While I was on vacation last week, I got a big kick out of reading “Queen Takes King” (Simon &Schuster), the new novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer.
The book was lumped rather patronizingly into a “chick lit” review column in the Times a few weeks ago, but it is a hard-edged social satire about the power struggle between a super-wealthy, Trump-like real estate developer and his wife, after he has one affair too many and she decides to end the marriage.
“Queen Takes King” is cynical and a bit mean-spirited, but the tone seems to suit the setting and the major players.
Grazer sees the humor in rich old men who really do believe they might live forever — just because they have so much money and influence — and she sees what hard and dangerous work it is to be a woman in this Manhattan shark tank.
Grazer is the ex-wife of movie producer Brian Grazer — the longtime filmmaking partner of director Ron Howard.
“Queen Takes King” could be the best insider novel about clout and romance in the Big Apple since the late great Jay Presson Allen’s “Just Tell Me What You Want” (the brilliant 1978 book that became an equally entertaining — but virtually unknown — Sidney Lumet film two years later).
The scope of Grazer’s novel is broad enough to include the in-fighting on the board of a major ballet company. The author amusingly squishes American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet into her fictional “New York Ballet Theatre.”
Cynthia Power — the soon-to-be ex-wife of Jackson Power — started her New York life as a ballerina but has risen into a major role on the board of directors thanks as much to her own smarts as her philandering husband’s dough.
Cynthia has to go toe to toe with the company’s artistic director to keep rising and she realizes he is a formidable enemy: “…he was canny. He’d survived several board regimes by making himself just useful enough, and just dangerous enough. He knew where the bodies were buried and he could dig them up: overdoses, affairs, bribes, eating disorders, AIDS, theft, alcoholism, kinky sex, extortion. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans at the NYBT would make the Desperate Housewives blush.”
Grazer knows where the bodies are buried, too, and she makes high comedy out of digging them up.
