The Swans of Fifth Avenue

 

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin    368 pages

I read Melanie Benjamin’s prior novel, The Aviator’s Wife, and just LOVED it. I felt like I was on the wall of the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh home. I admit that I haven’t yet picked up her two previous novels, but they are on my TBR list. I was excited that Benjamin was finally coming out with a new novel.

This time she turns her pen on “New York’s ‘Swans’ of the 1950s—and the scandalous, headline-making, and enthralling friendship between literary legend Truman Capote and peerless socialite Babe Paley.” The ‘Swans’ are Babe’s friends: Slim Keith, C Z Guest, Gloria Guiness, and Pamela Churchill (yes a relation to Winston).

These women are five of New York’s most beautiful and wealthiest women. They have it all: high profile husbands, money, clothes, beauty, glamor, influential friends, jewels, and gorgeous homes. Babe’s drop-dead gorgeous face often appeared on cover of style magazines, mainly Vogue. But inside was a desperately lonely woman who only wanted to be loved.

Enter Truman Capote. He explodes onto the New York scene and is quickly taken under Babe’s wing. They form a tight, chaste relationship, in which each one depends on the other for emotional support.

When I first picked up Swans, I had to read to page 159 and gave up. There was, I thought, no real plot. Nothing happened and the same conversations happened over and over. I was bitterly disappointed.  I thought about my disillusionment often; then it hit me. That’s basically what these people were about---nothing. The only one who seemed to contribute to society was Capote.

So I picked Swans up again, started on page 150, and was soon immersed in their world. It was sad to watch Capote binge on drugs and booze and Babe succumb to cancer, but death was really the only way out of the lives they had created.

I give The Swans of Fifth Avenue 5 out of 5 stars.