Bergdorf Blondes
Plum Sykes Viking, 320pp, £10
ISBN 0670914339
I went to New York for the first time last year. It wasn't what I expected. But I'm sure the problem wasn't New York; it was me. I was too tired - jaded after a hellish eight months in which I had had a baby, written a novel and then launched it into society.
No doubt I was too old and spoilt as well. I bet the way to see NYC for the first time is with a pack of cigarettes and Mrs Wagner pies, full of youthful adventurousness and energy. Entre nous, I thought New York was pretty grim. It was horribly hot, for a start. The sun glared off the buildings and seared you every five seconds as you had to stop at a crossing. The traffic was nightmarish, the yellow cabbies mad to a man, and our hotel had hideously needy doormen. The tour of the Empire State Building (I know, I know) had us wetting ourselves with fear (90-odd floors, shuffling queues, no obvious means of escape), while Greenwich Village struck us as a bit like Spitalfields but not as old.
Saddest of all were our attempts to find glamour in this allegedly most glamorous of cities. The Plaza looked like a Moscow underground station, its bar a provincial pub by Hieronymus Bosch. The Waldorf Astoria was hosting a prosthetic limb convention (or something similar), and the shops, so far as I could see, were pretty similar to shops in London. FAO Schwarz was Hamleys but less so, while Bergdorf Goodman, far from being a buzzy, hip, Selfridges-a-like, had the maiden-aunt whiff of Dickins & Jones.
OK, so we did everything wrong (we loved the Rainbow Room and the Staten Island Ferry). But as a result, Bergdorf Blondes was never likely to ring my bell. This is not Plum Sykes's fault. What struck me immediately was how neatly her book falls into the increasingly common category - Julian Fellowes's Snobs is another - of novel as upmarket manual. While Snobs explains the subtlest nuances of aristocratic behaviour, Bergdorf Blondes is essentially a guide to glossy New York life - the designers, the waxing salons, the hotels, the restaurants. It's a little black book with a story attached.
The story is classic chick-lit material - glossy magazine writer's love travails and network of stylish friends. After falling for a dishy photographer and pulchritudinous prince and attempting suicide in the Paris Ritz (mais bien sur), our heroine finds love - where else? - where she least expects it. Sykes has an upbeat, breathy style and there are some sharp observations. In one particularly funny scene about a reading group, a gaggle of Park Avenue princesses ask piercing literary questions such as whether writing makes you thin and if Dave Eggers is married.
That said, I must confess to finding the central myth that this novel perpetuates - the idea that New York is all high-octane glamour, jam-packed with the hottest hang-outs on earth - completely unconvincing. Frankly, I've never been so glad to return to murky old London in my life (but then, I love London). Yet perhaps, as I said, it's all my fault. Perhaps if I'd read Bergdorf Blondes first, I'd have had a better idea of where to go.
Wendy Holden's latest novel, Azur Like It, is published in paperback by Headline (£6.99)
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