Everything worth forgetting (Everyone Worth Knowing - Lauren Weisberger)

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Product:	Everyone Worth Knowing - Lauren Weisberger
Date:	21.05.06 (654 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: boring, slow, sloppy fact-checking, annoying characters

Disadvantages: good writing-style

After being let go from her 80-hour a week banking job, you would forgive Bette for mooching around her New York City apartment for a little while, eating junk food, watching daytime television and paying attention to her adorable little dog Millington. Concerned about her future, however, uncle Will quickly steps in to call in a favour and land Bette a job in super-cool PR firm Kelly & Company as an event planner.

Trading in the boring suits for the latest fashion gear, Bette now lives the high life in New York City, working 24-7, always on call. She socializes with the most famous people from East and West Coast alike and quickly becomes boss Kelly’s favourite new employee – be it for all the wrong reasons. Suddenly Bette finds her private life smeared across the tabloids – be it just because she suddenly seems to be the girlfriend of New York’s most successful lawyer and eligible bachelor Philip Weston.

Torn between two worlds, Bette often finds it difficult to choose whether she prefers to read a chick-lit book on her couch or clubbing dressed up in designer gear. Can she somehow manage to be part of both worlds? Or will she have to make a tough choice between celebs and glamour or true friends and family? And will she be able to find a fairytale prince in the process of finding herself?

I spare you the suspense – overall I really did not like this book and I kept reading it for one reason only. Fairly early on in the book it is revealed that the Bette, the main character, lives in a “cement monstrosity”, a “multi-winged behemoth”, which I quite clearly recognized as the one building in the world that I enjoyed living in the most during my life. It was therefore very bizarre to me that Weisberger had only bad things to say about it – that the flat suffered from waterbugs and that the flat was tiny. I kept reading because I felt that she should really have highlighted the merits of this place I once called home. Not once does she touch upon the fact that the lobby is fantastic – with waterfalls and goldfish! In addition, she tells us that Bette lives in apartment 1313. I am quite sure that this particular building does not have a 13th floor (in many New York apartments the floor numbering jumps straight from 12 to 14, to avoid superstitious tenants from worrying about the bad karma attached to this number) – but even if it did have a 13th floor, I am absolutely certain that there is no such thing as apartment 1313, as all the apartment numbers consist of the floor number followed by a letter of the alphabet.

Yes, I am picking holes into an unimportant aspect of the storyline – but Weisberger’s sloppiness becomes apparent later on in the book, when all of a sudden the character – without a mention of having moved apartments – suddenly invites a man back to her place, which suddenly is not on 34th Street by the river, but on 28th street between 3rd Avenue and Lexington Avenue!

To round it off, this is not the only loophole I spotted. On one occasion, Bette’s best friend Penelope calls her. There is a mention that Bette sees Penelope’s number on the caller ID. But then it turns out that Penelope is unexpectedly calling from a hotel. This would not have been strange in this day and age of mobile phones – except when Weisberger starts to mention how Penelope’s boyfriend is pulling on the phone line of a phone that Bette could not possibly have recognized the number of!

The other thing that I was sorely disappointed with is how much Weisberger fails to capture the feeling of New York, the character of the city. She makes it sound rather bland, its inhabitants rather shallow, which is not my experience of this vibrant city. Generally it appears that Weisberger tries to keep the venues faceless and she concentrates on the interaction of the characters instead – only on occasion throwing in a New York landmark that makes the connaisseur smile. I thought for a moment tat Weisberger may not have had the chance to experience New York enough to write a book in this setting – but indeed the author does live in New York these days.

Focusing on the character is generally a thing that I do enjoy – and I think that Weisberger does manage to portray different types of people quite well – with the slight problem that apart from three characters, they all seem rather annoying and make me want to put down the book. I find Bette very unlikeable – although, as she is just going through a phase in her life where she is finding herself, she may be forgiven for being a little all over the place. But the people who work at Kelly & Company are shallow people through and through and just stereotype the idea that skinny and beautiful people are false and on drugs most of the time.

The points at which I started to enjoy the book where when Bette actually is not in New York. When she visits her family in Poughkeepsie or she travels to Turkey on business, I can finally find a way to enjoy the storyline and stop picking holes in Weisberger’s writing. But maybe this is because suddenly the whole focus on fashion and stardom – a topic I am less than interested in – suddenly is shifted to show a nicer, down-to-earth side of our main character, Bette.

To give Weisberger credit, she is an incredibly good writer and certainly has a lot more vocabulary than most chick-lit authors, making her appear highly intelligent and educated. But this brilliance with words simply does not make up for the fact that the storyline is dull for about the first 150 pages, then becomes briefly interesting, then bores the reader again only to provide another ten to twenty pages of excitement before the story is abruptly ended leaving the reader with a handful of unanswered questions.


***Further information***

Harper Collins
Pages: 367 (written in very small font)
Price: £6.99 (for new paperback)
ISBN: 0-00-718265-1

Summary: A boring read, focusing too much on fashion and annoying characters.