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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
If I had a daughter (the kind who wouldn't punch me in the face) I wouldn't want her taking Candace Bushnell characters as role models. The women of "Lipstick Jungle" are much smarter and more appealing than the women of "Four Blondes" -- they love their work and not only the rewards of it -- but they are still too one-dimensional. They're the kind of girls who don't have interests, only goals.
But better them than the hapless, passive heroines of more skilled writers like Ann Beattie, Tama Janowitz and Melissa Bank, characters who depend on men not only for their emotional well-being but for their jobs and their rent. "It's so easy to solve your problems when you're a successful woman and you have your own money," Wendy tells Nico near the end of the book, and she's right, at least about many of the problems female characters face in chick lit. And I was ready to forgive Bushnell her tin ear when she has Victory Ford pick up the $1,000 check for her first date with Lyne at Cipriani, just to show him that she's not interested in him for his money. It might be the first time I've read such a scene in a novel: I only wish it would happen more in real life. And I liked it even better when Lyne responds to Victory's accusation that "the person who has the most money in the relationship has the control," with, "That may be, but if they're a decent person, they never let the other person know."
A few pages later maturity rears its head again: Wendy and Selden -- whose workplace rivalry has been gradually softening into friendship, at Selden's initiative -- run into each other at the Mercer Hotel at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. She admits that she's had to move out of her loft due to her divorce, and he makes a startling admission. His second marriage, to a supermodel (Janey from "Four Blondes"), failed because "I let my ego overrule my common sense." Wendy wonders if Selden is "really that decent." There's that word "decent" again -- could Bushnell be mellowing in her middle age? (And would any man ever admit that his ego had overruled his common sense?)
[Note: If you don't want to know how things turn out for the characters in "Lipstick Jungle," stop reading now.]
By the end of "Lipstick Jungle," decency and maturity are epidemic. (A lucky thing too, because after almost 400 pages the reader will have tired of Bushnell's leaden, clumsy prose and malapropisms. "Four Blondes" had a certain brisk facility, but the editing here is much worse.) Nico has decided that the fact that "she and Seymour really, really liked each other and always had" is "a lot more important than lust." She lets Kirby down gently, with a $5,000 check that breaks a bigger taboo than Victory's picking up the tab at Cipriani. Wendy goes through an amicable divorce and Selden is about to move in with her. She resolves to treat Shane well, after hearing him explode that "when a woman gives up her career to take care of her kids, she's a hero, and when a man does it, all you women think there's something wrong with him." "She was so much more powerful than he was ... She must be benign." And Victory is finally able to be vulnerable after the biggest, and self-administered, setback of her business career. She and Lyne Bennett go off shopping into the sunset together.
At the novel's close, Bushnell's clever but diagrammatic gender role reversals have finally brought her and her characters to a plane of real feeling and humanity never glimpsed in her earlier writing, a place beyond the power dynamics of S/M and gold digging alike. Somehow her three women have moved past the dilemma posed by Wendy early in the book, when she contemplates the myth she purveys in her romantic films:
"The rules were rigid: a high-status man falls in love with a lower-status, but worthy and deserving, woman. Fifty years of feminism and education and success had done little to eradicate the power of this myth, and there were times when the fact that she was selling this bullshit to women made Wendy feel uneasy. But what choice did she have? ... How many women would eagerly sign up for the opposite: high status woman ... falls in love with lower-status male ... and ends up taking care of him?"
Bushnell is an intuitive rather than an analytical writer, and it isn't clear how she thinks the issue can be resolved, how powerful women can find beta males sexy. The mood of the ending is better than the circumstances might suggest: Nico gives up on eroticism for companionship, and Wendy finds a nicer and less superficial version of Shane in Selden. In the closing scenes, Wendy has announced that she's pregnant with Selden's baby, and Nico hopes that Selden will continue working even after the child is born, "at least for a little while. Imagine having to support two men and four children!" The only duo where the sex seems hot is the most conventional partnership, tall, rich Lyne and madcap Victory.
But you don't pick up a Candace Bushnell novel for the logic. What Bushnell does so well is to get just the slightest bit ahead of the curve. Just as her "Sex and the City" girls are more common now than they were in the days of her New York Observer columns, so the coarse, energetic woman tycoons of "Lipstick Jungle" might be signposts for the years ahead. I'd welcome the change. And men who date ambitious women might have to resign themselves to a more strenuous sex life -- or at least to clothes that "scream casual power."
