So of course I am here telling you about the book I just finished, The Devil Wears Prada. I had seen the movie and been intrigued about the book, and then when I was at the Uxbridge public library a few weeks ago it was out there on display, so I picked it up.

I have to say, this is one of the rare cases when I like the movie better than the book. I am going to assume anyone who is reading this or cares has seen the movie and/or knows the premise, so I'm not going to summarize.

• Writing Style: The writing style was not great. A bit amateurish. Not awful, did generally get the point across, but a lot of extraneous chattiness, and I did find a dangling clause. Ick.

• Job Role: The main problem, as I saw it, was the narrator's attitude and naive snarkiness. If you take a job as someone's personal assistant/receptionist, you should a) have a good customer service persona and b)expect to be doing some personal tasks. I think both the narrator and I and Princeton from Avenue Q and everyone who finally gets a job out of college (who wasn't recruited into a training scheme)--I think we all probably did have the feeling of "Hey, I am so above this job and could be doing more etc etc" but you know what? If you actually express that publicly you are being very unprofessional. And although much of the narrator's snark is only directed to the reader, a fair amount of it is directed to her co-workers and sometimes even at her boss-- a fact her boss comments on late in the book. Of course many (but not all!) of the demands/conditions of the boss in TDWP were unreasonable, if you hate your job so much you can't be professional and it violates your boundaries, then you should quit. You can always temp, and in the narrator's case she claims to type 60 words a minute, so she'd be fine.

• Job Sector: Along the same lines, not only did she feel undervalued and put-upon in her role, but in fact she had deep-seated objections to the sector she was working in. If you take a job in a sector you can't see the use of...you shouldn't take the job. For this reason I feel very lucky that my job of this sort (that I spent almost a year at) was in a sector I believed in/wasn't opposed to, even if my role was boring and useless. I would be hard put to defend the existence of the fashion industry myself, and perhaps I have dreams in which the money spent on a fashion shoot at Vogue could go to low-emission public transportation, but that’s why I don’t work in the fashion industry. Short of becoming a (potentially violent) radical and undermining capitalism, there is nothing I can do but live and let live and not work in fashion. I will say in the narrator’s defense she thought the was entering the publishing sector rather than the fashion sector, but as soon as she figured it out she should have sat herself down and had a good think (and taken herself to a temp agency). No one wants a co-worker who thinks their product is useless and damaging! It’s rude, arrogant, and demoralizing (also unprofessional, see above). And unless you’re supporting dependents, why would you work to produce a product you think is useless and/or damaging? The scene in the movie where Nigel says “You’re not really trying” is much better in this regard.

• Values: Basically, I think what it comes down to is that she wasn't clear on her values. I do realize that this is part of the conflict of the story, but I think it was made much clearer in the movie than in the book. In the book, her boyfriend is Teaching for America, but in the movie he is working to become a chef. I think this is an important difference because what the moviemakers understood that the narrator/author didn’t understand was that the problem wasn’t with the fashion industry—it was with her. Haute cuisine could arguably be understood as just as frivolous as haute couture, but her boyfriend was doing something he enjoyed and believed in and that is what made the difference. Andy’s scorn of the industry and her boss and co-workers comes from a rigid “x is right, y is wrong” understanding of the world that is blind to the humanity of those around her whom she sees as shallow, even as it seeks to prioritize relationships over career (I mean the story could have been told as a Marxist fable, but that’s not what she sets out to do—probably for the best). However, the movie makes perfectly clear that the argument is not about the utility of a certain sector (like I said, if you don’t like it do something else) but about the choices we make and how we prioritize and why. This much is clear to the narrator/author and is made very clear in the movie.

