As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the best-selling “Gossip Girl” novels for teen-age girls, excels in. Von Ziegesar writes in the language of contemporary youth—things are cool or hot or they so totally suck. But the language is a decoy. The heartlessness of youth is von Ziegesar’s double-edged theme, the object of her mockery—and sympathy. She understands that children are a pleasure-seeking species, and that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness. She also knows—as the authors of the best children’s books have known—that children like to read what they don’t entirely understand. Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult.
As the first book opens, Blair Waldorf—who is almost seventeen and lives in a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street, with her divorcée mother, Eleanor, her younger brother, Tyler, and her cat, Kitty Minky—is sulking in her room. Blair, in the description of a classmate, is “the bitchiest, vainest girl in the entire senior class, or maybe the entire world,” and an antiheroine of the first rank: bad-tempered, mean-spirited, bulimic, acquisitive, endlessly scheming, and, of course, dark-haired. The blond heroine, Serena van der Woodsen (who lives at an even better Fifth Avenue address, right across from the Metropolitan Museum), is incandescently beautiful, exceptionally kind, and, in the end, it has to be said, somewhat boring. The series belongs to awful Blair, who inspires von Ziegesar’s highest flights of comic fancy.
Blair is sulking because her mother’s new boyfriend, a Jewish real-estate developer named Cyrus Rose, “a completely annoying, fat loser,” and her mother are in the kitchen eating breakfast in matching red silk robes. When dressed, Rose “looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saks—bald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit. He jingled the change in his pocket incessantly. . . . He had a loud laugh.” What? We’re only on page 6 and already reading about a fat, vulgar Jew! Doesn’t von Ziegesar know that anti-Semitic stereotypes are no longer tolerated in children’s literature? Of course she does. Cyrus Rose is only one among many tokens of her gleeful political incorrectness. An elderly guest speaker at Blair’s high-school graduation is another:
Only someone very hard-hearted wouldn’t laugh at this. The way von Ziegesar implicates us in her empathic examination of youth’s callousness is the Waughish achievement of these strange, complicated books. And in Blair she has found a powerful pivot for her feat.
She has equipped this girl with an excess of the most unattractive but also perhaps most necessary impulses of human nature—the impulses that give us such up and go as we have. Unlike her forerunners Becky Sharp and Lizzie Eustace, who ruthlessly elbowed their way into wealthy aristocratic society, Blair already has all the money and position anyone could want. She is pure naked striving, restlessly seeking an object, any object, and never knowing when enough is enough. However—and, again, unlike her prototypes—Blair never harms anyone but herself. She thinks malevolent thoughts about everyone, but she does not act on them. It is her own foot that she invariably shoots. Her goals of the moment—to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, and to get into Yale University—elude her. Something always gets in the way of her doing it with Nate, and her Yale interview is a catastrophe beyond imagination.
Nate is a kind of Vronsky manqué, with a grande-dame mother, like Vronsky’s, and a Navy-captain father who is “a master sailor and extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department.” (Too bad Tolstoy didn’t think of a father like that for V.) Nate “might look like a stud, but he was actually pretty weak.” This is because he is stoned most of the time. He lives in a town house in the East Eighties and is a senior at St. Jude’s, a private school that appears to be modelled on the Collegiate School, as Blair and Serena’s school, Constance Billard, is modelled on von Ziegesar’s old school, Nightingale-Bamford.
