The Real Real, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
McLaughlin, Emma and Nicola Kraus (2009). The Real Real. NY: Harper Teen. 320 pages.
So, since I am unashamed to admit that I like chick lit (for adults and for teens), I am also unashamed to admit that this new novel by McLaughlin and Kraus attracted me because it was written by the authors of The Nanny Diaries. Because I enjoyed McLaughlin and Kraus’s unintentionally Marxist take on the lives of the NYC elite and their spawn, I was hoping their first official young adult novel would offer something just as biting. Unfortunately–and perhaps in service of the authors’ or editors’ conception of the YA audience to whom this book is marketed–The Real Real doesn’t have quite the same spirit.
The novel’s conceit is a familiar one (and one that will likely be understood as a genre of its own in coming years): seventeen-year-old Jesse O’Rourke is chosen from among her classmates to participate in a high school reality show filmed in her community of Hampton Beach. Called The Real Hampton Beach, the MTV-type show features her school’s popular and wealthy among its central cast and Jesse–decidedly not wealthy and not exactly friendly with the in-crowd–can’t figure out why she’s been selected. Initially glamorous, reality stardom soon becomes a pretty intense burden for Jesse, whose pride (and family’s reliance on the $40,000 college scholarship provided by one of the show’s sponsors) won’t let her quit.
McLaughlin and Kraus emphasize the artificiality of the reality show (think The Hills or Laguna Beach), describing scenes filmed at night that are lit to appear as if they occurred during the day, manipulative prompts by producers, and re-takes of “spontaneous” events. While this kind of dirty laundry is exactly what readers of this type of novel want to know about, I wanted the rest of the novel to go a bit further and to really contrast the so-called life of Jesse’s that made it to the television screen with her “real” life. The structure of the book suggested that this was the intended architecture–the novel is divided into parts that describe Jesse’s life before, after, and during production–but I wonder if this contrast would have been stronger if Jesse’s on- and off-camera lives were contrasted more directly.
The authors’ description of Jesse’s semi-outcast status–she is definitely not part of the social scene occupied by the other stars of the reality show–and the awkwardness that ensues when she is sort of forced to hang out with the popular kids definitely rings true. It’s like when you’re put in a research group with the cool kids at school and, for, like, 3 weeks, all you do is hang around with these folks and try to get the project done. And you end up kind of being friends and you see what it would be like if you were friends with the cool kids in real life. But you know that after the project is turned in you totally won’t be hanging out anymore.
My major contention with this novel, however, has to do with what I believe to be poor editing. I think that this novel may have been quite a bit longer and more detailed in an initial incarnation and that some sloppy editorial work made some of the scenes a bit awkward. For example, there’s one scene early in the novel that takes place in the restaurant where Jesse’s father works as a manager (we have to sort of intuit his position there, because it’s never really articulated), during which the owner of the restaurant chews out Mr. O’Rourke for not having lobster on the day that his in-laws are visiting. This seems like a nitpicky complaint, but, in this scene, the names of the lobster-craving in-law is inserted rather awkwardly, and there is some confusion as to who everyone is in the scene and how each is related to the action at hand. Small things like this happen quite a bit throughout the novel, leading me to believe that more detail was excised from the final copy. There’s even this, like, extraneous character named Rick who is supposedly a part of the reality show cast but who never contributes to the plot–neither the reality show plot nor the novel’s plot–in any way. My question: why even include this guy at all?
In the end, I trust McLaughlin and Kraus as writers enough to think that The Real Real, as the duo’s first foray into the “official” YA lit. territory, is something of an anomaly. It’s not a bad novel, to be sure, but seems to be less fully realized than The Nanny Diaries.