September 21–28, 2000

books

Authors Galore

Candy bushy: Bushnell vamps it up.

An embarrassment of readings for the coming week.

Candace Bushnell

Candace Bushnell is something of a literary "it" girl at the moment. The former journalist has had her Sex in the City (once a column in The New York Observer) spun like so much cotton candy into an award-winning TV show created by Darren Star (Beverly Hills, 90210), and the Sex and the City book is currently on The New York Times’ bestseller list. But Bushnell has yet to reach the popularity of a Stephen King or the financial success of Jacqueline Susann, which will no doubt come in time. So she’s on the road promoting her new book, Four Blondes (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Four Blondes is an interesting work; four short works of fiction about highly glamorous New Yorkers in varied states of high-rent unhappiness. The pop-culture references fly fast and thick, but right underneath the glitzy lifestyles of her characters is pain. Bushnell calls her versions of flawed female characters "classic literary heroines," and cringes at comparisons to Tama Janowitz or other ’80s writers.

Bushnell vents from her hotel room in Boston. You can hear the air-quotes and italics in her voice: "I like Tama a great deal, but if anything, she’s following me. I see no comparisons whatever." If their writing seems similar, Bushnell says it’s because "[t]hings have not changed since the ’80s. New York is the big boom city; it’s still about money, it’s still about a big social whirl. [Critics] get [my work] mixed up with a genre of writers who wrote about urban life. Urban life hasn’t changed that much! Read The Great Gatsby — urban life hasn’t changed much since the ’30s! It’s a genre thing, not a decade thing."

Also earning ire from Bushnell are critics who haven’t done their homework: "Don’t these people read the classics? If anything, Janey (from Four Blondes) is like Lily Bart from The House of Mirth. [Reviews] are subjective, not objective. They are opinions. I read them and say, "whatever!" They’re for people to read them and have a good time, and get something out of it."

Bushnell’s glamorous life has to be put on hold for a bit; book tours can be a bitch. She laughs as she says, "I used to go to bed at 6! Now I have to get up at 6! And go to bed at 10!" There she goes, suffering for her art.

—Alex Richmond

Candace Bushnell will read Thurs., Sep. 22, 7:30 p.m. at Borders, 1727 Walnut St., (215) 568-7400

David Leavitt

Eighteen years ago, an unknown Yale undergraduate published the New Yorker’s first openly gay short story. This was in the midst of the Reagan era, when the magazine was not printing color photographs or author bios, and had a ban on the word "fuck." Monica was in elementary school and Tina Brown was on the other side of the pond.

A lot has changed since then at the venerable literary mag, and while he is no longer the young phenom, David Leavitt has continued to raise controversy wherever he goes. His 1993 novel, While England Sleeps, was pulled from stores when English poet Stephen Spender claimed its story too closely resembled his own life. In 1997, Leavitt returned to the public eye when an excerpt from Arkansas was yanked from Esquire magazine based on issues of "taste." (The story featured a character named David Leavitt, who wrote term papers in exchange for sex.)

This week Leavitt will tempt fate (and lawyers) by publishing, Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (Houghton Mifflin), a book that clearly mines the author’s experiences, but diverges from them in a crucial way. The novel tells the story of a young writer’s sentimental and literary education. Like Leavitt, Bauman publishes a controversial short story and departs school in a flurry of honors for New York, where he begins a meteoric rise in its publishing world. Only unlike Leavitt, who went his way alone, Bauman’s growth happens in the shadow of Stanley Flint, a brutally elusive former writing professor.

While he cites John Hersey as an influential teacher, Leavitt never had a mentor; this book, he says, "is really about the longing for one," a yearning Leavitt will confront as he begins his professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville. While some writers bristle at this imposition on their time, Leavitt warms to it: "I don’t think it will slow me down," he says, then leaps to music for an analogy, "Most musicians teach, they see it as a duty. That’s how I feel about writing. My view of my teaching is that I am passing on the craft." One wonders if he will also teach his students how to stay cool during controversy.

—John Freeman

David Leavitt will read Sat., Sep. 23, 7:30 p.m., at Giovanni’s Room, 12th and Pine, 215-923-2960.

Joe Klein

Anonymous no more: Joe Klein

"I never intended on writing any novels," Joe Klein says. "I always thought that a journalist writing a novel is the most dreadful sort of cliché, usually with pretty dreadful results."

Klein, of course, then conceived a little thing called Primary Colors, published it Anonymously in early ’96 and eventually became embroiled in controversy when, after numerous denials, he finally fessed up that summer.

But that was years ago. Klein quietly does solid work these days covering Washington for The New Yorker. And he’s got a second novel, The Running Mate (Dial Press), out and, sure enough, his name is on the dust jacket.

Running concerns one Senator Charlie Martin, a minor Primary character and a Vietnam vet, whose life is thrown into turmoil when he drops out of the Presidential primary. Martin is no mere John McCain stand-in (for one, he’s a Democrat), rather the character is inspired, Klein says, by all six Vietnam vets in the Senate.

"What these guys bring to American politics is a kind of sense of distance and irreverence. So many people — especially my age, baby boomers — confuse politics with war. These guys have actually been to war and they know that politics is the exact opposite of war."

For Klein, the difference between political fiction and political journalism is "in fiction, you can get to emotional places that you just can’t get to in journalism. People speculate all the time about Bill Clinton’s marriage. But nobody knows anything about it. You know as much about it as I do. I know a hell of a lot about Jack Stanton and Susan Stanton’s [the Clinton-esque couple of Primary Colors] marriage, though. Because I invented it. And to my mind, at this point, the real value of political fiction — not only now but in the past as well — is…to provide an emotional truth."

—Michael Pelusi

Joe Klein will speak Sun., Sept. 24, noon, Gershman Y, Broad and Pine Sts.