Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteA Model Summer turns out a good book too.
In fact, the admonition, "Write what you know!" has seldom been so delightfully tweaked. Supermodel, calendar girl, and Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue babe Paulina Porizkova has put together a biting retribute for the just a little snarky world of fashion advertising and super modeling.
In this alternative perils of Paulina, meet Swedish glamazon ingenue with the always mispronounceable name Jirina Radovanovicova, her hero, rival, and frenemy "Evalinda", the good boy "Hugo", the glamorous Aussie photographer Rob Ryan, the gay MUA (Makeup Artist) Emanuel, the perverted lech of a director Dumowski, whom Jirina fellates in her bid to win a 30,000 franc campaign, and a whole supporting host of charming, meaningful, and reasonably well drawn types.
For the how-I-spent-my-summer journey of 15-year-old (whom everyone thinks is 16) Jirina, Porizkova provides plenty of warning up front by borrowing from Pope's pen, "In youth and beauty wisdom is but rare."
How deliciously painful that turns out.
Released in spring 2007, possibly in time for spring break, certainly for reading at the beach, it has gotten short shrift from at least Entertainment Weekly's web: "Think Top Model on coke: lots of coke, as well as booze, casting-couch sex, devious rivals — and one dreamy photographer." [2]
I don't even want to say, "It wasn't that bad" because, truth to tell, I thought it quite "pop" for a popular release.
Also, frankly, well there's plenty of sex, drugs, and rigmarole throughout, the heroine's most telling encounter with coke confuses the white powder with the drink, so much so she unrolls the $20 bill and uses it to scrape her portion into a glass of water, which she then drinks expecting the Real Thing to the last.
As silly as a girl's book may be, this one nonetheless has its thoroughly adult and devilish turns.
Alex Kuczynski, who reviewed the work at greater length for The New York Times, noted Porizkova's long-standing snit with supermodelhood and early collision with history as the left-behind child of a couple who fled to Sweden with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and on those legs he seems to have gone looking for The Great Supermodel Novel and not found it.
Well, me neither.
What I found instead: a first novel in the spirit of Suzanne (Jacqueline) and a cautionary romance two or three decades younger than Anita Shreve's stock in trade.
Put the well titled A Model Summer in the Valentine's basket for girls mid-teens to mid-twenties.
Having spent so many hours grappling with the various and hypermediated "conflict cultures" and related reading, it's good to have gotten a break--a burst of popcorn out of boiling oil--with this first novel by a still young Paulina Porizkova.
1. Porizkova, Paulina. A Model Summer. New York: Hyperion, 2007.
2. Armstrong, Jennifer. "A Model Summer (2007). Brief review. EW.com, nd.
3. Kuczynski, Alex. "In Her Fashion." The New York Times, April 8, 2007.
Quick Links
Farley, David. "Paulina Porizkova: A Model Traveler." World Hum, January 9, 2007.
"Paulina Porizkova." Wikipedia.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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