The Devil Wears Prada (novel)
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| Author | Lauren Weisberger |
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| Cover artist | Evan Gaffney (design); Nick Dewar (illustration) |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Chick lit |
| Publisher | Broadway Books |
| Released | 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
| Pages | 360 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-7679-1476-7 |
The Devil Wears Prada is a 2003 best selling novel by Lauren Weisberger about a young woman who, fresh from college, gets a job working as a personal assistant to a powerful fashion magazine editor that turns increasingly hellish as she struggles to keep up with her boss's capricious and demeaning requests. It was hugely successful, spending six months on the New York Times bestseller list and serving as the basis for the successful 2006 film of the same name, starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway.
A prime example of "chick lit," the novel was widely seen as a roman à clef about Vogue magazine and its iconic editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, since Weisberger worked there as an intern. Although she denies the story's editor is modeled on Wintour, many readers believed otherwise, which helped propel the book to the bestseller list.
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[edit] Plot summary
The novel begins with its main character, Andrea Sachs, stuck in midtown Manhattan traffic, trying to remember how to use a manual transmission. She has picked up the Porsche roadster that belongs to her boss, Runway magazine editor Miranda Priestly, from a shop and must return it to Miranda's apartment in time for Miranda's family to go out to the Hamptons for the weekend. While she is attempting to do this, Miranda calls on her cell phone and excoriates her for not doing her job properly. She also tells her to pick up her pet French bulldog (in the British edition, a Persian kitten) from the veterinarian's office. Trying to comply, Andrea ruins some of the expensive designer clothing she is wearing. She wishes Miranda would die. But if that did happen, she reminds herself, she'd lose the pleasure of killing Miranda herself.
In the next chapter we move back in time and learn how she got into this predicament. After graduating from Brown with a degree in English, she visited India with her boyfriend Alex Fineman and came down with amoebic dysentery. Recovered, she leaves her home in Avon, Connecticut for New York City. There she moves in with her longtime friend Lily, now doing graduate studies in Russian at Columbia, and looks for a job.
A longtime reader of The New Yorker, she blankets the magazine publishing industry with her résumé, hoping to land enough experience somewhere and eventually get a job at the prestigious weekly. Still not over her dysentery, she gets a surprise interview at the Elias-Clark group. Afterwards she is hired as Miranda's junior assistant. While she knows little of her, she is told repeatedly that "a million girls would die for your job."
That job is primarily doing personal errands for Miranda, who sometimes mistakenly and sometimes deliberately calls her Emily, after her predecessor who is now the senior assistant. Miranda is a classic "boss from hell" — she rarely gives enough information or time to comply with her demands, yet she routinely berates those who fail. She makes people go to great lengths to accommodate her only to change her mind after they have done so. She feels no compunction about ordering Andrea and others to do things such as getting coffee or lunch anew if they have gotten too cold for her in the meantime.
People at the magazine are afraid of finding themselves alone in an elevator with her, or making critical remarks about her even to their close friends. She christens this attitude the Runway Paranoid Turnaround, as whenever one of her co-workers makes the slightest negative comment about Miranda, they immediately follow it up with a "turnaround" positive comment, due to their fear of their boss somehow finding out about their attitude and firing them.
All the same, Andrea is told that if she manages to stick it out working for Miranda for a year, she can have her pick of jobs in the magazine industry, so she struggles onward. Even in the present, the perks aren't bad — between Runway's "Closet" of designer clothes ostensibly on loan for photo shoots but rarely returned and often "borrowed" by the staff and the general obsequiousness she encounters as Miranda Priestly's personal assistant, she is able to acquire enough free designer clothing to fit in better with the rest of the Runway staff. Eventually, she develops an appreciation for it and stops incurring Miranda's displeasure. She gets a Bang and Olufsen phone for free when Miranda doesn't want it, and learns that Elias-Clark's policies regarding expense accounts are rather lax, to the benefit of herself and her friends.
She also goes to parties with celebrities. At one of them she meets Christian Collinsworth, a Yale graduate who has been identified as the hot (in more ways than one) up-and-coming writer of his and her generation. They become attracted to each other, complicating her relationship with Alex.
Her job begins to affect her health; she starts to lose weight because she can't bring herself to eat. This is due to the fact that she knows that she, after years of being tall and fairly thin, is now the fat, lumpy dwarf. Eventually, she begins to rationalise her not eating by thinking that "Missing one meal won't hurt, and anyway, $2000 pants don't look so hot on a fat girl." She realises that she, in that thought, has begun to embody the Runway attitude.
