Bergdorf Blondes (Hardcover)

So what is wrong with this book? Why does everyone who reads it hate it so much? Oh, there are so many reasons. Maybe it's the tone and delivery, which is an intensely irritating hybrid of wittering-English-posh-girl and witless-American-valley-teen speak, with a few French words thrown in as Sykes tries to channel Holly Golightly (it's not going to happen): 'It was tres unkind of him to be so cross after all I'd been through. I mean, hello, what about some major sympathy?'. Then there's the constant repetition of Sykes' favourite phrases: why use 'going to Brazil' as a sexual metaphor just once if you can use it a hundred times (even if it has already appeared on the TV series of Sex in the City years ago)? And occasionally the book just gets cringe-makingly climb under the sofa and die awful: 'I honestly believe that if everyone was having orgasms regularly, there wouldn't be a Palestinian conflict.' I know this is supposed to be funny and flippant and charmingly daring, and it's so dull, darling, to take it all so seriously, but unfortunately neither Sykes' novel or her narrator has the wit or charisma needed to pull this kind of thing off. In fact it is, as one of Sykes' characters might say, totally icky.

But all of these flaws would be forgivable if they were propping up characters or plot or anything interesting, but it's just interchangeable blank talking heads name-checking designer dresses. It's almost impressive how the narrator manages to be at once so awful that you just want her suicide attempt in chapter 6 to be successful and so personality-free that you can't picture her, can't remember anything she says and can't care about anything she does. And then all the socialites, who are supposed to be crazy or hilariously shallow or fascinating, just blend into one big indistinguishable mass of blonde hair and blah Cartier blah Valentino blah engagements. The men are no different, the mother is a rip-off from Bridget Jones' Diary ('Now, have you met my lovely daughter?...why don't you both come to the party tomorrow? I've got the dearest little mini pita breads in from Waitrose') and you can tell a mile off who the heroine is going to end up with- oh, he's sweet and concerned and funny and simple, and oh then they disagree and she hates him, and oh then there are further hilarious complications and revelations!

This book could have been good; it could have been nasty and satirical and stylish, or flippant and trashy and entertaining, or sharp and wicked and glorious. But it isn't even funny, and - despite the fact I get as much vicarious enjoyment from hearing about the lives of the New York beautiful people as the next pyjama-wearing internet-surfing Superdrug-face-mask-wearing slob does- it's really, really boring to read. The nearest I came to laughing was when I accidentally dropped it in the bath; the nearest I came to caring was when I fished it out and realised I wouldn't be able to get my money back. I feel like Plum Sykes mugged me for a tenner. I'll never buy a book written by someone named after a fruit again.