SRP Book Review #5

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

360 pages

I started this book thinking I'd better read it before the movie comes out, but then I realized I will probably not see the movie for several months, after I can Netflix it. It was a nice summer read, anyway. It's been so hot that I haven't felt like doing much but read.

The book is a roman à clef, and it wasn't too hard to recognize the things that are uh, roman à cleffy about it. It is still a complete mystery how Andrea ever got the job at Runway in the first place. (Based on the description of the oufit she wears to the interview alone. I mean, I am a librarian and I would talk smack about an interview candidate who wore a mismatched suit.) It's sort of implied that Miranda is so difficult to work for that they are desperate to find anyone they can, but then Andy's told over and over how lucky she is to have the job. It sort of left me thinking that Lauren still has no idea how she got the Vogue job.

I enjoyed the story as a larger scale, more outrageous version of a fairly typical first-job-after-college experience. Everybody knows what it's like to be micromanaged, have a hard time balancing work and personal life, and feeling the pressure to compete in terms of looks/weight/fashion with other women in the workplace.

Over all, I thought the book was engaging and funny. I liked Andrea as a more real, flawed version of the typical chic-lit heroine. (Some of the protagoniststs in the genre are getting to be a little too cookie-cutter quirky-cute. Sure, they might have flaws, too, but most of them aren't any more severe than a penchant for eating cookie dough right out the tube.) I wasn't sure, though, if Weisberger was doing a bit of an unreliable narrator thing on purpose, or if it would have been a good idea for her to do some more exploration of her motives before writing the book. Among other things, it seemed slightly ridiculous to me that Andy would endure almost a year of a job she hated--to the detriment of her relationships with other people and her own integrity--without some sort of confirmation that she'd get a good recommendation at the end of it.