Duo fails to craft a model 'Citizen'
Coauthors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus have a ready-made audience for their new novel, "Citizen Girl." Not only will this latest comic adventure appeal to the thousands of less-than-affluent urbanites who laughed through the duo's best-selling debut, "The Nanny Diaries," but it would also seem to be a natural for young working women dealing with crazy bosses and shifting job descriptions. Will these readers want to shell out their hard-earned cash for a hardcover? The marketing people at Atria have announced that the new book will be available with three different colored covers. This concept -- book as fashion accessory -- isn't unique, but it is interesting considering the novel's subject.
You see, when we first meet Girl, the heroine of "Citizen Girl," she hasn't much to spare on frou-frou. A beleaguered young thing, she's an underpaid drone toiling at a purportedly feminist think tank for -- surprise! -- an exploitive and trivia-obsessed boss. Girl has serious ideas and wants to do something substantial for downtrodden women; her boss cares only about the color of paper used in presentations and her own dubious fashion sense. "Those. Are. Fantastic," the boss says, interrupting Girl to point at a colleague's "purple clogs, which match her bright purple hemp jumper and the dark purple African lariat she has ambitiously combined with lilac Mardi Gras beads." That this nasty boss is a bit of a stereotype -- middle-aged, overweight, and sporting a recognizably Jewish name -- isn't supposed to bother readers. Doris Weintruck is obviously a bad person, and Girl deserves better.
She thinks she's going to get it, too, when she lands a high-paying dot-com job with My Company, where a go-getter boss named Guy claims to want her for just the kind of feminist integrity that Weintruck overlooked. Of course, as any reader of chick-lit novels knows, neither My Company nor Girl's new honey, Buster, will turn out to be as dreamy as they seem. That Girl will triumph is a given, but she's got a rocky road ahead. With My Company, Girl will end up confronting sexual harassment, the apathy of youth, pornography, the evils of marketing people everywhere, and, finally, the so-called do-me feminism that exploits more than it liberates women consumers.
That's quite a lot to tackle in one supposedly fun novel, and the results range from arch to didactic. McLaughlin and Kraus get a lot right, from the Lower East Side chic of vintage furs paired with combat boots to the lingering dot-com craziness that has companies popping up and, more frequently, withering like mushrooms in the sun. Plus, much of the deadpan humor that sold "The Nanny Diaries" is intact here, as when one of Girl's older, wiser colleagues comments on Girl's young study group, saying, "They seem to think sexism is something we invented to depress them."
But that strain of subtle wit is in short supply in "Citizen Girl." Instead, the dialogue-heavy narrative relies on the kind of breathless prose that expresses stress with both repetition and italics, with our heroine's internal monologue running to the " 'Yesterday?!' No! Nonono!" variety. But too many reactions are broken down into one-word or even one-syllable sentences, such as "a . . . presentation. That. I. Wrote." This device eases up toward the end, when the escalating action turns much of the dialogue into long, run-together phrasings: "NoroomonmyplaterightnowNoroomonmyplaterightnow," thinks Girl, not long before someone tells her, "Yeah,I'mnotdrinkingtonight,justhadsomemethandthatshoulddome, youwantsome?" Both constructions quickly become annoying with overuse.
While "The Nanny Diaries" portrayed an X family, the joke was that they could be real. But too many of the characters in "Citizen Girl" remain nameless, as if to make them symbols, and that keeps them from donning flesh and blood. Only the authors want us to see them as complete characters, or at least humorously evil villains, which is difficult with such stagy monikers. In "Citizen Girl" there's something hampering the jokes and sharp asides, something that feels rushed and a bit desperate. It's almost as if the authors have decided to leap over the writing and directly to the marketing and multiple covers. And. We. Don't. Buy. It.
