The Devil Wears Prada

Title: The Devil Wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger
Pub Date: 2003
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A young woman gets a job as a personal assistant for the diva editor of a fashion magazine

So, "chick lit." This is a difficult world for me, because while I should technically be a consumer (being a chick, and being a consumer of lit), I have a very hard time finding much in the genre that I can like very much. This book turned out to be not much of an exception to that. It was okay, but the further I got into it, the harder it was for me to stay with it or to like much of anybody in it.

So we have Andrea, fresh out of Brown University on some kind of Literature or English degree, who accidentally walks into a job working as the junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the uber-bitch editor of the fictional Runway magazine. Andrea knows nothing about fashion, has no idea who Miranda is, and zero experience as an assistant of any sort, but quickly learns that her job is to be a sort of highly-comped servant to be misused and abused at all hours of the day and night by Priestly, a sort of caricature of a rich, out of touch society woman who has never been told no in her life loud enough to have heard it after reaching a certain level of power.

As her year of servitude drags on, Andrea begins to lose her friends and relationships to the all-consuming task of being Miranda's assistant. She cannot take personal calls. She cannot make plans, even on weekends. She must be available at all times, because she never knows if she will be summoned to a black tie event or a week in Paris. Her best friend becomes an alcoholic, her boyfriend grows distant, and yet Andrea continues to be Miranda's complaining lackey, because at the end of the year, she might be able to get in the door at The New Yorker, her dream job, at a much faster speed than trying to do it the old-fashioned way.

The real problem with the book for me is in the characterization. Maybe it's because I have never lived in New York. I'm Kentucky born and raised, and we don't understand or exactly trust Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular. Maybe it's because I am a grizzled and weathered 35 instead of a young and naive 22. But I cannot believe that anyone behaves in the ways that either Miranda or Andrea behave. The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but the main two are just complete aliens for me. I didn't see the movie, and I'm sure that Meryl Streep managed to make the role of Miranda divine in that way of hers, but in the book, she's just horrendous without mitigation. There is one moment in Paris when she is almost human, but you almost by that point get the idea that she might just be a sociopath by that point, grooming her victim. Or maybe she's just trapped in an echo chamber of her own making, and Andrea just has a martyr complex. Either way, I cannot really like either one of them. Andrea's incessant whining and yet continuous running and fetching gets old quickly, and Miranda's complete inhumanity just start to grate. I would tell both of them to get a grip inside of five minutes.

This was an easy enough read, I suppose. Certainly not mentally taxing. But probably I won't hang on to it. Maybe I'll catch the movie some time and see what Meryl does with the part.