Wages of sin

For the most part, Bushnell's ideas about the world reduce to the depressing but generally valid principle that everyone is for sale. (Oh, some heroes and ideologues and mulish types aren't, but the Bushnell worldview describes most of those one meets.) Perhaps because of Bushnell's relative artlessness, these ideas loom larger. In Bushnell's world, precious little happens because someone is looking for a human connection, enlightenment or to get perspective on her life, or even because she wants to see a new place or have a new aesthetic experience. The characters in "4 Blondes" don't have interests. They aren't eager to see the latest art show or opera, ski or play tennis, visit Borneo or Alaska. They only have goals: furthering their careers, marrying well, having a large house in a prestigious location, rising in society.

The inner lives we enter are one-dimensional -- human souls as imagined by someone from another galaxy who doesn't have a soul of his own. Or is this our galaxy, after a century that has greatly eroded the popularity of the soul? It's unclear whether Bushnell is merely writing down what she hears as she makes her way through a particular social universe, or whether she is making a conscious decision to show us ourselves in all our one-dimensionality.

Like "Blade Runner," but I fear more inadvertently, "4 Blondes" raises the question of what it means to be human. The extent to which we find Bushnell's characters human is the extent to which they fail to be purely rational economic actors. They have some vulnerability, if only that which springs from their inability to make the right moves all the time. Janey, for example, thinks that one mogul she's sleeping with is "expanding her sexual horizons" by only engaging in anal sex with her, until she hears from someone else that refusing to have "regular sex" is his preferred method of avoiding inconvenient entanglements, such as paternity suits.

I've always found that the most surprising aspect of life is how bad most people, even mercenary people, are at actualizing their self-interest. Most everyone is for sale, but most get a bad bargain for themselves. It takes Janey years to finally figure out that it's a better deal to rent her own small beach house than to put up with the men to whom she has sold her company in the past. And Princess Cecelia of "Platinum" has sold herself for a title and a fortune, but she appears to be going mad.

Such compassion as exists in Bushnell's world is mainly for those who bargain poorly. Though her subject matter is girly, the terms of engagement are as harsh as those of Wall Street. Bushnell says she writes about society, but she really writes about money. As if the two were different. The basic question raised by "4 Blondes" may really be, "Are all people whores?" Theodor Adorno perhaps deserves the last word: "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

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