THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA by Lauren Weisberger (2003)

 

"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.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller (2011)

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.” ― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011)

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

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 decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. Please don’t get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think the book is great, but that’s a matter of opinion. Lots of people hate it. So it goes.

I’ll admit it; I’m a little bit biased when it comes to ancient history, but I promise I’m being as impartial as possible when I say that I was enchanted by The Song of Achilles. Ann Patchett (an author, although not the author of this book) calls the 2011 novel “startlingly original,” and she’s not completely wrong: while Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles by day and our hero by night, has approached this story from an atypical perspective, the story itself is not of her creation. Formally, it belongs to the blind bard Homer, who composed it (with slightly less homoerotic subtext) under the name of the Iliad in the 8th century BCE (although realistically it belonged to everyone; Homer was just the guy who wrote it down). The Iliad is the story of the ten-year Trojan War, and of its demigod hero Achilles, who was fated to be the best warrior known to man, but also to die young should he choose to pursue his divine destiny. Troy would immortalise him, avenging his untimely death by cementing him into the woven tales of generations to come as the greatest hero of all time, but he would also be, you know, dead. In the age of Achilles – roughly 1250 BCE, 500 years before the Iliad was even published – you only chose mortality over glory if you were inclined with intense stupidity, and so Achilles fulfilled his prophecy, fought like War Machine at Troy, and died an unforgettable hero. The Song of Achilles follows this same storyline, but what made Miller’s adaption so interesting was the fact that the hero of Troy was not, as would have been expected from a book bearing his name in the title, the central character. Taking this place was Patroclus, Achilles’ boyhood best friend (in antiquity the term for this was therapon, meaning 'dearest companion’ or ‘brother-in-arms’) and, in Miller’s work, his lover. Historians worldwide have for centuries speculated and debated over whether Achilles and Patroclus actually existed, and if so, were actually lovers rather than just inseparable friends – Plato’s Symposium assumes that the boys were a couple, although the Iliad never makes the distinction – but Miller’s work does, and damn, does she do it well. Awkward and shy in comparison with Achilles’ confidence, grace and composure, Patroclus is exiled from his home kingdom at ten years old and is taken in by Peleus, king of Phthia, the son of whom is none other than Earth’s Mightiest Hero himself. Patroclus swiftly falls for the mischievous, straightforward and charming prince, and Achilles promptly follows suit, but almost as soon as the boys are able to express their love to one another, they are called to war by the cry of a Greek king whose famously beautiful wife was stolen by a devious Trojan prince. Troy being the site of Achilles' prophesised demise, the two boys are reluctant to answer the call to arms, but Achilles' thirst for kleos (along with other binding factors – you’ll get the joke if you read the book) sends them sailing for Troy, where the two lovers will both face some of the hardest decisions of their lives.

I could pretend not to gush, but I’m not going to kid myself. You’d think that as a future Classics major, a simple retelling of an enormously famous piece of classical literature wouldn’t really ruffle my feathers, but you’d be wrong – oh, so wrong. By some strange miracle, The Song of Achilles genuinely surprised me on each and every page. I gasped, I screamed, I danced with the idea of throwing the book out a window more than once; the story simply gripped me, so tightly that it hurt to put it down, with such magnetism that I could barely walk away. There's no denying that it was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the chemistry between Achilles and Patroclus that breathed such captivity and life into this reiteration. I’ve read many reviews in which people complained that this book about the Trojan War has very little of the Trojan War actually in it (only about half the book occurs during the war, whereas the Iliad begins in its ninth year), but that’s one of the things that really sold this book to me; almost half of it was dedicated to establishing a literally epic love story. Sure, the fighting and bloodbaths were pretty cool, but who doesn't love a little bit of teen angst dating back to the 13th century BCE? Patroclus’ quiet but turbulent infatuation and Achilles’ deep and fierce passion oozed through the pages until I was infected by their star-crossed love, too. It’s helpful that Miller is quite an accomplished writer: her prose, while nowhere near the eloquence of the bard from whom she borrows, nevertheless tangoes and salsas across the page, elegant and violently emotive all at once. Her characters are well-developed: there was such stunning juxtaposition between the individual voices that you almost knew who was speaking without even reading their name. Achilles was cool, collected and bluntly honest, his phrase-work confidently rolling off the tongue like a cat stretched in the sun; Patroclus was weedy, jittery and nervous, but had a calm voice of reason and a strong sense of right and wrong. Chiron was candid and wise, Agamemnon arrogant and proud, Odysseus sharp and witty but not altogether unkind; these personalities didn't bounce off each other listlessly, but interacted fluidly, rendering each character unique in their own small and subtle, but also vibrant and outstanding, ways.

In retrospect, I can’t really pin down any specific thing about this book that coerced me into loving it so deeply, but Rick Riordan’s review of The Song of Achilles spoke of how the story coming from Patroclus’ point of view opened new windows through which to analyse the Iliad, and on reflection, this was one of my favourite things about the novel. Many big-shot reviews labelled Miller’s prose as simple and juvenile, but they’ve forgotten the two most important points: one, that this is YA, and two, that Patroclus was simple. “It was unlikely for my father to have allowed us to be alone together,” he tells us in the first chapter; “his simple son and his simple wife.” This is no wily and silver-tongued Odysseus, no brave and forthright Achilles; this is Patroclus, simple and scrawny but loyal to the bitter end. His story is so captivating because he tells it so plainly. There are no vast metaphors, no rousing paragraphs of rhetoric; as Riordan says, Patroclus cuts straight through the grandeur and heroism of the Iliad to show us the story of the humans behind the heroes. This was what sold the novel to me. Miller hasn’t simply rehashed Homer’s epic hero; she has dug deeper, found the lamb within the mighty lion, and coaxed it into the open, bringing us a story of humanity, compassion and suffering – and above all, timeless love in a hopeless place.

TL;DR: As a future Classics major, I already knew what happens in the Iliad, but somehow The Song of Achilles managed to break me anew. The quiet pain and fierce passion of this stunning tale gripped me iron-tight and dragged me along behind it - I'm lucky to have come out the other side relatively unscathed. Prolific writing skill has joined forces with comprehensive understanding of both ancient history and how to move a modern audience to create one of my favourite stories yet - this is, without a doubt, the best book I've read so far this year, and I'm sceptical as to whether any will manage to surpass it. Granted, I'm biased, given my innate fascination with Classical Greece and its mythology, but give me at least a little bit of credit: this book is really, really good.