The novel's heroine is Andrea Sachs, a small-town girl and freshly minted Brown graduate who dreams of writing for The New Yorker. This, in case you failed to understand, means she's a "real" writer. To ensure that we're left with no doubt of Andrea's twenty-four carat intellectual purity, Weisberger introduces us to her after she's returned from a two-month journey in India ravaged by amoebic dysentery, and saddles her with a longtime boyfriend who teaches underprivileged kids in a bad neighborhood and has all the vim and verve of a Stepford wife.
Predictably, Andrea's post-college job hunt is fruitless until what seems to be the opportunity of a lifetime lands in her lap: the chance to work as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the feared and revered editor-in-chief of the fashion bible Runway (a thinly veiled facsimile of Vogue). Naturally, Andrea has a scholar's distaste for fashion magazines and she's warned that Miranda is tempestuous at best, but the job has one irresistible draw: if she makes it through one year's employment without getting fired, Miranda will make a call and obtain her a position at the magazine of her choice.
The rest of the novel is little more than a series of incidents and anecdotes, as Andrea, thrown into a world of hyperactive celebrities and fashionistas, struggles to fulfill Miranda's outrageous demands, working sixteen-hour days and on call a full twenty-four. Exhausted, overworked and nursing a systematically abused ego, her relationship with the boyfriend slowly deteriorates and she barely notices as her best friend begins a dangerous tumble into alcoholism.
It's common knowledge by now that Weisberger herself graduated from college and worked for a time at Vogue, under its legendarily ball-busting editor-in-chief Anna Wintour; and while Weisberger's claims that her villain is not based upon Wintour have garnered much press, the truth is fairly obvious. For the novel is little more than a self-pitying, vindictive tell-all, at its best when recounting the mad workings of a major magazine and the fashion world, and completely irrelevant when attempting to focus on Andrea's life outside work-the subplots involving her family and friends are barely sketched and unconvincing. If the novel is entirely fictitious, and not based on the behind-the-scenes antics of Wintour and the Vogue crowd, it loses its only point of interest.
In Andrea, whom Weisberger evidently regards as an improved version of herself, we find the glaring contradiction that lends the narrative its inherent confusion. Andrea's contempt for the industry she works in is unflagging and monotonous, yet the novel itself is enamored with glamor, obsessively name-dropping and paying excessive attention to dress sizes, heel lengths, sweater fabrics and so on. It is completely alienating to have the narrator spend half her time professing disdain while cataloguing every material detail of her job. Moreover, it's infinitely condescending to provide no reason for this thorough distaste, as Weisberger is thereby assuming her readers share in it without question. Andrea is as much of a snob as the Gucci-clad coterie of Runway worker bees, with one big exception: she's written an entire novel to complain.
"The Devil Wears Prada" is all the more disappointing because of the enormous potential of its fascinating subject. In Weisberger's hands, Anna–-pardonnez-moi, Miranda––is a colorless caricature, so one-dimensional that even her most extravagant demands become dull and unsurprising by the novel's halfway mark. According to Weisberger, Miranda's talent doesn't much extend beyond her ability to "pair a talented photograher with some expensive clothes and walk away with some pretty magazine pages." Believing that's all it takes to be editor-in-chief of the world's preeminent fashion magazine––a magazine that reads and shapes a subculture more influential and widespread than Weisberger, herself an affected party, apparently fails to understand––is nothing short of obtuse. Weisberger writes that "throughout our weeks together, I felt there was nothing I did not know about Miranda Priestly. Except, of course, what exactly made her so important." But she's got it backwards. The novel, despite its shortcomings, does hint at the influence a Miranda Priestly has on the world. Where it fails most egregiously is in failing to show us who this fascinating monster is––her pressures, her sacrifices, her demons, her fears. But Weisberger is too preoccupied with her complaints to realize that a picture of the woman hiding behind the legend would be a thousand times more telling than an account of her lunchtime calories.