Better Than The Movie: The Devil Wears Prada

Who wrote this book? Does it matter? Probably not.

So here’s what happened: I was at a friend’s place and she has this thing for really bad chick flix. It’s not even funny. I’ve had to watch “Miss Congeniality” with her, it’s that bad! Anyways, she says to me, “You have to watch The Devil Wears Prada” and she jumped up from her couch and shoved the DVD in before I could protest. The movie was hellabad. Like, I couldn’t understand why the protagonist’s friends didn’t understand that she had a really crazy demanding job. I assumed it was because the movie was diluted from the book, so I bought the book.

I bought the book for $4 used. Thankfully.

It’s not that the book wasn’t a fun read; it was. And it wasn’t that the book wasn’t entertaining. It’s just that the book was badly written.

It could have been such a good book. It could have rocked. But instead it just felt like a book written in haste.

The book starts with our hero (Andrea? I can’t even remember anymore) driving her boss’s stick shift car with a broken heel and ruined pants. She reflects on how she got to this point in her life and that’s how we’re taken back to the beginning of the story. Now, one would assume that this driving-the-stick-shift-in-broken-heels incident was the pivotal point in the book since the book starts with it, but it isn’t. In fact, the vignette is so inconsequential that it’s never revisited again! You heard me: the reader never finds out how Andrea manages to get the car to her boss or what happens with the busted heel or ruined pants.

That is flabby writing. And I don’t deserve to be treated to that even if the book did only cost me four bucks.

It gets worse. A lot of the bonding moments between Andrea and her coworker are retold as memories of the event rather than in real-time, which detracts from the narrative. And Andrea’s inability to adequately explain to anyone (and I mean anyone, including the reader) why she’s sticking with such a terrible job is frustrating. The climactic moment when Andrea decides to quit could have been much stronger had it not be conflated with a value statement about her boss.

Despite all this, the book was way better than the movie. But that may just have been because I didn’t have to watch Anne Hathaway pretend that she was awkward and unfashionable.