"Oh, don't be silly - everyone wants this. Everyone wants to be us." - Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada (2003)
DISCLAIMER:
This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to
the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you, reading this, will like it
yourself, not only because I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I
always assume that people will like everything I like. If you are a big fan of
this book and find yourself deeply and mortally wounded by my criticism, I
humbly apologise. I think the book is quite bad, but that’s a matter of
opinion. Lots of people love it. I would hate to be those people. (Side note:
the film adaption is a modern classic. I wish I could say the same for its
origin.)
I first
watched the film adaption of The Devil Wears Prada when I was fourteen, and I’ve loved it
ever since. There’s something so compelling about watching Anne Hathaway go
through life-changing physical transformations and Meryl Streep curb-stomp
people just for the good and pure fun of it, so naturally, when I discovered
that The Devil Wears Prada was actually a book before it
became a blockbuster, I was itching to get my hands on it and devour a great
story in the form I love the most.
Here’s where
it gets a little tragic: The
Devil Wears Prada movie
rocks. The Devil Wears Prada book does not.
Three pages
in, and I was already disappointed by how utterly weak the book was; a sure sign that this
was not going to be a promising reading experience. TDWP tells the story of the young and
ambitious Andrea Sachs, twenty-three and qualified but totally unemployed.
Desperate for a buck or two to rub together, Andrea eventually gets a job
as the junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, chief editor of the famous Runway magazine and, as it turns out, the
eight-headed hydra from hell. If Andrea works a year for her, Miranda has the
power to bump Andrea straight from zero to hero, inserting her into any
position she wants within or without Runway, and while Andrea, a
budding writer with a thirst for the real world, would love to be inserted
among the big-wigs at The New
Yorker without having to
painstakingly climb the social ladder, she first has to survive an entire year
of service with the most finicky, unpredictable and maniacal nit-picker to ever
walk the Earth – or the Underworld. Sounds like a great story, right?
Wrong.
Raving
praise littered the back cover of Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, calling it
‘deliciously witty and gossipy’ (Publisher’s Weekly) and ‘this season’s
must-have accessory’ (Rocky Mountain News), but if there’s one thing
I’ve learned from The Devil
Wears Prada, it was that you can never, ever judge a book by its cover.
Sure, the book is kind of sassy, and it gossips like a tenth grader with a chip
on their shoulder, but there really is nothing ‘delicious’ about it at all. For
one thing, the prose is thoroughly feeble and unrealistic. The dialogue is
often staged as if Weisberger has never had a real life conversation with a
human before, and there were several whole pages that I would have ripped out
if it wasn’t my library’s copy that I was reading – for example, the entire
paragraph where Andrea describes in graphic detail climbing the stairs at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m a seventeen-year-old with no experience in
publishing whatsoever, but I would have fired Weisberger’s editor on the spot –
so much unnecessary, boring and waffle-y nothingness made it into the final cut
of the book that it was almost as if no one had edited it at all. As a writer,
the weak phrase work really got under my skin. Weisberger tried many a time to
make grand exclamations of disgust, relief, exhilaration and exhaustion, but
more often than not, she failed quite miserably. Couple this with a storyline
that sustained me only because I wanted to be informed when I tore it to
shreds, and you’ve got a snooze fest – but TDWP,
ever so smug and pleased with its ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’ attitude, seems to have no
idea that hip and edgy don’t come in its size.
This book
tries so hard to be fun and carefree, but here's what I picked up: it’s Gillian
Flynn’s ‘Cool Girl’-type fun. “Cool Girl is hot. Cool Girl is game. Cool Girl
is fun,” may as well be the novel’s motto, because when I read it, I didn’t see
the bright sophisticated, high-brow young woman in Andrea that Weisberger wants
you to see; I saw a pretentious, condescending brat, convinced that the sun
shines out of her ass and that every person she ever meets is a planet
revolving around her. Andrea thinks that she’s better than everyone else due to
the fact that she loves to write (because authors are so great, right?), yet
she literally writes nothing at all until the very end of the book. Seriously.
