This book is a story of inflated expectations. It is appropriate, then, after it got a great review from a friend on Goodreads, I thought it would be a particularly hilarious bit of chick lit. I waited two months (I was 12th in line for a copy from the AADL) and when my number came up I couldn’t wait to see what all the fuss was about.

I still don’t know.

The editor should have taken a hard look at Bitter is the New Black and employed Coco Chanel’s maxim: Always take off the last thing you put on. In this case, that would apply to the footnoting. A footnote should be a small but insightful — or at least humorous —digression from the text. Lancaster’s footnoted “Mmm-hmm, work it, girl” to her own assertion that her reflection is (not approximates—is) Angelina Jolie, and rhetorical comment to her too-slow-for-her-liking coworker “Retardy Arty” to “make squirty in the potty like a big boy” add nothing to the text—and are unfortunately flesh-crawlingly bad. Deleting the footnotes wouldn’t have made the book good, but would have been an enormous improvement.*

This novel is also the most egregious example of telling instead of showing I’ve ever encountered. The sentence “we had pithy and witty conversation” should only be used if it is meant to be getting us somewhere more interesting — especially since evidence of the speaker’s wit was sorely lacking and would have merited an example. The reason good writing resonates with an audience is because the reader is doing half of the work, but Lancaster doesn’t trust us to grasp that she is better than, and hates, everyone—so she states it repeatedly and verbatim. It wears thin pretty quickly; after all, we’re happy to read that she is smarter than everyone, but now she’s saying she’s smarter than us.

The most grating offense is that Lancaster seems to be in love with her own narrative “style,” exemplified in such lines as “children think it’s all about them (footnote: when we know it’s all about me)." Yes. Yes, readers know you are shallow and self-obsessed; we got that in the first ten pages when the designer label-shaped anvils were falling thick and fast onto the page. We. Get. It. Thumping the point home does not make you clever; it assumes we are too stupid to ingest the literature equivalent of overcooked oatmeal. It sounds like one of the pieces I wrote as a teenager, convinced that my supercilious tone was winning and witty, before someone who loved me knocked me down a few pegs by handing my pages covered in red ink. A few rewrites could have cleaned it up considerably.

The class stereotype doesn’t make her character any more likeable—she repeats the words “Republican” and “sorority” as often as possible, almost daring the reader to make a judgment. Sadly, she does nothing to dispel this stereotype, as if pledging or buying Prada somehow doomed her to a spoiled and selfish nature. If “Republican” is meant to be lazy shorthand, then I can hardly argue that it doesn’t belong in a book that described a hippie using the phrases “pot” “tie-dye” and “patchouli” in the same sentence. We’re painted a picture using the widest possible brush: monthly trips to the stylist for highlights, Conservativism, high-end fashion--it’s as if Sarah Palin’s autobiography were ghostwritten by Stephenie Meyer.

Even so, Lancaster could have pulled off the “bad guy as likeable narrator” trope had she not made the mistake of asking the reader to feel sorry for her. She is laid off from her job and suffers unemployment with a good deal of self-pity, but not the smallest shred of self-criticism. She continues to be an unapologetic harpy, which, fine—but even as a harpy, her personality is selective and uneven. She calls a coworker a whore for making out with someone other than her fiancé—because she may be many things, but “[she’s] not a cheater.” This from the woman who stole a designer handbag from a homeless person. Again, people who are judge, jury, and executioner can be compelling protagonists, but not if they’re cardboard stand-ups with a rudimentary understanding of the language. They need depth, and three paragraphs about how they cried after September 11 is not a satisfactory demonstration of depth, particularly when the event is never referenced again—except to mention that “increased security” is prohibiting her from barging into offices with her resume.

The book goes from bad to unbearable when the speaker decides she is going to turn down her first job offer in two years to pursue her writing. Leaving aside the enormous jaw drop of anyone who has managed to read this far, a summary of how one becomes a writer makes for incredibly boring reading, even to writers—unless punctuated by actual humor. A friend of mine argues that all chick-lit is bad, and I disagree: plenty of it is fantastic. The problem is that for every worthwhile read, something like this gets published—and the floodgates open and drown the genre. The narrative style popularized by David Sedaris—the funny, easygoing commentary on daily life—gave the mistaken impression that anyone can do it. The difference isn’t that one writer is a woman and one is a man; it’s that one can write, and one can’t.

I have learned one thing: Amazon’s “Look Inside!” feature is not only a courtesy, but a warning. Click it for Chick Lit; the time you save may be your own.

* Mainly because it would have been shorter.**
** That’s how you use a footnote.

Sarah Smallwood has been living and working in Ann Arbor for five years. Her essays have been featured online often enough to keep her grandmother happy, and she is currently rewriting her first novel. She keeps a daily blog at The Other Shoe and can be reached at heybeedoo at hotmail dot com.