One Fifth Avenue.

Every society has its critics, and the modern equivalent to Jane Austen or E.M. Forster may well be Candace Bushnell for her saturation of society with Sex and the City. Like those writers before her, Bushnell examines high society not for voyeuristic interest but to make a point about the universality of emotion.

Not only does her new book One Fifth Avenue actually feature some well-developed male characters, important for readers like me, but it manages to aim meaningful and insightful criticism at the Manhattan elite.

The title of the book is also the center of its action. The characters all have some connection to one Soho apartment building, the epicenter of Manhattan’s chic. The conceit allows Bushnell to focus on the landed nature of wealthy society. Living there is of supreme importance, and more than one character claims that she would be nothing if she moved out of Manhattan or even One Fifth. But location isn’t everything, and Bushnell devotes all her considerable satirical powers to casting off the veils of wealth and prestige in order to examine the upper class with a critical eye. One Fifth Avenue will certainly please old fans with lines like, “Perhaps too much money was like too much sex. It crossed the line and became pornographic.” This ability to produce catchy but meaningful quips about modern life is Bushnell’s forte and still serves her well.

Comparisons to her masterpiece Sex and the City may seem inevitable, but shouldn’t be. New York is ten years older and much less innocent; all that remains is Bushnell’s character-based storytelling approach. For me, Carrie’s book deals and Samantha’s flings were completely tangential to the show’s focus, the four protagonists. The same is true of this book: the story is quite thin. (A new family moves into a 3-floor apartment at One Fifth; everyone else tries variously to find meaning and make money.) But the characters are marvelously detailed. Most of them are past 40, married, and already millionaires, leaving them to make something of their lives amid careers that slow and are revived. Their existential crises are believable and moving, not comically overwrought. Clearly Bushnell has done her “research,” especially as this is her society: she is the established author character whose vanity and fame she mocks. Authors are better represented here than actors or bankers, another sign that the composition of Manhattan’s elite is changing: “books are like movies now,” as one character opines, and often the wealthiest have earned rather than inherited their money, leaving them smarter, more practical, and more cynical.

For all this, the book’s one shortcoming is its lack of creativity in the story. The actors, while laudably complex, are still predictable in their actions, in their hookups, their desires and flaws. Like Carrie’s formulaic columns, this book isn’t quite creative, at least not in the artistic sense; but insightful, worth reading for its incisive commentary which sweeps past the glitter and fashion to find the substance, or lack of it, underneath. -Jonathan Giuffrida