She doesn’t write at all, despite how dreadfully she claims to adore it, which
makes me think that her writing career was merely a plot device used to make
Andrea look better than her colleagues, rather than an actual facet of her
character. Weisberger has clearly channelled herself into every fibre of Andrea’s
being, so much so that it was desperately evident from the off-set that our
protagonist was the World’s Biggest Mary-Sue. Andrea believes that an interest
in fashion makes you inferior to the high-and-mighty minds of intellectuals and
scholars, and given that this worldview is brattish and precocious and would be
more at home in a spoiler toddler rather than a twenty-three-year-old woman,
you’d think that Andrea would eventually have some life-changing epiphany in
which she realises that her sneering attitude makes her the vapid and shallow one rather than
her Vogue-loving, Prada-toting co-workers, but
she doesn’t. She remains patronizing, arrogant and impudent throughout the
entire story, convincing me that Weisberger actually believes in Andrea’s
ideals and has essentially written her in the image of herself – a terrible
trick for a Paid and Professional Writer to play.
Then, of
course, there’s the aspect of the book that caused me the most pain (due to the
amount of times I physically slapped my own forehead at the idiocy): the themes
of subtle, but hideously ugly homophobia. There are Lena-Dunham levels of
stereotyping and appropriation in this novel, and while that may have been the
In Thing in 2003, when the world was still gingerly prodding at the idea of
homosexual representation in the media, it certainly doesn’t fly now.
Weisberger has gone, in wholly unoriginal fashion, down the You Have To Be Gay
If You Are A Male Who Loves Fashion route, but far from this being racy and
exciting, it’s all a bit dull and dank. She often describes Andrea’s male
colleagues as being flamboyantly/aggressively gay (those aren’t her exact
words, but I don’t really want to trawl back through the book to find the
offending instances), which is something I used to say when I was twelve; it’s
childish, it assumes that you have to swing a certain way to be interested in
fashion, and above all, it’s boring. I would be more outraged by this conduct
if it was in any way interesting, but it’s not. It’s old, it’s overdone, but
worst of all, it’s not the only archaic allegory Weisberger puts into play. So
many of the tropes in this book are just as out-dated and dust-covered as her
limited understanding of homosexuality, like the gross stereotype of people of
colour being lesser than white people (the POCs are all cabbies, newspaper
stand attendants and doormen) and the candid fat- and slut-shaming that I would
have relished in as a pre-teen, but am repulsed by now (for example, the fact
that Andrea, a size six or eight, is considered ‘fat’ by her size zero and two
associates). I suppose there’s a little bit of salvation for this hurtful,
cheap naivety in there somewhere: TDWP was published in 2003, and so is
quite hilariously out-dated in the context of the modern world. However, I
believe that there is a stark difference between the reason and the excuse, and
like a racist white grandparent, while the age of the book is the reason for
its conservative attitude, it certainly isn’t an excuse.
Maybe I’m
missing the point. Maybe The
Devil Wears Prada is a
crafty, clever satire, buried beneath layers of average story-telling and
skimpy wit and intellect, and I’m just a bitchy seventeen-year-old hoodlum who
doesn’t understand the art of political comedy. If this is the case, it’s
buried far, far deeper than I can be bothered digging. With that in mind, I
offer up the following advice: if you’re one of those girls who thinks that
staying at home on a Friday night to read books, drink tea, browse Tumblr and
watch Supernatural/Doctor
Who/Sherlock makes you better than the girls who spend their
weekends partying, drinking and socialising, you’ll love this book. The main
character is just like you.
TL;DR: I'll give The Devil
Wears Prada a little
bit of credit: it is set in a New York of over a
decade ago, and as I was six years old in 2003 and lived in suburban New
Zealand, I have to interpret the book in the context of the time of its
publication, something I can't accurately gauge as it happened across the world
twelve years ago. Of course, this doesn't make up for the boring storyline, the
less-than-engaging characterisation and the hopeless character development, but
it's a tiny bit of consolation: maybe if I was seventeen in 2003, I might have
actually enjoyed this book. As it is, sorry, Lauren Weisberger: better luck
next time.
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