Jacqueline Susan – The Valley of The Dolls

What with the epic levels of stress and organisation going on (I have a spreadsheet just to remind me what I’m supposed to do each day. I’m not proud of it.) I need one thing and one thing alone from my reading at the moment. FRIVOLITY. Also, escapism. Absurdity. Ludicrousness. Ideally, some bodice ripping Tudors too, though Philippa Gregory is, most selfishly, not working to my schedule.

And what are the three books on my shelves which I haven’t packed? The three books which are supposed to meet this not very demanding goal?

Moll Flanders, The Mumsnet Guide to Pregnancy, and The Singer’s Musical Theatre Anthology.

Self knowledge and forethought #FAIL.

To the library!

Where I return with Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls. Which is every single one of the above, and even features the ridiculously named Lyon Burke in place of bodice-ripping Tudors, BUT also has the added advantage of not being shameful to read because it is a classic. Not Moll Flanders scale classic, but classic all the same.

And, should you so wish, you do not just have to revel in the enjoyable trashiness of it; you can also do *serious face* critical analysis about how crappy things were before feminism was born.

So: here we have three women in various states of connectedness with showbiz-land. Anne has escaped her deadly dull provincial life and run away to New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of. She starts working as a secretary in a showbizzy agency; but Anne is super-beautiful and soon gets involved with various men who want to have all this beauty for themselves. As a result of her conveniently-coincidental meeting with a millionaire, she gets more drawn in to the glamourous but shallow lifestyle of Broadway. She is able to give a helping hand to struggling ingenue Neely and also meets much-older-than-she-says Jennifer who is just on the cusp of proper stardom. The book covers around twenty years of their see-saw lives, where things gradually get darker and more sordid and desperate. Because you know what, young and impressionable readers? Showbiz is not a nice place to be! Who’d have thought it.

The men in this book are vain and shallow and egotistical and objectivifying. The women aren’t exactly lovely either: they are grasping and ruthless and stop-at-nothing. But they sort of have to be, because they are all relying on their looks and TICK TOCK. They have to beat the odds before the end up on the scrap heap. However, it’s not as simple as pre-feminist man = bad; pre-feminist women = innocent and exploited. Neely in particular is a vicious piece of work.

Clunky dialogue is something of a feature of Valley of the Dolls. Characters often make Long Winded and Impassioned Speeches to Convey Significant Cultural and Sociological Points, using words that don’t ring true, such as ‘etched’. Also, because the book covers a lot of ground, the characters have to do that specially irritating thing of telling each other things that they already know in order that the reader knows it too. Tiresome. However, this is definitely overlookable, because Valley of the Dolls is so effortlessly readable and surprisingly modern. With some implied rudery that is really quite rude.

Library, I knew you wouldn’t fail me.