While working for Miranda, she receives a letter from a teenager, telling Miranda that she loves her magazine, spends all her money on trying to look like the models, but still hates herself because "my butt is huge" and "I'm too fat". The teenager is begging Miranda to send her a dress to wear to her prom, but ends by telling her that, even if she throws the letter in the trash can, she'll still love her. Andrea begins to doubt the true value of her job, as it is, primarily, encouraging the woman who makes teenagers all over America hate themselves as much as this one. However, she keeps going, thinking that it will all be worthwhile when she gets a job at the New Yorker.
The 14-hour days she puts in almost routinely leave her little free time to spend with Alex and Lily, who is increasingly turning to alcohol and picking up dubious men in order to relieve the pressures of graduate school. Her relationship with her family also begins to suffer. Her parents complain she isn't making time to visit her older sister, who is expecting her first child. However, Andrea ignores all this, even to the point of staying at work when Lily is arrested for going 'bottomless' while on a date with her latest dubious conquest.
Matters finally come to a head when Emily gets mononucleosis and Andrea must take her place accompanying Miranda to the fashion shows in Paris. She agrees, although this will mean cancelling her and Alex's homecoming weekend trip, which has dire consequences on her relationship with Alex.
In Paris, she has a surprise encounter with Christian. Later that night Miranda finally lets down her guard a little bit and asks Andrea what she's learned, and where she'd like to work afterwards. She promises to place phone calls to people she knows at The New Yorker on Andrea's behalf once her year is up, and tells her she can actually do some small written pieces for Runway.
But back at the hotel she gets two urgent calls from Alex and her own parents asking her to call them. She does so and learns that Lily is comatose in the hospital after driving drunk and wrecking a car.
Though Andrea is receiving much subtle pressure from her family and Alex to return home, she tells Miranda she will honor the commitment. Miranda is pleased, and tells her that her future in magazine publishing is looking bright. At the Paris fashion show, however, a livid Miranda phones her, demanding that Andrea replace her daughters expired passports in time for them to catch their flight, in three hours time. After she hangs up, Andrea stares at her phone, trying to think how to accommodate Miranda's impossible demand. Then, Andrea finally realizes that her family and friends are more important than her job, and realizes that she is becoming more and more like Miranda. On the spot, Andrea flips out her cell phone and tells her family that she's coming home. Miranda disapproves, but Andrea tells Miranda publicly "Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you." She is fired on the spot, but returns home to reconnect with her friends and family. Her romantic relationship with Alex is beyond repair, but they remain friends. Lily recovers and fares well in court for her DWI charge, receiving only community service.
In the last chapter we learn that the fallout from her standup to Miranda made her a minor celebrity when the incident made 'Page Six'. Afraid she had been blacklisted for good from publishing, she remains in Connecticut for a while and works on short fiction. Seventeen buys one of her stories. She returns to New York and gives herself a comfortable financial cushion by selling all the designer clothing she took to Paris with her to consignment shops. She saves one dress, and sends it to the teenager who wrote to Miranda.
At the novel's end, she is returning to the Elias-Clark building to discuss a writing position at another of the company's magazines. She arrives in the lobby to hear her friend, Eduardo the security guard, singing American Pie, the goodbye song she never got to sing. She looks round, and realizes that it is, in fact, Mirandas new assistant who is having to sing, while loaded with Mirandas coffee, shopping bags, newspapers, and her beaded clutch. She remembers that that used to be her. Eduardo winks, and buzzes her through "like I was someone who mattered."
[edit] Characters
- Andrea Sachs, a recent Brown University graduate, works as a junior personal assistant to a powerful and tyrannical fashion magazine editor. She is called Andy by her friends and family.
- Emily Charlton, her coworker, Miranda's former junior assistant now her senior assistant, responsible for more business-related matters such as reconciling expense statements. She and Andrea should be friends, and sometimes are, but have a mixed relationship, as their differing responsibilities to their tyrannical superior create envy between them: Andrea gets to leave the office a lot, whereas Emily is allowed to dress more flexibly and relax more at the office.
- Miranda Priestly, the British-born (as Miriam Princhek) editor-in-chief of Runway, a very chic and influential fashion magazine published by the Elias-Clark company. She is known for wearing a white Hermès scarf somewhere on her person every day and treating her subordinates in a manner that borders on emotional and psychological abuse.
- Alex Fineman, Andrea's boyfriend, who teaches at an elementary school in the South Bronx through Teach for America.
- Lily Goodwin, a free-spirited graduate student in Russian literature at Columbia who rooms with Andrea, her longtime friend whom she went through high school and college with.
- Nigel, a very tall British gay man who in addition to serving as Runway 's creative director frequently appears on television as a fashion consultant and is thus one of the few stars of the magazine Andrea knows prior to working there. He always speaks loudly, with his words printed in ALL CAPS. He has an outrageous sense of style himself, and is also the only person who Miranda allows to critique (sometimes brutally) her own personal wardrobe choices.
