I wanted to love this book because I loved its conceit: a former junior staffer for Miramax Films writes a roman à clef about what it's like to work for a place suspiciously like Miramax Films—and then she sells the book to her former employer's book division, Miramax Books. I thought it would show that cheekiness, that verve, that insidery sense of the media business that lots of us love.Well,
The Twins of TriBeCa is cheeky, all right, full of the kind of industry jokes I expected. The film company in question is called Glorious, after Gloria Waxman, mother of the two very difficult, competitive brothers called Tony and Phil Waxman (see parents Miriam + Max Weinstein = Miramax, run by the Weinstein brothers). The dog on the premises is a big mean animal called Harvey (after Harvey Weinstein). The famously reclusive actor who co-owns the space in which the Waxmans work is named Eddie De Silva (Robert De Niro), and the performer everyone is dying to have at their premiere is a celebrity currently known as The Person. So far, I guess, so good.The problem is that jokes like these are exactly as far as
The Twins of TriBeCa goes. Oh, yes, there's a plot (about whether the heroine, who works first in publicity and then in marketing, will get together with the foot fetishist Page 6 journalist) and a subplot (about some mysterious leaks from the famously manipulative publicity department). But, as in other employee-revenge novels—I'm thinking
The Devil Wears Prada, as
ToT author Pine clearly was, too—the plot is not just thin, it's as anorectic as the characters it's based on. Pine's heroine, Karen—like the heroine in
TDWP—is supposed to be a modern-day Candide, a stranger in a strange land, an observer whose naïveté inspires a kind of primitive insight. Instead, she comes off as a whiny, entitled brat. Sure, the Waxmans and their crew are impossible, but when Karen, at the end of the book, laments that working for them has made her forget to watch CNN and to discuss the news stories she used to think were so important, I was shocked. She did? Last we heard, at the beginning of the novel, she thought her job as a researcher at CNN was stultifying. In a better novel, this about-face would be an epiphany; here it just seems disingenuous. Karen's sense of entitlement is such that she'd bristle if she were asked to fetch coffee for the pope.Thanks to the success of
The Devil Wears Prada, there remains a place for this kind of novel in the publishing landscape. And that's great, when it's done well—see 2002's
The Nanny Diaries, which melded heart and humor with its social satire.
Twins, on the other hand, is short on heart and predictable in its humor, altogether more gimmick than art.
Agent, Katherine Boyle. 75,000 first printing. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Pine's debut novel follows Karen Jacobs, who quits her job at CNN to take a position as an assistant at Glorious Pictures, a major movie studio based in New York. But Karen isn't prepared for the bizarre behavior she finds in the publicity department at the studio: the senior assistant is jealous of her; her boss, Allegra, rarely talks above a whisper and makes urgent phone calls from the comfort of her bedroom; and connected interns don't have to come into work at all. Karen gets the chance to experience everything from the thrill of working at Glorious' Academy Awards party to the tirades of insecure executives in the publicity department. Readers who follow Hollywood gossip will recognize many of the thinly veiled films and celebs mentioned in the novel, including the mercurial, eccentric twins of the title who are easily recognizable as Miramax heads Harvey and Bob Weinstein. A definite piece of "gossip lit," Pine's first novel is a fun peek behind the scenes of a major Hollywood studio and the wackiness that ensues there.
Kristine HuntleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
