Maslin Watch: Back in Action

Things just weren't the same without the regular Monday morning Maslin Watch, were they? And then nothing from her yesterday! I was worried I might have to find a new schtick, but everything is back in place, as Maslin considers Plum Sykes.

After three paragraphs of quotes extracted to convey the tone of Bergdorf Blondes, Maslin finally gets around to suggesting "the real-life counterparts of these characters and quite a few fun-loving others are liable to enjoy the brain candy that is Ms. Sykes's first novel," and though that infinitive phrase may be proper grammar, it's still a bit rambling, but that's what you get for trying to cram as much into one sentence as you can.

Into the blender go Bridget Jones, Anita Loos, "Sex and the City" and "Clueless"; out comes a diabolically amusing concoction.

Now, I admit I'm hardly the biggest fan of the genre, but this shopping list doesn't seem all that diverse--except for Anita Loos, which I'm wondering how the hell she got on. (Not that she isn't great, just that she's been consigned to the scrap heap of respected but largely unread writers.) I mean, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between Cher and Carrie Bradshaw, other than that the high school kid doesn't smoke and screw like the big city columnist. And all Bridget adds to the equation is self-doubt; granted, that's quite a bit to add, but the other core elements remain the same.

Ms. Sykes somehow manages to treat this as satire while also playing it nearly straight in a book that boasts as many flagrant product plugs (Michael Kors, anyone?) as it does funny one-liners. "Bergdorf Blondes" brings to mind the wise men of Spinal Tap and their deathless dictum: it's a fine line between stupid and clever.

The thing Maslin seems not to get is that satire is best done when you play it completely straight--when you don't, you're doing farce, which is a completely different genre. Good satire works because it first convinces us of its realism, then suckerpunches us with the scathing potrayals and commentaries. Even Gulliver's Travels succeeded because Swift aped perfectly the conventions of the explorer's journal, though modern readers more likely than not don't notice.

Ms. Sykes crosses over to the stupid side in those ill-advised moments when she allows real life to intrude on fabulousness. Whatever else New York sample sales may be, they are not "so fraught with danger they make the Gaza Strip look peaceful."

But you know what? Without seeing it in context, this still strikes me as an absolutely dead-on representation of a certain uptown mindset, in which fabulous people compare the slightest travail to international catastrophe...and a lot of that mindset shows up in the Times. The Significant Other and I still chortle over a piece from last year, in which a woman wrote about being delayed at the airport for several hours and earnestly compared it to "a refugee camp experience." You might well call it "stupid"--but it's stupid on the part of the people who live that way, not necessarily on the part of the author who writes about them.

For all the book's noxious insistence that Champagne and diamonds make the world go round, Ms. Sykes has a distinctive, wily and well-deployed comic voice.

Can I just point out that I find the Times convention of capitalizing champagne utterly quaint? But seriously...I suspect this "noxious" holds the key to much of Maslin's (and likely other readers) reaction, in that Sykes is writing about an element of New York City that, for those millions of us who aren't members, is an object of both envy and ridicule, often simultaneously. (Probably for people outside New York as well, but the effect is perhaps more immediate locally.) So a story like Bergdorf Blondes is "supposed" to provide opulence in which readers can wallow and to give the rich their comeuppance at some point...and if I weren't writing on the fly, I'd probably go into Fitzgerald at this point blah blah blah. Anyway, the point again seems to be that--and I freely admit I haven't read the whole thing, though calls are going in to the publicist--Sykes may have portrayed the Manhattan socialite world a little too accurately for some reader's comfort.

Maslin also makes a crack about "the inherent cattiness of its genre" which struck me as a bit odd. She says Sykes is a better writer for avoiding it, but I don't know that I'd call it an "inherent" genre component in the first place. It exists in several of the books, to be sure, and some authors probably are working out some jealousy issues on their secondary characters, but if there is cattiness in the books, I suppose I see it coming more from individual authors and, perhaps, the narrative requirements of individual protagonists than from some "inherent" trait.