Perhaps not. A cursory flick through the novel reveals the usual predictable and popular Manhattan proclivities: name-dropping, name-calling, fashion and fornication, with a generous side-serving of finest champagne and caviar.
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| Sex and the City became a huge success and trend setter |
And so let’s meet our heroines: Victory is a high-flying, avant-garde fashion designer (well, what else?), Nico is the glossy, bossy chief editor of Bonfire magazine, and the comparatively blandly named Wendy is the President of Parador Pictures. All three women are – as you would expect from a novel of this ilk – wealthy, successful, undoubtedly glamorous and confident, and at the “top of their game” (for it is, after all, a game)…. But are they happy? Victory has never been married (the horror of it!), and the other two are deeply dissatisfied with the husbands they somehow managed to ensnare in between lunching and business meetings. One of the underlying messages here seems to be that if you play a man’s game, in a man’s world, you can still win even if you are a woman. What does this entail? Making big bucks as well as making babies. And excelling at both. But Wendy’s pampered daughter’s first word was “money”, not “Mommy”. And her poor neglected husband wants a divorce, pronto. Nico has also been married for some years but boredom is setting in like rigor mortis and she finds herself helplessly drawn to a prescriptively Adonis-like underwear model.
As expected from Bushnell, it’s an unapologetically materialistic and clichéd read; possibly something the British audience might find exaggerated, contrived, patronising and hard to relate to. But it is written with the same candour and barbed wit that has already made Candace Bushnell so popular with her growing army of fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The characters are not sympathetic and they are entirely one-dimensional, but let’s be honest, nobody who picks this book up will expect, or want, a profound and probing discourse on Real Life as a Modern American Woman. They just want a bit of fun, frivolity and fantasy, and why not?
So, by virtue of its paper-thin characters and glittery, transparent plot, this is destined to be a hit. Read it all before? Seen it all before? Yes, but even if you don’t read the book, chances are you will probably be tuning in for the TV show.
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