Sheer Lacy Abandon: Penny Vincenzi and Shirley Conran

I can’t be the only person who was thinking this.

Yesterday’s New York Times book review was of a new novel by an Englishwoman named Penny Vincenzi. The book is titled Sheer Abandon, and it is, apparently, the kind of summer fluff that now and then every girl needs to inhale. Edith is the kind of girl who doesn’t look like she inhales, but you can bet your bippy, she does. Not often; just now and then. As Auntie Mame said, “On festive occasions.”

So I read the review, which was pretty enthusiastic, almost affectionate, saying, basically, “Ok, this is fluff, but as fluff goes, it was fun.” Which is great. What I couldn’t help thinking, though – and this is what I can’t believe wasn’t in the review – is that Vincenzi’s novel sounds like it’s basically a re-write of the classic beach novel Lace, by Shirley Conran.

I can’t remember when I first read Lace, but it was a long time ago. It was a fat chunk of a mass-market paperback. It was like a Judith Krantz novel, but a little classier – not in writing style, but in name-dropping. Conran was clearly from a different world than Krantz; the levels of brand consciousness were different. Conran’s consciousness was much higher than Krantz’s. (I’m not insulting at all; just making distinctions between the two. One would regard Pratesi sheets as a given; the other would not even know to notice them, at least not in her authorial youth.) (And incidentally, the only reason I know about Pratesi sheets is, I think, another 1980s artifact entitled The JAP Handbook, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Lace is about a child’s quest for information: abandoned as an infant, the teenager runs away from a sad foster home and winds up as a porno star looking for her mother. As I recall, a TV movie starred Phoebe Cates in this role, must check to see if that’s on DVD. It was, I must emphasize, a startlingly vapid book, but Conran also had a real way with her story; there were a million details in there that were just irresistible. I must have read that book five times. But as happens, books get lost or thrown away, and sometime about 15 years ago I got rid of my copy of Lace.

It was only a few months ago that I remembered the novel and realized I’d like to re-read it. I found a copy in a used book store for a dollar and picked it up; I could hardly wait to get home and re-read it. I was actually quite confident that I’d be annoyed and disgusted with it now. I was sure that Conran’s writing would seem worse than I remembered, and that my affection would sour on re-examination. You know something? I was wrong. In fact, I like and respect this piece of crap even more now than I did when I was 15. So go figure.

I wish Penny Vincenzi all luck with her Sheer Abandon, I really do; I’ll have a look at it one of these days. But I hope that her reading public will remember that Shirley Conran got there first, and did it with style. And high-quality, high thread count sheets.