A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses: A review of Judith Krantz by Clive James →
I recently discovered that Random House has released the the entire oeuvre of Judith Krantz
In case you’re too young to remember, until the early to mid 1990s or so, Judith Krantz was the queen of blockbuster romantic fiction, otherwise known as the “sex and shopping” genre. (She published her last novel, The Jewels of Tessa Kent, in 1998, but neither it nor her previous 2 books, Dazzle and Spring Collection, did nearly as well as her previous 7 novels, though they still did better than most. She was no longer the dominant force in her field though.) Current day authors that probably fit into this genre are the Shopaholic books, obviously, and…well I can’t really cite any others since I stopped reading these kinds of books some years ago. But you get the idea. All of Judith Krantz’s books got huge advances (the one she got for the paperback rights to her second book, Princess Daisy, set a record at the time) and most were made into TV miniseries, mostly produced by her husband (who was a legit movie and TV producer anyway, so it wasn’t entirely nepotism I’m sure. Incidentally, their son Tony Krantz is a producer slash director now; he was executive producer of the first 5 seasons of 24.)
Anyway, as I read through her books, conflicting thoughts came to mind. First, she was not such a bad writer, on the surface - but she was given to some pretty crappy overblown prose too. There’s a lot of rather random sex in her books, which made her books naughty back in the day, but these days…well I don’t know, maybe they’ll still be good for some people. And her characters…well. I think that she actually came up with her best set of characters in her first book, Scruples, then gradually ran out of decent ideas.
In essence, Judith Krantz was absolutely in love with the 1980s - even if her first book came out in 1978. She loved the values of the moneyed classes of the 1980s, which she seemed to have seen as a return to the elegance of the era she grew up in, the late 1940s to 1950s, but with more, ostentatious money. If she were just a bit better writer, her books could even be seen as an interesting look at that decade. As it is though, she was just incapable to digging much beyond superficial things. (I also read her autobiography for the first time. Yikes. A woman just steeped in upper-middle-glass-American privilege and snobbery, and not even realizing it, is the impression I came away with.)
Anyway…while I was doing a bit of idle research, I ran across this hilarious review of the aforementioned Princess Daisy by none other than Clive James, for the London Review of Books, back in 1980. He basically nailed a lot of things wrong with her writing. The stuffy comments that start with Sir: are funny too.
