IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

British reviewers jumped into the fray with abandon. It was irresistible: a new book by the creator and definer of that 1990s phenomenon

Sex in the City, Candace Bushnell. The book cover is even adorned with the author herself: now 60 but still foxy enough to get away with a tiny hemline and vertiginous heels. Like her original gang of girls bonding over brunch, Bushnell’s new book draws on both fiction and autobiography: to whit a woman very like Bushnell, in her fifties, adrift in the modern dating scene, against the backdrop of Manhattan and the Hamptons.

Viv Groskop in the Observer encouraged readers to set aside their prejudices: ‘It’s bittersweet, amusing and well observed. It starts out being about sex and dating but really it’s about disappointment, regret and self-acceptance.’ And in the New

Yorker Katy Waldman too enjoyed this tales of weathering life’s storms: ‘The book captures the buoyancy of the writer’s brand, but it also has a weather-beaten, mellow quality.’

But in the Sunday Times, Jackie Annesley just couldn’t engage with the characters and found the prose distinctly lacking: ‘Bushnell makes some interesting observations about ageing and being childless, but her narrative always manages to fall short of being witty and droll. Witness one of her more bewildering analogies: “Thoughts are like little feet. They start making a path that then becomes a trough of self-doubt and despair.” Dorothy Parker she is not.’ And in the Spectator, Julie Burchill thought it ‘a vale of tears rather than a source of fun’. Burchill stuck on in there but ‘as this book shambled to its end, I found myself very happy indeed’.