BookIT! (without the personal pan pizza): Sweet Valley Confidential

My friend amanjo, knowing my prediliction for Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley High-related nostalgia, was kind enough to offer me her copy of Sweet Valley Confidential. My initial enthusiasm for buying my own copy to visit my friends, the Wakefield twins, was dampened when she told me that the hardcover release was 20-some bucks (looks like Amazon is kinder). Why, back in my day, when I routinely special-ordered the latest paperback SVH and, to a lesser, not as chastely sexy and glamorous extent, Sweet Valley Twins, a title ran me $2.50! But like I said: amanjo was more impulsive and committed to the concept than I, so I inherited her gently used copy.

It arrived last week in a USPS parcel, and I took my time cracking the cover. I'm a grown-up person with a degree in literature. I've written papers about Age of Innocence and "Twelfth Night" and Things Fall Apart! How could I backpedal into something I've clearly outgrown, with all the education (not to mention the sweet, sweet love of ironic enjoyment) and the adulthood I now possess.

Pretty easily actually. The love of sweet, sweet ironic enjoyment helps a lot.

I'm only about 80 pages in thus far, but one thing is for certain: ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD IS PISSED. The world's most perfect boyfriend, Todd, has apparently cheated on her--once in body, but months in soulmate longing and clandestine meetings at a diner right out of Happy Days or Alice--with her identical twin sister, Jessica. Elizabeth lets you know she is super pissed via internal monologues that occasionally end in awkward swearing (gasp!), as well as odd past-tense passages that are like flashbacks or coma dreams or journal entries. Those also sometimes contain swearing (gasp! I mean, Elizabeth! She was perfect!). She's living a shitty existence in New York as only a character in a cruddily constructed YA novel can: working at a startup magazine dedicated to off-Broadway shows that is crumbling, yet can afford to pay her to do an in-depth piece on a play about Samuel Johnson.

Thus far, she has nearly had sex with her boss (but not really), got serious sex vibes from some amazing "black Irish" (that's a phrase Jessica Wakefield and no other English-speaking human uses, by the bye) bartender (but she didn't wanna), and is engaging in a love-hate relationship with--sigh--a playwright who happens to look almost exactly like Todd.

The teases about how much sex Elizabeth could be having but chooses not to reads like Brian Johnson of The Breakfast Club: next, she's totally going to meet a guy, but none of you will know him, because he's from Niagara Falls.

Meanwhile, Jessica is tormenting herself like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, only many times stupider. That is, when she's not full of righteous and indignant fury that "matronly" gossip Caroline Pearce (isn't it great, by the way, how all of the characters you knew and loved in Sweet Valley made no efforts to grow or develop or change any of their constrictive two-dimensional roles) is trying to nose out whether Elizabeth has called or forgiven Jessica('s scheming vagina) or is coming to Jessica and Todd's wedding.

Todd is a cipher, made even more of a zero than his high-school self by his cheating, which seems like it is supposed to make sense in the context of the novel, but instead comes across as though it was created in a vacuum, never really the behavior of an actual human person but of a plot point generating robot. The menfolk that litter Elizabeth's lifescape are not much better than a collection of adjectives, eye colors, and hair descriptors. If I may dust off my degree for a moment: the way the male characters are portrayed in this novel suggests, like Jane Austen, that Francine Pascal lived in a society where males and females were largely segregated and, therefore, she has little idea how men think or act and therefore tends to marginalize...okay, well, Austen tended to marginalize, so let's call what Pascal does "straight-up half-pipe fancy-skateboard-move biffs" the male voice. For example, a furious, seemingly straight playwright, when faced with the stunning, everyone-wants-to-sex-her-because-she's-byoooooootiful-but-also-has-a-headache-tonight-honey Elizabeth, finds himself thinking "...why he had been so unfriendly to this beautiful girl. He made up his mind to make her his friend."

Here are some alternate and more believable ways that sentence could have ended:
"He made up his mind to make her his fuck buddy"
"He made up his mind to maker her his concubine"
"...his latest conquest."
"...his plus-one to a hot afterparty."
"...his next teammate on his co-ed dodgeball league."
"...his girlfriend, for crying out Pete."

It's an odd experience reading this thus far. For all I'm sassing, it's almost as though I'm too embarrassed for my young self to make fun of it, because it exposes what a naive dork with poor taste I was. Dave White recently wrote in a review of a tweeny movie, Prom, "because while it’s ostensibly about high school kids, it’s not for them. Instead, it’s a children’s film about how cool it’s going to be when they get to be big and can drive a car and stay up late and go out to a huge party." And that is exactly how I imagine Sweet Valley High would read now. At the tender age of 34, that's certainly how this version of the late 20s is reading...only worse, it's like a kid's idea and execution of a nighttime soap opera like 90210: The Original: big showy fights with awkward transitions and poor use of vocabulary; lots of talk about sex but very little actual sex; the very serious use of the term "soulmate" and "beloved"; a half-baked presentation of "living an artist's life"; everyone has glamorous jobs that all could be the topic of "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." homework.

But who am I kidding? My desire to make fun of all these things, and to find out if Lila Fowler and Ken Matthews really do get divorced, will win out.

Also: I really want to read another poorly executed sex scene like Jessica and Todd's one blazing night of passion, their "mouths furiously pressing, kissing, sucking, inhaling each other" as they "make love with an otherworldly passion."

Which is exactly what 10-year-old Jessie would say, come to think of it. Minus the "poorly executed" adverb-verb combo.