'THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA' | A review Nastiness, negativity are terribly unstylish

The novel is fiction but it mirrors the author's life.
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"The Devil Wears Prada" by Lauren Weisberger (Doubleday, 360 pp., $21.95)
There's nothing like a juicy bit of gossip, especially when it's about impossibly tall and skinny women who work at fashion magazines and get cartloads of free designer clothes.
But Lauren Weisberger's debut novel, "The Devil Wears Prada," is not gossip, because none of it is true. It's fiction -- really, it is.
Never mind that Weisberger and the book's main character, Andrea Sachs, are both Ivy League graduates who landed plum jobs at top fashion magazines right out of college.
Never mind that both worked as personal assistants to notoriously dictatorial editors -- Weisberger for Anna Wintour at Vogue, and Andrea for Miranda Priestly at the fictional Runway magazine.
The similarities between Wintour and Priestly? Just a few: Both are British, wear trademark black sunglasses and are unapologetic about wearing fur coats.
Although it's tempting to scour "Devil" for details about Vogue and the famously elusive Wintour, it's not fair. Why not judge the book on its own merits? The problem is, the book isn't especially good, largely because the main character isn't likable at all. She so obviously hates her job -- and the fashion industry -- that her attitude dampens every page.
The story
She starts out brimming with enthusiasm. Fresh out of Brown, Andrea pounds the pavement looking for a job in publishing. She hopes to work at The New Yorker, her favorite magazine. But a job at Runway lands in her lap, and she accepts after hearing rumors that a year of working for the all-powerful Miranda will guarantee a job at any New York magazine.
The stint sounds too good to be true, and it is. Andrea is asked to fetch lattes, round up dirty clothes, and basically snap to it whenever called -- which is often, and on weekends.
To a certain degree, Andrea's rants about Miranda are amusing: The woman is so threatening, Andrea says, that she "scared people skinny."
Still, there is too much complaining about the job, and not enough detail about why it's so awful. Sure, Miranda is ornery and demanding. She's unreasonable, rude and a terrible boss.
But Andrea gets her back in some inventive ways, including refusing to wash the boss's dishes after those high-protein lunches. Instead, she would wipe the plate with tissues and "scrape off any leftover cheese with my fingernails."
Hard to feel sorry
After a while, though, it's hard to feel sorry for Andrea. Complaints about "unrelenting, inhumane sleep deprivation" sound bratty from someone who has to be at work at 7 a.m. Plenty of school teachers and stockbrokers do that every day.
And it can't be overlooked that she has every tool available to her to satisfy Miranda. She never has to wait for a taxi, because a company-hired car is always waiting. Money is not an obstacle, because she uses Runway's expense account for everything.
The perks are great, too, with free clothes, staff makeup artists available for touchups 24-7 and, of course, that bottomless expense account. What's so bad about that?
Weisberger should have offered more specific reasons to hate Miranda, or allowed Andrea to revel a little bit more in the good stuff.