- James, another gay man at Runway who befriends Andrea. He sometimes jokes about "calling in fat" on days when he feels unattractive.
- Jeffy, who runs Runway 's famous "Closet," stocked with all sorts of clothing putatively on loan from the designers for use in shoots, but rarely returned and often "borrowed" by the magazine's staff.
- Hunter Tomlinson, a prominent New York tax attorney who is Miranda's current husband after she left the father of her two daughters, a onetime British rock star. As nice to Andrea and Emily as his wife is cruel, he is referred to by them and other close associates of Miranda's as "B-DAD," behind his back, for Blind Deaf and Dumb, the only way they could imagine anyone being able to live with her.
- Eduardo, a security guard at the Elias-Clark building, who often playfully makes Andrea or anyone else unfortunate enough to work as one of Miranda's personal assistants sing or otherwise put on some sort of act before he lets them enter the building.
- Christian Collinsworth, a hot young writer whom Andrea meets at a party, where they develop a mutual attraction.
- Caroline and Cassidy, the twin daughters Miranda dotes on.
- Cara, the girls' nanny, who saves Andrea's skin more than once but is eventually fired by Miranda after she gives the twins a timeout in their bedroom for a bad attitude.
- Jill, Andrea's older sister, who is married and lives in Houston, where she has begun to affect a Southern accent, much to Andrea's displeasure.
- The Clackers, the magazine's many female editorial staffers, so called (dismissively) by Andrea for the sound made by the stiletto heels they all wear.
[edit] Style and literary technique
The novel is narrated entirely in the first person by Andrea, and told in strict chronological order after the first chapter. Overall, it is a very realistic style with little in the way of literary device or flourish.
[edit] Realism
Weisberger denies that Miranda Priestly is modeled on Wintour, saying in the publicity material for the book that her antics and demands are partially fictional and partially a composite of actual experiences she and her friends had in their first jobs. But others familiar with Wintour, who makes a walk-on appearance near the end of the novel (and in fact is later described as having a bitter rivalry with Miranda), say there are specific similarities between life and art:
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- Both serve as trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Both have trouble remembering the names of people who work for them.
- Both are known for a fashion quirk: Miranda for her scarf and Anna for often wearing sunglasses indoors.
- Both are native Londoners who never attended college.
- Both have distanced themselves from at least part of their family background.
- Both are "size-zero" thin.
- Both have two children by a previous husband.
- Both have new or old male companionship who are Texan natives.
While Meryl Streep's film portrayal departed significantly enough from the novel that she was widely credited with creating an entirely new character, Miranda's onscreen office does share some similarities with Wintour's, down to an octagonal mirror on the wall and floral displays on the desk.
Runway is also shown having cover graphics very like Vogue, right down to the ultramodern Bodoni font used for the magazine's title.
Other characters are reportedly modeled on real people at Vogue — Nigel on André Leon Talley, and Miranda-hating travel writer Judith Mason, who makes a brief appearance on the telephone, is a disguised version of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten (who likewise supposedly stutters a lot).
Those familiar with the offices of Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue, say Weisberger has much of the setting right in her fictional Elias-Clark, down to the layout and culture of the cafeteria (the huge salad bar and tiny "Carb Corner" reflecting staffers' aversion to eating any food that might cause the slightest weight gain), the use of company ID cards to track employees' whereabouts and the sterile décor of Wintour's office.
Elias-Clark president Irv Ravitz, who is alluded to on several occasions but never actually seen, seems to be modeled on his Condé Nast counterpart Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr.
Many real-life fashion designers are referred to, such as Karl Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, Tommy Hilfiger and Donatella Versace; and some celebrities, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, are seen at parties. J.K. Rowling is also mentioned.
[edit] Commercial and critical reception
The Wintour angle was of great assistance in promoting the widely-anticipated book. It sold millions of copies in hardback, stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for six months and has since been translated into 27 languages.
Critics, resigned to the knowledge that their reviews would be irrelevant to the book's runaway success, and also mindful of its subject matter, were largely unimpressed. Kate Betts, a former editor of Harper's Bazaar who also worked for Wintour at one point, spared no barb in the Times Book Review, stressing the author's ingratitude at the unique opportunity of working at Vogue: "[I]f Andrea doesn't ever realize why she should care about Miranda Priestly, why should we care about Andrea, or prize the text for anything more than the cheap frisson of the context?"[1] Janet Maslin, in the daily paper, joined in: "a mean-spirited Gotcha! of a book, one that offers little indication that the author could interestingly sustain a gossip-free narrative ..."
It was, however, duly noted that Maslin tactfully avoids naming both the magazine where Weisberger actually worked and the woman she allegedly modeled her main character on. The Times continued this practice when the film was released[1]). It has been noted that Betts, a former Condé Nast editor, was hardly an impartial reviewer (In her second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, two characters are speculating on the identity of a popular anonymous online gossip columnist. One candidate is "that former fashion editor who goes around writing mean book reviews").
