Word: clef
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...needs it. Or why the staff is late for the meeting she's moved up the time for. Or why someone dares to propose a feature on enamel costume jewelry when they did the same feature two years ago. If this movie, which is based on a roman a clef by Lauren Weisberger, who once worked in publishing for real-life sacred monster Anna Wintour, had concentrated fully on Miranda's essentially motiveless malignity, it might have been a great black comedy...
...Things Past with a flirtatious male don, for winning him a place at Cambridge. Here he repays the favor with a Proustian portrait of his hero, adding layer upon layer of sometimes miscellaneous information, in vaguely chronological order. Though Proust always insisted his masterwork was not a roman à clef, Davenport-Hines shows the parallels between Proust and his fictional narrator, real figures and the fabricated ones. Born in Paris to a rich Jewish mother and a Catholic physician father, Proust was a nervous, asthmatic child who grew up to be, in Davenport-Hines' phrase, "the most famous valetudinarian...
...Marie Cox knows how to make a stir. She became the talk of the town in Washington, D.C., as the blogger Wonkette, covering politics with a racy edge. Now, her new book, Dog Days, a roman ? clef about a 28-year-staffer on the 2004 campaign of Democratic candidate John Hillman (get it?) who is having an affair with a married political journalist, Cox making waves in the same mainstream media that she saucily disses. This week, she sold her second book to Riverhead with typical Wonkette fanfare. We caught up with Ana Marie by phone on a train...
This, apparently, is what all the really bad bosses are wearing these days. Filming began last weekend on the movie adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, a roman à clef penned by a former assistant to Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour. In the movie, MERYL STREEP plays Miranda Priestly, the temperamental, overweening editor of a fictional fashion glossy called Runway--a character based loosely on Wintour. But the movie's stylists did away with the fashion queen's dark bob and sunglasses, reportedly to make the character sexier, more provocative and not so devilish. Or maybe they thought Wintour...
...doddering, pajama-clad Ronald Reagan is balking at leaving the White House to attend his successor's inauguration: it is too cold outside. So begins The White House Mess, a just-published satire that has titillated Washington by lampooning the self-serving banalities of political memoirs. This capital à clef was written by onetime White House Intimate Christopher Buckley, 33, former speechwriter for Vice President George Bush, as well as the son of Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley, an old friend of the Reagans'. The novel, however, "doesn't seem to have hurt any feelings," admits Buckley. "Maybe...