Why does Andy stay in her job that she hates in an industry she doesn’t believe? This is the real question about values that the book doesn’t answer well but that the movie does answer well. We keep hearing that “a million girls would die for [that] job”—but Andy doesn’t think she would. She’s not attracted to the glamour, she’s not interested in clothes, the money’s not great, but she does take advantage of the perks. The place where it gets tricky is that she is partly sucked in by the glamour and the perks, and the argument that she makes in the book is that for this one year of sacrifice she will be able to get ahead in her career as a writer—to skip 3 years of drudgery as an assistant in publishing or a related field. The movie adds resonance to the title in the scene with Andy and Miranda in the car together when it is made clear that Andy is put in a Faustian position—I am not sure the narrator/author understood it as clearly. But if that were really the reason, she would have quit sooner and realized that she would rather spend 3 years in a sane job to advance in her field than give up her entire life for this one year. So that’s not really the reason she stays, even though she thinks it is. Andy stays because is hooked on the external validation that Miranda dangles before her, plain and simple—her own as well as that of other influential people like Christian or publishers, celebrities, etc. When Miranda berates her personally, Andy does question her own worth, and that is what makes her work harder to impress Miranda instead of realizing that what she’s being asked to do grates against her own priorities. She confuses being competent (or supercompetent as Miranda demands of her) with having an internal worth. By the end of the book and movie Andy aligns herself with her priorities, putting her friends and family above the temptations of glamour, celebrity and influence, but it is still not clear that she understands the difference between performance/ability and worth. Paul Simon put it this way “You want to be a leader?You want to change the game? Turn your back on money/Walk away from fame./You want to be a missionary?Got that missionary zeal? Let a stranger change your life/ How’s it make you feel? You want to be a writer/ But you don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.”

• Roman a clef aspect: So another reason I thought the movie was better was because it could tell a clean story. As you may know, TDWP is largely understood as a Roman a Clef of author Lauren Weisberger’s experience as Anna Wintour’s personal assistant. I think this fact, while it probably gave the book the attention that it got and accounts for a large part of its success, is actually a detriment to the book as a work of literature. For one thing, because it is a person writing about her own life, it has too many irrelevant details and subplots; because she is trying to be faithful to her own real experience, she can’t trim these things out. This is simplified in the movie. Furthermore, I have mixed feelings about the ethics of revaling personal details about someone you worked for, especially when part of your job was to protect your boss’s public image. As Anna Wintour is quoted as saying (in response to reports that Ms. Weisberger is having trouble with her third novel) “Maybe she should get a job as someone else’s assistant.” Because of course she can’t—she betrayed trust in that position. So in other words, I found it unprofessional. If she had distilled the truths she learned that year into a story with more universal appeal and only passing resemblance to real people and events, it would have more lasting value as literature (though perhaps it may have been less marketable). I think that perhaps Ms. Weisberger has not yet (or at least not at the time of writing TDWP) seen the universal aspects of her experience. However, I think the trouble she’s having with her current book will probably lead to a lot of growth and make her a better writer. I wish her all the best and hope it’s not too painful.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060629/REVIEWS/60620007/1023 which I thought was very good. By the way, please notice that he agrees with me in noticing Meryl Streep plays the character as “part dominatrix.” It’s all in how she wields the carrot/stick of her approval.

(I know this is long and rambling and repetitive and pseudo-deep, but I just wrote it to let off some steam. Maybe if I am even more bored and procrastinating another day I will edit it into tidiness.)

Anyway, what I have learned about myself from reading this book (and also Running With Scissors, Dry, and Reading Lolita in Tehran) is that while I can find memoirs/autobiographical fiction very interesting, it probably doesn’t suit my needs at this time because a) the writing style is usually not as appealing to me as fiction/literature b) if someone writes a story about his/her life, usually something dramatic and often terrible has happened to him/her c)it’s non-fiction, so whatever bad thing happened really happened, and the ending isn’t in the book, but the person is out there living it somewhere. I’m finding that because of b) and c) above I will no longer checking this type of book out from the library because because my main reading time is before going to bed. I find I tend to stay up to finish the books because I want to see what happens/how it ends and the sentence structures* are simple enough not to get in my way, and then something awful happens, and then it’s not really resolved at the end, and I am up way past my bed time.

*This is not a problem with Jane Austen because sometimes the real pleasure in reading her work is admiring the sentence structures, and I find if I’m too sleepy to appreciate them, I’ll stop and go to sleep.

Labels: book review, jobs, movie