Imagine that! She compares Truman Capote's classic Breakfast at Tiffany's to Sunday and the other Capote also-rans and discovers to no one's surprise that these new books are entirely (tacky) style and zero substance.

"This summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well," Horyn noted. "Is that all there is? Has the fashion plot thinned to such a degree that it’s just about presenting life as a blue velvet ring box or a giant Birkin bag?"

Horyn tries to figure out why women continue to buy these books. Is all this name dropping aspirational? Harper Collins editor Jonathan Burnham says, "The audience [for these brand-heavy books] is Middle American women looking to buy a taste of the glittering East Coast experience, with all the silliness," while another editor says that like glamorous movies during the Depression, these books provide a glittery salve for those struggling with pedestrian struggles like mortgages.

Really? If my house were being foreclosed on and I started reading a book about basically empty women who are blowing thousands of dollars on gaudy couture, it would not distract me from my plight. It would make me want to punch these fictional harridans directly in the cooch. Which is sort of how I felt when I read this quote from Vogue's Plum Sykes, whose Bergdorf Blondes was a bestseller when it came out in 2004. "Using all those brand names is sort of bizarre,” said Ms. Sykes. “At the time that ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ came out, it seemed so modern. Now it seems old-fashioned.” Oh yes Plum, you invented brand name dropping eons ago, and now that all the plebes have caught on, it's so desperately out of touch!

Anyway, although the venerable Ms. Sykes hath declared brand-name dropping "old-fashioned," Lauren Weisberger's Chasing Harry Winston, which is chock-full of expensive accessories, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks so far. Clearly we can't beat 'em, so we might as well join 'em: mark your calendar for my forthcoming novel, Humping Hermès Scarves to hit book stores in the summer of 2010!

And the Plot Thinned ... [New York Times]

Earlier: Young Adult Novels Plumb New Depths Of Product Placement
Blogging Towards Bethlehem

To be sure, some of the books reviewed in Maslin's article are the bread and butter of the chick lit genre, like Lauren Weisberger's Chasing Harry Winston, with its "caipirinha-soaked" trio of materialistic harpies, she conceded. "But why do Birkin and Everything get thrown into the slush pile with the marriage-minded messes? And some of these books, despite their female friendly plots, must be better than others, mustn't they?" she wondered, pushing a lock of sun-bleached hair behind her ear. "So why are they all thrown into the same catch-all review?"

She toggled back to the front page of the books section and sighed deeply. Of the seventeen other articles on the books index, only two were about works written by women. Dejected, she crawled back into the fuchsia ghetto of the Styles section to read more stories about sunglasses.

On the Beach, Under A Tiffany-Blue Sky [NY Times]
Bringing Home Birkin [Amazon]
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything [Amazon]

Hats off to Anna Wintour, who displayed what may have been the tiniest spark of humour by showing up to a screening of former assistant Lauren Weisberger's book turned movie The Devil Wears Prada in New York.

WWD reports:

"...the crowd controlled themselves admirably and there was nary a gasp or a sideways glance at Wintour's entrance. And with daughter Bee Shaffer and companion Shelby Bryan on either side, Wintour sat stoically through the entire film before literally bolting out of the Paris Theatre to avoid press as the credits rolled."

Wow. It's kind of like the Pope turning up to a screening of The Da Vinci Code.