The New Yorker reviews Gossip Girl

Published Mar 03 2008, 06:02 PM by Sharon Steel

Er, more specifically, JANET MALCOLM has reviewed Gossip Girl, and we're talking about the book series by Cecily von Ziegesar, not the television series by Josh Scwhartz. Oh, we are completely losing our shit over this review. It is three pages long online, although we would be so happy if it were longer, and that Malcolm did succumb against her own will and "go on telling Blair stories until they are gone..." The piece is so full of delicious bits we're pretty much at a loss. We would cut and paste the entire thing here just to satisfy our need to have it preserved somehow, but instead we elected to simply link to it and cut out the clip from our print copy and file it away in our file folder of amazing stuff. But just because we really can't help ourselves:

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.”

Even though the books are about a hundred years old in terms of newsiness and timeliness, it really doesn't matter because of how elegantly Malcolm dissects them here. We wish we were her, pretty much.

Filed Under: Lit Links, Publishing, The New Yorker, Things We Love, YA

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The New Yorker reviews Gossip Girl

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