Because sometimes, “where do you get your ideas” is painfully obvious

So first: yes, I sat down last week and read through THE WASHINGTONIENNE. Well, I started out with good intentions but eventually I did have to resort to skimming, bouncing around between pages and finally, giving up once I realized I wasn’t really reading a “novel” after all.

But I decided to hold off on saying anything once I found out the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley (!!) was going to review it today, and so he has. To my amazement, he actually, um, considers it “not half-bad”:

“The Washingtonienne” is proof positive that the book

industry, when it sniffs the rich aroma of profit, can fling aside its

18th-century ways and boogie with the big boys. Ordinarily it is the

dumbest business on the planet, taking nine months to a year — or more

— to shepherd a manuscript through editing and production, a process

that involves endless expense-account lunches at which absolutely

nothing is accomplished, sales conferences (sometimes in exotic

locales) at which editors’ immense egos are stroked and/or destroyed,

and the demolition of whole forests to print news releases that nobody

reads.

But when it comes to Washington’s version of

“Sex and the City,” the good folks at Hyperion, Cutler’s publisher,

really moved. Why, a year ago no one had heard of her except the

friends with whom she gossiped and the men whose libidinous needs she

serviced, yet now she has her very own book, featured in prime

locations in all bookstores — and just wait until she starts hitting

the talk shows. The buzz will be louder than the 17-year cicadas.

Goodbye Jane Austen, hello Instant Messenger. As for the lucky author,

the only thing to say is: Way to go, Jessica.

What’s

even more remarkable than this publishing coup is that for about a

quarter of the way through, “The Washingtonienne” gives hints of being

lively, funny and agreeably in-your-face. Eventually it runs out of

steam, but for a while Cutler — in the voice of Jacqueline Turner, her

singularly unheroic heroine — sticks pins in a lot of deserving

targets. Washington itself, for example, is “an easy place” for sex

because, lacking “those industries that attract the Beautiful People,

such as entertainment and fashion,” being “full of young single people

and bored married people,” even a girl of modest looks can find plenty

of action.

And the media circus has certainly begun, as Cutler’s doing the interview rounds. In this New York Post Q&A, she’s inevitably asked to contrast blogging and writing:

You never intended to be a novelist. Has that changed?

 

I hate writing. Blogging is one thing; a novel is so much more.
I want to do a second book. I don’t want to do a memoir. You don’t want
to write about yourself all the time. I’m not that interesting.

As Yardley points out, what’s a girl to do when publishers come calling for her story? Turn down the money? Say no? Of course not. Cutler had a story to tell, albeit a thinly veiled one, and even if she never writes another book again, well hey, in this day and age of disposable celebrities, why not get her fifteen minutes?

But at the same time, I suppose I’d hoped the book would bear a teensy, tiny relation to a novel. Ah well.