Unlike the actual private schools of New York, however, which give a fair number of scholarships to low-income minority students, von Ziegesar’s private schools are almost a hundred per cent minority-free. (I say almost because of Carmen Fortier, a scholarship girl from the Bronx, who appears—chewing gum—on page 86 of the first book of the series, and is never seen again.) Of course, this glaring absence is necessary to von Ziegesar’s program of provocation. She does not compromise it. There are no Brussels sprouts hidden in her Rice Krispie marshmallow treats. She is writing a transgressive fairy tale, not a worthy book for a school list. “Welcome to New York’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live and go to school and play and sleep—sometimes with each other” is von Ziegesar’s opening volley, delivered in the voice of an anonymous figure called Gossip Girl, who continues:
The question of where Rufus gets the money for the private-school fees—and for the designer clothes that Dan and Jenny buy on his credit card as their lives intersect with those of the East Side kids—is left unanswered. Von Ziegesar has other concerns than writing books that make a lot of sense. Along with the pieties of political correctness, she has taken on the indecencies of consumer culture. Insanely expensive clothes are the engine of her sendup of our time of ceaseless shopping. There is scarcely a page on which the name of a fashion designer doesn’t appear. The kids don’t wear dresses and coats and pants and shoes; they wear Diane von Furstenberg dresses, Stephane Kélian shoes, Hugo Boss coats, Marc Jacobs shirts. If the book has any redeeming social value, it is as an education in label recognition. After reading the “Gossip Girl” books, you will never walk into a department store again without feeling a little surge of pride as you recognize Christian Louboutin and John Fluevog and Michael Kors—who are to their world what Marcel Proust and Henry James and Theodore Dreiser are to the bookish audience for whom von Ziegesar writes in the guise of writing for the pre-S.A.T. young. The books are full of literary allusions: there are quotes from Wilde, Hemingway, Shakespeare, references to Goethe and Tolstoy, and chapters entitled “The Red or the Black” and “What We Talk About When We’re Not Talking About Love.”
Dan Humphrey is a caricature of the angst-ridden nerd who writes poetry. Dan’s friend Vanessa Abrams is so taken with a poem of his, called “Sluts,” that, behind his back, she sends it to this magazine, where it is immediately accepted by our revered (if imaginary) Submissions Editor, Jani Price. After the poem is published, Dan, who previously spent his after-school time in his room “reading morbid, existentialist poetry about the bitter fate of being human,” becomes a star. He is courted by an agent. A rock band hires him to write lyrics. He starts shopping at Agnès B.
His sister, Jenny, is a shy ninth grader, who “preferred to be invisible” and might have succeeded “if her boobs weren’t so incredibly huge.” She is a kind of stand-in for the eighth and ninth graders who read the “Gossip Girl” books, and who will identify with her innocent worship of the cool senior girls. But, except for her boobs, she is not very interesting.
Vanessa is “an anomaly at Constance, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ over and over like it was the Bible [and] had no friends at all at Constance.” Her hippie parents, Arlo and Gabriela, who live in Vermont in a house made of recycled automobile tires, have allowed Vanessa to live in Williamsburg with her older sister Ruby, who plays bass in a rock band, on the condition that she get “a good, safe, high-school education.” Writing of a visit the hippie parents make to New York, von Ziegesar fulfills her pact with youth to lose no opportunity to express the disgust it feels for the old and unbeautiful and deviant. She dresses the “gaunt and alarmed” Arlo in a Peruvian poncho and ankle-length hemp skirt (“Yes, that’s right, a skirt”) and the gray-braided Gabriela in a garish African schmatte, and sends them off to an exclusive New York benefit. When Vanessa asks where the benefit is being held, Gabriela replies, “Somewhere called the Frick. It’s on Fifth Street, I think. . . . I’ve got the address written down somewhere.” Weightless little in-jokes like this are scattered throughout the books, like the optional confectioner’s sugar on tea cake. Von Ziegesar’s hands are never idle.
Of course, the cake itself is of Hostess Twinkie immateriality—the “Gossip Girl” books are the lightest of light reading. They revolve around the twin desires of von Ziegesar’s high-school seniors: to have a good time and to get into college. The conflict that might exist between these desires in the real world does not exist in the world of “The Gossip Girls.” No one ever cracks a book (they are too busy shopping at the three “B”s—Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Barneys—or working in soup kitchens so that they can say they did on their college applications), and (with one exception, a vicious boy named Chuck Bass, who “could barely spell, had never read a book in its entirety, and thought Beowulf was a type of fur used for lining coats”) everyone gets into college. This is not much of a plot, admittedly, but von Ziegesar’s impudence invests the dopey activities of her characters with true page-turning interest.
