Cornelia Guest features in racy novel from Crazy Rich Asians author about New York socialites

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A love story about an engaged, precious, young socialite from a wealthy, New York family who reunites with a righteous eco-warrior she met years earlier at a glamorous wedding on the Italian island of Capri is set to be the novel of the summer.

Sex and Vanity, the latest offering from Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan, has already won rave reviews, with the Atlantic branding it ‘The Shakespeare of Status Anxiety’ and Town and Country calling it ‘a razor-sharp take on the one percent’.

It tells the tale of the very glamorous life of Manhattan’s elite, and even features the real-life socialite Cornelia Guest as a character – the goddaughter of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, an old friend of Kwan.

In the novel’s racy scenes, the main character Lucie role plays as a British aristocrat and a Russian Princess with her fiancé Cecil, who tells her to ‘check out his royal scepter’ during sex. 

Speaking to Tatler, Kwan said the novel is inspired by his own entry into ‘the real Gossip Girl world’ which included ‘running with Park Avenue Princesses’ who flit between ‘six parties at night, heading uptown, downtown, staying out until dawn and appearing in the tabloids the next morning’.

Guest, a former debutante who was childhood friends with Truman Capote and ‘BFFs with Andy Warhol’ has become an animal rights activist in recent years.

Her real-life passion is reflected in the fiction, which includes a scene at a glitzy gala to raise funds for an animal shelter gala, where the socialite’s pet dogs eat all the canapés for the high society guests.

‘Cornelia is someone who really epitomises the Park Avenue princess, she was cool enough that she spent most of her time downtown, partying with Andy Warhol at Studio 54. She straddled both worlds. And in a strange way, I did that too,’ Kwan added to Tatler. 

Many have drawn comparisons from the racy novel to the Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl books which became a huge Noughties TV hit. 

Excited readers have already given the novel, released last week, rave reviews on Goodreads, calling it a ‘read in one sitting’ kind of book and ‘the perfect summer read’.

Others compared it to E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View and called it a fun romp.

‘The Crazy Rich Asians trilogy will always be my must-read classics. So happy to finally have my hands on Kevin Kwan’s new book SEX AND VANITY. I’m ready!!!’ wrote one.

‘Stayed up half the night reading Kevin Kwan’s “Sex and Vanity” and all I can say is that it’s different from “Crazy Rich Asians” and more thought-provoking,’ another penned.

‘Ordered the eBook as soon as I heard about this — it was a ‘read in one sitting’ kind of book, and I loved everything about it. The perfect summer read,’ commented a third.

Kwan has described the book as ‘a love letter to New York’ and it follows his smash hit trilogy Crazy Rich Asians, which was adapted into a hit film which grossed $283 million (£225 million) in 2018.

Like Gossip Girl, Sex and Vanity is set in the Big Apple and explores the very glamorous and often scandalous lives of wealthy socialites – including the rapacious nouveau riche –  and their interactions with high and mighty old money families, Waspy Upper East siders, and dynasties of Asian American Wall Street families.    

It focuses on the tale of Lucie Tang Churchill, a biracial New Yorker whose mother is of Chinese descent and has ‘Wall Street money,’ while her father ‘came over on the Mayflower’ and has generational wealth.

Lucie lives a life of mega yacht parties wearing Valentino bikinis and eating lobster ravioli.

The novel opens with the nuptials of a Tatler-cover girl and Taiwanese heiress to an Italian count on the idyllic island of Capri.

‘Incredibly beautiful’ 19-year-old Lucie has a holiday romance with a mysterious wedding guest, George Zao – a ‘self-righteous Mama’s boy’ and ‘eco-warrior’ from Hong Kong.

She considers him ‘a brooding weirdo that takes himself much too seriously’, but a spark quickly develops between the diametrically opposed pair, with Lucie describing him as a ‘godlike Apollo’.

In one scene, she describes submitting to George in a ‘way she never had before’ and ‘letting herself get lost in a pleasure so intense she thought she was going to pass out’.

One passage from the book reads: ‘Lucie didn’t want it to ever stop, and as his fingers and lips found her breasts and tortured her so exquisitely, she found herself pushing his head down, down, down, until her diaphanous skirt pooled around his head and she could feel his stubble graze her inner thigh, his searing tongue on her skin, hearing him murmur, “Are you sure it’s okay?”.’

However, unsure what her parents will think of the Hong Kong surfer boy, Lucie flees the  island and returns to the comfort of the Upper East Side. 

The reader next meets Lucie five years later, where she’s engaged to a ludicrous, Instagram-obsessed billionaire millennial (referred to as a ‘billennial’) called Cecil. 

Cecil is described as ‘Armie Hammer handsome’, and one of the most desirable bachelor’s on the planet. He gives Lucie a ring ‘the size of a rhino’s testicle’.  

Kwan based ‘ghastly’ Cecil on an amalgam of friends he knew in New York, but says the character provokes sympathy as the amount of money they’re born into creates a toxic lifestyle.  

‘[Lucie’s] life, her image, her whole being up till this point, had been a study in perfection,’ Kwan tells the reader.

‘She had gone to Brearley [an all-girls private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan] and had always been popular as Lucie Tang Churchill, the cool half-Asian girl. She had graduated from Brown with honors. 

‘She had landed her dream job with the coolest company in town, and she was about to marry a dashing, erudite gentleman whom even Esquire proclaimed “The Most Desired Dude on the Planet.” 

‘They would live in an exquisitely original town house in the West Village, summer in East Hampton, and maybe even get a place in Provence.’

But when Lucie comes across George again in a yoga class, she’s reminded of her old feelings – and notions of old-fashioned propriety are set against a whirlwind of trendy restaurants, ultra-fashionable clothes, high-tech drones and cocaine-fuelled parties. 

Her conflict continues throughout the novel, with Kwan also exploring her complicated emotions about being biracial. 

Her mother was born in Seattle, but she often gets asked ‘where are you from’, she resents her brother for looking more Caucasian than her, and George’s Asian background is the reason she doesn’t immediately fall for him – despite electric, exciting sex scenes. 

Kwan also pokes fun at the one per cent in the novel. Every time a new character is introduced, he gives their full educational history in brackets, starting at pre-school, such as ‘I’m Renee Pike (Saint Cecilia / Port Neches Middle School / Central Senior High / UT / Harvard Business School).’

While he admits he’s poking fun of it, Kwan added to Town and Country it was inspired by real life as it’s ‘the most New York thing’. 

‘You go to any cocktail party, and people name drop their schools within the first five minutes. It’s a way of connection, but it’s a portrait of a person in five words.’

The novel is the first in a trilogy, with the second set to explore London’s upper class and the third will take the protagonists to Paris. 

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