vse-na-prodazhu.html 10. Bushnell C. One Fifth Avenue. – London: Abacus, 2009: 1) p. 117, 218. 2) p.38. 3) p.301; 4) p. 411.