Von Ziegesar uses the technique of narration through interior voice with all her major characters, but when she gets into the id-shaped mind of Blair Waldorf she crosses a kind of boundary. Blair is both a broader caricature and a more real person than the others. Her over-the-top selfishness and hatefulness has the ring of behind-our-masks-we’re-all-like-that truth. And among her malevolent internal mutterings lurk some of the series’ funniest lines. When her mother marries Cyrus Rose, for example, and proposes that Blair reconsider her refusal to take his name, Blair’s inner voice growls back: “Blair Rose? No thank you. It sounded like the name of a perfume made especially for Kmart.” Her refusal is a rare gesture of defiance. In almost every other respect, she is an obedient, even rather docile, child. She is angered and embarrassed by her mother’s marriage to the oily Cyrus (and by her pregnancy at forty-seven), but she confines her fury to her thoughts. She is always perfectly civil to Cyrus, who is a perfectly amiable goof. Nor does she kick and scream when her pretty bedroom is requisitioned as a nursery for the baby and she has to move into her stepbrother Aaron’s ugly, ecologically correct room (it has a cruelty-free mahogany dresser), which smells so strongly of his dog, Mooky, that Kitty Minky urinates all over the bed in protest. She merely packs a bag and moves into a suite at the Plaza. Has the powerlessness of children and the power of money ever been so nicely fused? The gesture also gives rise to one of the series’ best set pieces.
Ensconced at the Plaza, Blair calls Nate and tells him to “get your ass over here right now.” Nate agrees, but, because he is with friends getting stoned, he quickly forgets about the call. Blair waits and waits. She calls Nate and gets no reply. (He has wandered off to the Battery to sail his father’s boat to Bermuda and left his cell phone behind.) Blair is wearing black silk La Perla underwear and has ordered champagne and caviar on toast points. She eats a toast point, then another, and calls her father, Harold Waldorf, in the South of France, “where he’d been living since he and Eleanor split up over his gayness almost two years ago.” It is late at night in France, and “Blair could picture him perfectly, naked except for a pair of royal blue silk boxer shorts, his sleeping lover—François or Eduard or whatever his name was—snoring softly beside him.”
“ ‘Bear? Is everything okay? Did you hear from those fuckheads at Yale yet? Are you in?’ her father demanded as soon as he heard her voice.”
Blair reflects that “talking to her dad was exactly like talking to one of her girlfriends.” As she finishes the toast points and begins drinking the champagne, Harold inanely tells her, “You deserve to have it all.” She is moved to ask, “If I deserve to have it all, then how come stupid Yale hasn’t let me in yet?”
“ ‘Oh, Bear,’ her dad sighed in his manly-but-motherly voice that made both men and women fall in love with him instantly. ‘They will, dammit. They will let you in.’ ”
I will not give away whether Blair does or doesn’t get into Yale. I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone, like the toast points. The platter has barely been touched. But I think I have given enough of an idea of what she and her creator are about. The television series based on the “Gossip Girl” books was reviewed here by Nancy Franklin (November 26, 2007). I completely share Nancy’s (or should I say Nanci’s?) dim view of the adaptation. It is related to the original only in the names and outlines of the characters. “ ‘I don’t know what I’d do without Barneys.’ Serena sighed, as if the store had saved her life.” Without von Ziegesar’s fast, mocking commentary to propel them, the TV episodes are sluggish and crass—a move from Barneys to Kmart.
Among the many errors that the TV series makes, perhaps the most glaring is its promotion of the books’ parents from their status as emblems of parental inadequacy to that of characters in their own right. In the TV version, we are asked to follow the stories of the parents in tandem with the stories of their children: Lillian van der Woodsen and Rufus Humphrey, for one particularly unfortunate example, are thrust into a trite romance. What makes classic children’s literature so appealing (to all ages) is its undeviating loyalty to the world of the child. In the best children’s books, parents never share the limelight with their children; if they are not killed off on page 1, they are cast in the pitifully minor roles that actual parents play in their children’s imaginative lives. That von Ziegesar’s parent characters are ridiculous as well as insignificant in the eyes of their children only adds to the sly truthfulness of her comic fairy tale. ♦
