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Kyle Smith, dubbed the king of lad lit for his best-selling Love Monkey, may soon be known as the king of bad lit for his holiday cashing-in novel A Christmas Caroline.
Smith, movie critic for The New York Post, fesses up to his inspiration. The publisher is promoting Caroline as The Devil Wears Prada meets A Christmas Carol. So much for originality. But Smith, sir, you are no Charles Dickens.
Dickens' timeless tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and his holiday conversion is one of the most stirring tales of an awakened heart. A Christmas Caroline is nowhere near as moving or as richly entertaining.
It chronicles the life of skinny, self-starved, self-absorbed Caroline, an accessories editor for a New York fashion magazine. Unlike Andrea Sachs in Lauren Weisberger's Prada, Caroline has no redeeming qualities.
Our heroine is rich in conceit, callousness and cruelty, but her designer handbags, of which there are many, hold not even a tuppence of humanity. She is so mean and nasty, she makes Dickens' Scrooge look as cute and lovable as Scrooge McDuck. As bad as Scrooge treats his worker bees, we find it easy to love him when he comes to his senses. Not so with Caroline. Even after crossing over to the bright side, her personality seems chilly and brittle.
Smith has created a character so reprehensible that, frankly, she's irredeemable in this reader's eyes. When she sees a boy in a wheelchair, Caroline ruminates that she "hated cripples, the way they took up precious parking spaces ... she hated their style ... their ever present 'Hi, I'm a victim' look." That's not just bad humor, it's bad taste.
Those who didn't like Love Monkey said its weakness lay in protagonist Tom Farrell, another highly unsympathetic emotional misfit.
As for Dickensian inspiration, it at first seems cute that Smith got a little help from A Christmas Carol in naming his characters. Jacob Marley becomes Carly Jacobs; Bob Cratchit becomes Krystyna Krtzychzt -- but Caroline is a boiling-over stew pot of names from other Dickens novels. The clever quotient for this name game is tiresomely low once your list closes in on 40.
I wanted to love A Christmas Caroline, because the idea seemed sweet and whimsical enough to work. The book jacket is adorably festive, the title enchanting. But in Smith's hands, this modern holiday spinoff is clunky and sterile at best.
A Christmas Caroline
By Kyle Smith
William Morrow, 309 pp., $14.95
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