When my cousin last came over for a big ol’fashioned family BBQ, she toted with her The Devil Wears Prada. She confessed a liking for both “funny and scary books,” and explained that she picked this one up on the recommendation of her friend. The title seems interesting to me, so the next time I saw her, she lent it to me.
I let it sit in my bedroom for a month and hadn’t so much as opened it. Finally, after feeling exceptionally guilty after the ‘family trip’ to Victoria, I started reading.
I finished it today.
Andrea Sachs is a small-town college grad whose greatest ambition is to become a writer for The New Yorker. After a typical round of resume-dropping, she accepts a position at Runway as the junior assistant of the editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly. While Andrea’s not at all interested in fashion, she takes the post on the hope that Miranda will be able to secure her a job at The New Yorker after her one-year tenure. Unfortunately, she hadn’t counted on the boss from hell…
Let me say something here: I don’t read chick lit often. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid the stuff. (I guess The Lovely Bones may count as chick lit, but er…) If all chick lit’s like Devil, I think I’ll be avoiding it a good while longer.
First, never mind the fact that it has little plot besides a steady escalation of unreasonable demands by Miranda and a steady decline in the interpersonal relationships of the narrator. To me the book seems fragmented and jumpy; I had trouble following which day was what and when all these trips to Paris were happening. So the plot didn’t exactly win me over. Maybe the characters, then.
Sadly, the book disappoints here, too. Andrea is only slightly interesting: she’s a little too well-adjusted and normal compared to all the other wacky characters in the novel. Her best friend, Lily, is less boring, since we actually get some backstory about her; Lily’s subplot about the various men she gets involved with rivals the main storyline for interest. Andrea’s boyfriend Alex isn’t very interesting either: he’s too understanding and too perfect. And the boss Herself? Unreasonable and not particularly memorable beyond her endless demands. There’s just no real depth to her character–why she feels entitled, why she wrenches every last drop of dignity out of her assistants, why she’s so sadistic–it’s just not explored at all.
This book just wasn’t all there. It lacked subtlety. There’s a point in the novel when Andrea reconsiders the kind of person Miranda is; sadly, by the next chapter we’re back to the whining Andrea who shows none of the insight that she did in the previous chapter. I wish the author had picked up on that a bit more, but perhaps that would have led to an even more clichA~(c)d ending than the one I read.
I felt strangely empty after reading it. I think, perhaps, I’ve been expecting too much of my books lately.
And for a book my cousin had labelled in the funny camp, I didn’t laugh much. I think I might have smiled once when the narrator described Lily’s “Fractional Scale for Men.”