Sex and the City, The Book

Today I finished reading Candace Bushnell's book, Sex and the City. I loved the HBO series, so I wanted to check out the novel. The book was published in 1996, so when I read it I tried to remember what was going on and what the general atmosphere was at the time.

A couple years ago my Shakespeare professor told a story about a young, untenured professor. He was at a conference and was asked to give a short summary of his presentation for the next day so that others at the conference could decide which talks they wanted to attend. Since he was nervous, he misspoke and reversed the order saying his talk would be on how a contemporary writer (I forget which one) influenced Shakespeare. Other professors whose work he admired repeated back, "How interesting. I wouldn't have thought about things affecting each other in non-chronological order. But modern contemporary writers do shape how we read Shakespeare today." Now the young professor had to scramble to figure out how he was going to change his talk and what he was going to say!

Anyway, even though SATC wasn't influenced by other literature that has since been published, it was interesting to me how it was influenced by recent events. In the mid-nineties the stock market was rising and would hit 10,000, a few years later. Financial growth from the dotcoms and Clinton balancing the budget with a surplus. And now we have the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Bankers in England are told to go to work in jeans so they don't look like bankers and—subsequently—get killed. The point is that as much as I love SATC, it was a strange feeling reading the book because every other character was described as an attractive thirty or fortysomething investment banker. Seriously, half of the characters were investment bankers! I wish I had read the book in 1996 so I could see what would have jumped out at me; perhaps the social rituals or the glamour of NYC would have been at the top of the list. Perhaps I would have wanted to live vicariously through the characters, pretending I too was wearing a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Even so, I'm sure I would have found the materialism egregious back then; but I think the unselfconscious references to jobs in finance have made the book into an artifact of a time before the recession. I suppose I could re-read it in another thirteen years and see what I think.