I've never liked Sex and the City because I've always believed the hype. These exquisitely put-together women with their brunches and their snobbery and their designer labels and their shoes, their endless bloody shoes; I assumed they were presented as role models for modern women, liberated to shop, fuck and talk incessantly about shopping and fucking. Don't get me wrong, I'm really quite interested in shoes and fucking, but not enough to feel anything other than contempt for women who seem to have nothing better to do with their lives but to construct a lifestyle around them.

And that should have been that. Unfortunately I'm compulsively drawn to things I think I dislike and thus began my obsession with Sex and the City. The book and the TV show are, by necessity, very different entities, the former being a, consciously or otherwise, depressing and distancing text, and the latter being -- well -- enjoyable and, for the most part, crowd-pleasing.

Roughly adapted from a series of newspaper columns, the book consists of short chapters linked by common themes and occasionally recurring characters. For anyone used to the warmth and vibrancy of the television show, the difference is really quite shocking. There are characters (there are even characters called Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and Carrie but they are barely recognisable, Charlotte, for example, is a sex-crazed English journalist who quickly abandons her English naivety for New York cynicism) but they are little more than sketches, identified primarily by some high flying aspect of their profession (a broker who made two million on bonds last year, a litigator who takes steam baths with Ronald Perelman, an editor at a hip political magazine, and so on) with the result that the reader is bombarded by a succession of essentially interchangeable, instantly forgettable somebodies. This does not, to my provincial senses at least, suggest a glamorous and sparkling world; it suggests the materialistic identity-devoid, surface-obsessed nightmare of Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho.

From the very beginning of the novel the scene is set, not for light comedy or the meaningless froth for which chicklit is semi-justifiably notorious, but for a glittering surface that imperfectly conceals the emptiness, bitterness and disappointment beneath (or, if you are feeling uncharitable, for a cold shallow bitch whining about how shit her cold, shallow lifestyle is):

The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton's bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing -- but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember -- instead, we have breakfast at 7 AM and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How did we get into this mess?

The books are full of supposedly intelligent, beautiful, successful, liberated and powerful women who are as preoccupied with wealth and marriage as any 18th century debutante. And nobody is happy. "I don't feel anything after I have sex," muses Magda, one of the interchangeables, "Oh sure, I'd like to, but what's the point?" "I have no alternatives," screams Skipper, another, (a man this time), "I wouldn't be in shallow relationships, so I do nothing. I have no sex and no romance." The book is a catalogue of failure, the failure of love, the failure of happiness, the failure of sincerity, the failure of romance, the failure of sexual liberation.

Samantha Jones, in the book a forty-ish movie producer, is introduced as a New York inspiration because, of the two choices Bushnell claims are available to a successful single woman, "You can beat your head against the wall trying to find a relationship, or you can say 'screw it' and just go out and have sex like a man," Samantha has perfected the latter. But, despite the narrator's insistence that "we were hard and proud of it" this is not equality, it is merely imitation. And it does not work, as demonstrated by the perpetual and inescapable unhappiness of the characters. Furthermore, the ability to have sex, not like a man but like an animal, comes at a cost, and the cost is the amputation of the aspirations and ideals that make us human. And, for that matter, for this reader, sympathetic as characters or as people.

A lot of the humour (if you happen to find it funny) of the novel springs from the inversion of traditional sexual roles. The women reject romance and pursue sex with the reductive disinterest that is usually the providence of men: "They begin wanting you to treat them as people instead of sex toys," observes Charlotte, referring to her latest lover who has recently stopped calling because "he wanted to read me his poetry and I wouldn't let him." The incongruity of denied expectation is amusing, but the behaviour and the sentiment are chilling. Not only does this sort of behaviour demean and emasculate men, it also prevents the women from engaging in relationships with men, or each other, in any meaningful way:

[Carrie] wanted to take the pictures [of Mr Big] and glue them to a piece of construction paper and write "Portrait of Mr Big with a Cigar" across the top and then, "I miss you," with lots of kisses at the bottom. She stared at the pictures for a long time. And then she did nothing.

Whereas in the series the women were able to take refuge from the failure of romance and the cruelty of men in the guaranteed warmth and support of each other the book offers no such refuge. Although the women talk and talk, there is no sign of affection or friendship between them (Samantha is described as being "Carrie's best friend. Sometimes.") and, often, they are presented as being either as threatening as men or extraneous to the primary female pursuit of acquiring men:

"She doesn't like herself for wishing Sam would leave but sometimes when you're with a man that's the way it is.

One of the most startling and vivid passages in the book occurs when a newly empowered Carrie walks down the street behind a woman in a white shirt and:

Suddenly Carrie feels like a shark smelling blood. She fantasizes about killing the woman and eating her. It's terrifying how much she's enjoying the fantasy.

For a book of such (deliberately?) bland and understated narration, the detail in this half page of text is absolutely extraordinary, and the senses of alienation and hostility are palpable. "Carrie envisions tearing into the woman's soft, white flesh with her teeth." Hello Patricia Bateman. I have no idea what the author intended with this passage but it seems to be suggested that when women turns predator the victims are not men but women and, by extension, themselves.

In No Satisfaction: Sex and the City, Run Catch Kiss and the Conflict of Desires in Chick Lit's New Heroines (and why the hell can't they give them shorter titles), Ann Kiernan says that, although they have lost humanity, the women have acquired (sexual) power. Ironically, whether they have it or not, they don't even want it:

After he left for work, she began crying uncontrollably. The maid came in and looked horrified. At eleven AM, Carrie called his office. "I want to go to an insane asylum." She wanted to put herself in someone else-s hands. She wanted no responsibility. She wanted to lie in a white room and watch TV, and maybe make pot holders.

The novel ends on something like an optimistic note. Mr Big is happily married. Carrie is happily single. But at the end of such book, it is impossible not to conclude that Carrie is like Manhattan, still glowing but ultimately empty.