Critics who favored the book admitted it had problems, as any first novel might, but praised it as a "fun, frivolous read."
No Condé Nast Publications reviewed or otherwise mentioned The Devil Wears Prada.
[edit] Criticisms
The Devil Wears Prada was criticized primarily for the usual limitations of a first novel and for being too gossipy (as romans à clef often are). The story was seen as trite and clichéd (the same general plot is shared by the 1994 film Swimming with Sharks), and its autobiographical elements too thinly veiled. Many reviewers recalled The Nanny Diaries, similar in several ways to The Devil Wears Prada, and found Weisberger's book wanting.
The critics also claimed that Miranda was too one-dimensional, too much the absurdly overbearing boss. Yet Andrea admits that for all that, she still does the difficult work of keeping a premiere fashion magazine on top almost all by herself. As a result, she herself (along with Emily) enjoys considerable power in the fashion world as Miranda's gatekeeper.
Accordingly, the novel also makes Miranda seem sympathetic at a few points, most notably at an engagement party thrown for her brother-in-law, who has moved down to South Carolina and made a fortune in real estate. Andrea, surrounded by women from his social circle who "looked like a dressier version of the cast from Deliverance," even admits "I never grew tired of watching Miranda. She was the true lady and the envy of every woman in the museum that night".
[edit] Themes
[edit] Snobbery
While The Devil Wears Prada is on a narrative level about Andrea's struggle not to "sell out" her principles, whether sartorial, literary, or moral, its main preoccupation is snobbery. Andrea looks askance at the fashionistas she is surrounded by at Runway and hates their cliquishness (for example, the magazine's advertising department never invites anyone from the editorial side to their parties for advertisers not because they think the latter beneath them but because they know no one from editorial would be caught dead at an advertising party). But her distaste for them is equally snobbish, as many of the other characters, even (ultimately) Miranda, repeatedly point out to her.
Besides her coworkers, Andrea looks condescendingly upon Southerners as well, as her attitude toward her sister and Miranda's brother-in-law's friends demonstrate.
Some readers and reviewers complained that Andrea's own snobbery makes her hard to sympathize with. While this is perhaps so, it makes Andrea's apparent triumph at the end of the novel something of a hollow victory, much like the final scene of the 1988 film Working Girl, layered with dramatic irony, in that she has settled, at least temporarily, for working for publications much more middlebrow than her original ambition of making it to The New Yorker.
[edit] Jewish identity
An interesting sub-theme is the tenuousness of Jewish American social identity amid widespread cultural assimilation in the early 21st century.
Andrea speaks only Hebrew in addition to English. She identifies herself and her family as Jewish but only once. Otherwise, the Sachses are stereotypically WASPy, living in Avon, Connecticut, worshipping The New Yorker, and playing Scrabble for relaxation. Significantly, the only sign of secular Jewish culture present in their household is the dinner of bagels, lox and latkes Andrea's mother orders the night before Thanksgiving, the American holiday closely linked with the Mayflower Pilgrims, English Protestants from whom direct descent was long a guarantee of a social status that American Jews could never attain. We never see the Sachses celebrating any of the traditional Jewish holidays. It hardly comes as a surprise that Jill has gone native after her marriage and move to Texas.
Miranda has gone even further in rejecting her Jewish origins, Andrea learns via a Google search, by changing her name to distance herself from an Orthodox background in the East End, where her father spent his days studying religious texts and was supported by the community. At one point, Andrea evokes this background when she considers leaving Miranda's office by walking backwards, likening it to the way observant Jews are supposed to leave the Wailing Wall.
It is thus probably more than a coincidence that Miranda's chosen last name is Priestly and that the character who most epitomizes Andrea's temptations and aspirations is named Christian; or that conversely, her (Jewish) best friends' last names are "fine man" and "good one."
[edit] Foreign editions
In addition to the United States, the book is sold in Albania, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, México, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
[edit] Film adaptation
The film version was released on June 30, 2006, produced by Wendy Finerman (Forrest Gump), freely adapted for the screen by Aline Brosh McKenna and directed by David Frankel. Anne Hathaway played Andrea, Meryl Streep earned critical praise and a Golden Globe as Miranda, and Emily Blunt played Emily.
Production took place during fall 2005, on location in New York and Paris. Weisberger herself made a very brief non-speaking cameo appearance as the twins' nanny.
It was very successful, taking in over $300 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film for both lead actresses. In September Weisberger and Frankel jointly accepted the first-ever Quill Variety Blockbuster Book to Film Award.
[edit] Television series
On October 12, 2006, Fox Television Network announced that they have acquired the rights to a sitcom version of the series based on the book, which will air in 2007.
