Dark obsessions drive this debut about the golden era of magazines – but its vile and hilarious heroine is not someone you want to spend so much time with
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ast year the New York Times ran a quiz entitled “Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the 90s?” It was based on the fabled four-page exam Anna Wintour had would-be assistants sit – a cultural literacy test containing questions about 178 notable people, places, books and films. I’m afraid that this former (British) Vogue intern did not pass muster: wrong era, wrong country.
A woman who almost certainly would pass with flying colours is the former Vogue staffer Caroline Palmer, now the author of a novel, Workhorse, set at “the magazine” during the dying days of a golden age of women’s glossies, when the lunches were boozy, the couture was free and almost anything could be expensed. In this first decade of the new millennium, we meet Clodagh, or Clo, a suburban twentysomething “workhorse” trying to make it in a world of rich, beautiful, well-connected “show horses”, and willing to do almost anything to get there.
The women’s magazine has an established literary history, from The Bell Jar to The Devil Wears Prada. So too does the genre we’ll call “young woman comes of age in New York City” – I’m thinking of books such as The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Rules of Civility and My Salinger Year. Then there’s the grifter narrative (The Talented Mr Ripley, Emma Cline’s The Guest, Gatsby, even Breakfast at Tiffany’s). The grifter isn’t solely an American phenomenon, but it makes the most sense there; a new country without an aristocracy, where reinvention always feels possible. Workhorse is a novel that ticks so many boxes it’s unsurprising that it provoked a bidding war. It even has that most fashionable of protagonists: a highly dislikable heroine.
