In a recent newspaper interview, Candace Bushnell, the creator of Sex and the City and the author of two subsequent novels, outlined her sense of herself as a “serious” novelist, whose books throw up deep philosophical questions about men and women. Lipstick Jungle is the story of three ambitious Manhattanites in their early forties, a movie mogul, a magazine publisher and a top fashion designer. All three are determined to achieve world domination, and will happily cut a few throats to get there, sacrificing their family and emotional lives en route. Throughout the novel they quaff Cristal champagne and consume buckets of Beluga caviar while hopping on and off private jets. This is all, stylistically and thematically, suggestive of a fabulous chick-lit bonkbuster. So can Bushnell really dig deeper?
Set in the droll, Vogue-flavoured world of “Parador” Pictures, “Glimmer” magazine and “Ratz Neste” publishing, the novel contains frequent, salivating descriptions of million-dollar diamonds, weekends in St Barts and billionaire mansions. The difference, of course, is that this is the “noughties” not the 1980s, and the women are spending money that they have earned themselves. Bushnell’s prose is hugely engaging, but it is difficult to feel any sympathy for this gruesome triumvirate. They behave exactly like powerful men, taking their less successful spouses for granted, neglecting their kids, cheating, scheming and stomping on their adversaries. This is, of course, the point but it does not make them enviable, likable or even particularly emblematic.
The novel questions the personal cost of all this. There is an emotional emptiness to many of the women’s achievements: when they win Oscars, or claw one rung further up the ladder, they feel flat or perhaps guilty about their behaviour, and they are torn between their floundering personal lives and their career demands. Yet they press on regardless, and ultimately the thrill of success, of beating men at their own game, turns out to be enough.
Bushnell’s “philosophical” questions, while fun, tend to feel as if they have been lifted from the pages of Glimmer magazine itself. Wendy, the film producer, has a husband at home and three young children. When her inevitable marital crisis comes, she seems likely to lose custody. Her outrage demonstrates our societal double standards: we tend to see divorcing at-home mothers as heroines who have devoted their best years to child-raising and deserve both the apartment and stiff alimony. Devoted at-home fathers, meanwhile, are weak layabouts who should get a job and stop sponging. This is a valid point, if not a terribly startling one.
At times these women’s interior worlds are genuinely alien. Indeed, some of their sentiments seem to have been pulled straight from a (grammatically shaky) Mary McCarthy novel. In college, Wendy “had decided that there were basically two types of women in the world: women for whom men went crazy, fell in love with, and eventually would marry and pay for; and women who, for whatever reason, didn’t inspire much ardour in men — at least not the kind of grand passions that would cause a man to ‘provide’ ”. Do Manhattan career women really think this way? If so, it is little wonder they feel so driven.
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Magazine-style questions such as “Why shouldn’t a powerful fortysomething female executive have extramarital sex with a youthful Calvin Klein model?” or “Why should a powerful female executive feel guilty for barely seeing her offspring while her male peers do not?” come thick and fast. They may not be particularly revelatory, but they are entertaining and a cut above the usual chick-lit offerings. This is, in short, a fabulously diverting novel; a kind of Sex and the City on steroids, every page of which screams “HBO screenplay”.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £6.64 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst