Mirabile Dictu

I have a confession to make: Anna Wintour is my new hero. The woman is a saint.

Well, okay, probably not. But I came away from The Devil Wears Prada firm in the belief that if I had to deal with a bitchy, self-righteous, humorless twentysomething assistant who rolled her eyes and made faces when she thought I wasn’t looking and couldn’t even get my latte to me while it was still hot, I surely would not let her hang around for eleven months before inviting her to watch the backswing on that door on her way to the unemployment line.

The book is supposed to be Lauren Weisberger’s “thinly-disgused tell-all” about interning for Wintour at Vogue. The storyline itself is stereotype from start to finish: Serious Intellectual Plain-Jane gets accidentally sucked into the world of high fashion, comes just close enough to Losing Her Soul OMG to provide a couple of chapters of angsty soul-searching and reality checks from angry boyfriends, but then triumphs over glitz in the end with the power of her innate goodness of heart and goes back to wearing sweat pants. Now, there’s nothing wrong with writing stereotyped storylines; look at all the retellings of fairy tales (though not, please, at that guy who wrote Wicked, whose retelling of Snow White I got halfway through before realizing that indeed life is stern and earnest but for God’s sake let us have limits). But the trick is that you have to tell them well - the devil, so to speak, is in the details. Either you find a sparkling and engaging way of telling an old story, or you’re left with… well, an old story, that many, many, many people have told better than you.

The Devil Wears Prada just doesn’t quite work.  It has potential, certainly, and there are many things about it that ought to work; indeed, the fashion industry ought to make for a biting, sparkly, and endlessly entertaining satire even in the hands of that guy who writes Garfield.  But the book doesn’t work, for several reasons.  To begin with, it’s simply not funny - situations that are themselves inherently absurd somehow have all the spastic energy sucked out of them by Weisberger’s lifeless prose.  The writing suffers from an endless “And then, and then, and then” litany of facts and events that read like an annoying movie montage and somehow serve to make it seem that the narrator has absolutely no inner life, which doesn’t help the reader when it comes to empathizing with her.

And the narrator needs help, make no mistake - the fact that her boss is a monster doesn’t absolve her of being smug, whiny, and annoying.  There are times when she comes across like a nineteen-year-old flouncing huffily because her boss, ohmygod, actually asked her to get off her cell phone and run the stupid cash register like it says to in her job description.  Case in point: we’re invited to be incredulous and sympathetic at the fact that her boss, who is the editor of a huge fashion magazine, wants umpteen magazines, papers, and trade publications sitting on her desk first thing in the morning, laid out just so, and the narrator later makes a snide comment about what a waste it is because Miranda only reads the society and gossip pages.

Okay, but - Lauren.  Sweetie.  Sit down and I will explain this to you slowly using little words.  When you are a huge-ass media mogul, it behooves you on a professional level to, wait for it, keep up with the media.  And while I’m sure it might be more morally righteous to sit around on your ass reading the New York Times Review of Books on company time, that’s not really your job.  Your job is to keep on top of the people to whom your magazine is helping to hock ten thousand dollar Dolce and Gabbana dresses.  See, the annoyingness of the narrator has driven me to defend her boss, who really is a huge bitch, and I don’t think that’s quite the effect that the book was intended to have.

I didn’t really hate the book.  I didn’t like it, either, though I wanted to.  The writing is flat, humorless, one missed opportunity after another, and no one’s sympathetic - not the narrator, not anyone she works with, not her tediously saintly boyfriend or her skeevy lush of a roommate, not the hot society writer who took a wrong turn out of a book in which he had an actual purpose and is now gamely trying to improvise his way through this one with no idea what’s going on or even what genre he’s in.  I’m still going to go see the movie, but clearly I will have to place my faith in the ability of Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Donatella Versace to rise above even the limpest material.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.