Author and columnist Candace Bushnell. The author of Sex and the City has just released her fourth book, One Fifth Avenue. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

The press tour for Candace Bushnell’s new novel, One Fifth Avenue, a tour that swung through Toronto in mid-October, appears to be sponsored by the colour pink. At the reception desk of Toronto’s swanky Park Hyatt Hotel, I was directed to The Pink Suite, where I was offered a fuchsia-coloured bottle of Glacéau Vitamin Water.

It all turned out to be a promotion for breast cancer awareness, but considering that Bushnell writes the kind of books that sport rose-hued covers featuring martini glasses and stiletto-shaped swizzle sticks, the colour scheme was fitting. She is, after all, the best-selling author whose 1990s newspaper column “Sex and the City” inspired the hit HBO series and film, and who introduced “toxic bachelor” and “Manolos” to the popular lexicon. Consider her chick-lit’s eminence cerise.

Bushnell’s latest novel is set in a real New York landmark, an exclusive art deco co-op populated by (fictional) feuding tenants — the establishment old guard squares off against arriviste hedge-funders. Around this rarefied circle sniffs a group of wannabes: a sleazy writer for a Gawker-style site, an aspiring celebutante and a gay confidante to society ladies. Fuelling their mutual backbiting is barely suppressed anxiety about the health of their bank accounts and their status in the gossip blogs.

Bushnell’s writing has long been a barometer of the zeitgeist — she has often called her work “social anthropology.” But the release of One Fifth Avenue seems particularly prescient. She began writing it in the early days of the subprime mortgage crisis, and it was released just as the U.S. government was publicizing details of a $700-billion US financial bailout package.

The book, Bushnell says, is a snapshot of life the moment before the U.S. economy collapsed. “Living in New York, you really see the vast disparity between the super-rich, the regular people and the poor. Even for the super-rich, there is anxiety about money. Apartments are expensive, art is expensive, real estate in the Hamptons is expensive. For the past few years I’ve been thinking, This is out of control. How far can people go?

“But people have been living beyond their means for a long time. We think it began with credit cards, but it isn’t new at all. In [the novel] Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp borrows money to advance herself in society, and of course it all falls apart. The pursuit of status through material goods is part of human nature.”

Yes, that’s a reference to William Thackeray — an influence that will only surprise those who haven’t read Bushnell. In person, she may look like one of her characters: A refreshingly un-Botoxed 49, she is honey-blond, ballerina slim and chicly dressed. But she considers herself an outsider to the world she chronicles. Though occasionally sluggish to read and reliant on clichés, her books have more in common with Jane Austen and Edith Wharton than with glossy potboilers like Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada and Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes.

One Fifth Avenue is flush with designer labels, soap opera names (Schiffer Diamond? Comstock Dibble? really?) and in-jokes (one character’s role model is Carrie Bradshaw). But strip all that away and it’s clear how well Bushnell understands the yearning that underscores modern life.

(Harper Collins Canada)

“Everyone longs for things: to be significant, to have recognition. That longing for something that will bring us happiness is one of our existential battles as humans,” Bushnell says. “ ‘Is that handbag going to make me feel better? Is that person going to make me feel better? Will having kids make me feel better?’ It’s an absolute cliché, but happiness never truly comes from outside sources. That’s what my characters all seem to struggle with.”

On the small screen, Sex and the City was a cutely accessorized celebration of female empowerment and friendship. But Bushnell’s original columns were bleak, almost caustic, ruminations on life in pre-9/11 New York. Even the sex was more calculating than erotic. The real lust is for power and its trappings: prime real estate, haute couture and stock options. The original Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha weren’t even friends but passing acquaintances on an alienating circuit of bed-hopping and social striving. One reviewer compared Sex and the City to the satire of Fran Lebowitz. Another likened Bushnell’s style to “the detached grace of an early [Joan] Didion.”

Bushnell’s heroines may flaunt their assets in Herve Leger bandage dresses and preside over boardrooms (in the case of Lipstick Jungle, another Bushnell novel turned TV series), but they haven’t come such a long way from Lily Bart and Elizabeth Bennett. Their social advancement still depends upon their beauty, their feminine wiles and the net worth of their husbands.

“In the society we live in,” Bushnell says, “women are told that beauty will buy you happiness. But for all women, it’s important to try to achieve something. Because we’ve all seen women who were very beautiful when they were young and never bothered to learn anything or achieve anything. As you get older and you lose the currency of your looks, you need skills and personality.”

At the time we spoke, a few weeks before the U.S. presidential election, I suspected that Bushnell, a keen spectator of the intersections of sexuality and power, would have something to say on the subject of Sarah Palin, that ruthless, eye-winking, pro-life, moose-killing, sucker-punching, God-fearing ball of post-feminist contradictions. But when I asked for her thoughts on the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Bushnell demurred. Surely, whatever her political beliefs, Bushnell must find Palin a fascinating figure. When I pressed her, Bushnell said, primly, “I have to stay away from political questions. I’m on a book tour for One Fifth Avenue, and I don’t want to stray far from that.”

Fair enough: An impending recession is no time to alienate (conservative) readers. Bushnell’s eye to the bottom line brings to mind another one of her literary forebears, Jacqueline Susann, the author of Valley of the Dolls and Once Is Not Enough. Like Bushnell, Susann neutralized her gritty exposés of the cost of fame and money with juicy sex scenes, bitchy dialogue and breathless descriptions of clothes. (Not for nothing was this genre referred to as “the shopping and f---ing novel.”) Bushnell, like the late Susann, is not a temperamental artist; rather, she’s a worker-bee writer, energetically promoting her books, cheerfully signing copies for fans and giving her readers exactly what they want. Bushnell has just inked a deal to write a two-book series for young adults about Carrie Bradshaw’s high school years.

In One Fifth Avenue, Bushnell has a little joke (I presume) at her own expense. A struggling male writer with literary pretensions finally hits it big when a slick entertainment magnate decides to package his arty novel as a Da Vinci Code-style airplane read. The price of success is admitting to himself that he’ll never be the next Don DeLillo. Does Bushnell ever wish her work was taken more seriously by critics?

“I do what I do. I think it’s commercial, but with some literary elements. I don’t think I’m Edith Wharton. She’s a far superior writer to me, but she’s far superior to most writers. I feel like I have a voice that’s my own.”

One Fifth Avenue is in stores now.

Rachel Giese is a writer based in Toronto.