Review of Caroline Palmer’s Backbone – A Tale of Devil Wears Prada Style Ambition | imaginary

toLast year, The New York Times ran a quiz called “Would You Have Got a Job at Vogue in the 1990s?” It was based on Anna Wintour’s legendary four-page test of potential helpers—a cultural literacy test containing questions about 178 notable people, places, books, and films. I’m afraid this former British Vogue intern didn’t pass the test: wrong era, wrong country.

The woman who is sure to be highly regarded is former Vogue staffer Caroline Palmer, now the author of a novel called Workhorse, set in the “magazine” during the waning days of the golden age of women’s sophistication, when lunches were drunken, high fashion was free and almost anything could be spent. In this 2000s, we meet Clodagh, or Clu, a suburban twenty-something trying to make it in a world of rich, beautiful, well-connected “show horses,” willing to do almost anything to get there.

The women’s magazine has an established literary history, from The Bell Jar to The Devil Wears Prada. So does the genre we call “a young woman coming of age in New York City”—I’m thinking of books like A Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The Rules of Civility, and My Salinger Year. Then there’s the beguiling narration (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Emma Cline’s Guest, Gatsby, and even Breakfast at Tiffany’s). The con man is not just an American phenomenon, but he makes a lot of sense there; A new country without an aristocracy, where renewal always seems possible. Workhorse is a novel that ticks a lot of boxes, and it’s no surprise that it sparked a bidding war. It even contains the most famous hero: a much-hated heroine.

Chloe is a liar, thief, and alcoholic, filled with class envy and internalized misogyny. The way she describes the other women is often mean, though sometimes funny: “She looks particularly exhausted tonight in the harsh kitchen lighting, like when she sees a famous actress buying bananas at a downtown bodega.” It seems fitting for a character who finds herself in a work environment where people say things like “There’s nothing more disgusting than seeing a woman eating appetizers at a cocktail party.” Although Chloe is dissatisfied, as is the case with these novels, you can’t help but root for her—at first, at least. Workhorse follows her from her days as an Upper East Side apartment clerk and her work as an editor. Watching them get there is, at times, tremendous fun. Palmer has a gift for the wit, and Chloe’s observations about the foibles of the fashion industry are razor-sharp. Her dark obsession with the beautiful and well-bred Davis Lawrence, a magazine colleague and the daughter of one of the most terrible mothers she has ever met in fiction, is well drawn, as is her friend Harry, the story’s real-life Holly Golightly. Here are two charismatic people, while the angry, clingy and increasingly desperate Chloe has none.

This, in the end, is the problem with the novel. It’s not that young women don’t deserve to be the subjects of epics as long as The Goldfinch, nor do I have any childish distaste for unlikable characters. However, I probably wish I didn’t have to spend so much time with Chloe. Workhorse comes in at over 500 pages, which is a long time to be on anyone’s mind. Maybe it’s a first-person issue, and having a third person nearby would have worked better. Regardless, you could have cut a full third of this novel and I don’t think it would have suffered. If anything, it would have allowed some of Palmer’s truly brilliant writing – such as her brilliant description of the blackouts in New York – to stand out even more.

The fact that the fashion industry can be shallow and cruel is no news to anyone. The Devil Wears Prada was published 22 years ago, and we are now in the post-Wintour era. It’s hard to know how interested the general reader will be in another nostalgic ode to the heyday of magazine publishing. I enjoyed glimpses of that magic immensely, though it was always, in a sense familiar to all journalists, accompanied by the feeling of being fully in the game as the party in Bungalow 8 winds down. What elevates Workhorse beyond its central subject is a deeper exploration of the emotional burden carried by the perpetual outsider; What a weight – and a waste – such envy and ambition entail, how one day you turn around and find yourself “burning out.”[ed] Over a decade in one night.” As one character says: “You grow up with all these questions that you really want to answer… Am I going to get married? Or am I going to have kids or a good job or something, and then when you start getting the answers, you feel sad?

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.