Branded

When Richard and I went to Paris a few years ago, I was intent upon visiting the House of Balmain, where I purchased a beautiful tie from their small men's collection. But I was less interested in shopping than I was in seeing the place where Valentine O'Neill began her career as a fashion designer. Valentine is fictional, a character in Judith Krantz's Scruples, a book that positively sizzles with brand-name-dropping, put there not as paid product placement but as verisimilitude of an especially glamorous kind.

So I'm a little impatient with the argument that we should be worried about brand names in YA fiction. I could certainly get into a fine frothing if the YA series actually whored themselves out to the highest brand-name bidder, which would be both sneaky and lazy: if it doesn't matter if your heroine wears Chanel or Balmain you haven't thought hard enough about her. But that's not what's happening, and I am more scandalized that the Times article pimped this possibility so heavily only to reveal that it had no basis in fact. Yet.

My favorite new reviewing word,

from Publishers Weekly's 3/3/08 review of Penny Vincenzi's (love her) An Absolute Scandal: "chickensian."

Happy Birthday, Judy!

Martha told me she heard this morning on "Writer's Almanac" that today is Judith Krantz's birthday. (I guess there is hope for NPR.) There are lots of writers I admire, respect, enjoy, but Krantz is the one I love the most. It's not the sex and clothes (although she writes well about both) but the easy, generous, and amused tone of her narration and the ladylike swagger with which she employs four-letter-words. I had the great pleasure of talking with Krantz once for several hours for a Booklist interview, and she told me she had to give up using the c-word after her first novel, Scruples, because it was the one word her "ladies" (as she called her readers) positively hated.

Any Krantz novice should begin with Scruples, of course; after that I would most highly recommend Till We Meet Again (two French sisters, one a pilot and the other a movie star, and their mother, a star of the Paris music hall who becomes a great châtelaine of Champagne) and Dazzle (gorgeous and impetuous photojournalist with two scheming half-sisters). Any one of them would be perfect for your journey to Philadelphia tomorrow.

Odd trivia: Did you know that Judith Krantz was sister-in-law, via her brother, publisher (and acidhead) Jeremy Tarcher, to the late Shari Lewis?