An Alternative Life for Princess Diana
NYT Sunday Book Review by CURTIS SITTENFELD
Like many women of my generation, I count the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles as one of my most vivid early memories. I was 5 when it occurred, and I rose at dawn to watch it on a black-and-white television with my family. I was so captivated by the grandeur — the billowing dress with its 25-foot train, the horse-drawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace — that I asked my parents what steps I myself might take in order to marry a prince. It wouldn’t be possible, they informed me, because we weren’t Episcopalians. It seems, in retrospect, strangely evasive of my mother and father to imply that religion was all that stood between me and the British throne, but maybe I was lucky to have my dreams quashed so early. Apparently, the experience of watching that royal wedding at a formative age is now routinely blamed for turning countless little girls into adult Bridezillas.
Sixteen years later, after Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris, I rose again at dawn to watch her funeral. I had graduated from college a few months earlier and was interning as a reporter in North Carolina, working a 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. In the days and weeks that followed the funeral, I’d drive around a city I didn’t really know in a newly acquired secondhand car, and whenever “Candle in the Wind 1997” came on the radio, which was approximately every 10 minutes, I’d burst into tears. I have, of course, heard the argument that the death of a pampered, neurotic woman famous for being pretty as much as for anything else was not exactly tragic — but isn’t there room in the world for many kinds of tragedies?
All of which is to say that for someone like me, the idea behind Monica Ali’s new novel, “Untold Story,” is irresistible: What if, Ali asks, Diana had survived that accident? What if she had faked her own death and eventually gone to live under an assumed name in America? Such a premise immediately achieves two things. It corrects the heartbreaking error of Diana’s early death, and it creates, at least for American readers, the delicious fantasy that there could be a princess among us.
Unfortunately, the premise is the best part of “Untold Story.” There is no pleasure in criticizing a writer as talented as Ali, who won many fans with her terrific first novel, “Brick Lane,” which follows, over several decades, a woman who emigrates from Bangladesh to London for an arranged marriage. It’s funny and sad, smart and ambitious. Its characters are complex, its insights wise and compassionate. Clearly, Ali is capable of writing a novel about anything, including Diana. But somehow “Untold Story” has come out all wrong.
In creating a story about Diana’s escape from public life, Ali has allowed Diana herself to escape from the novel. Ali never uses the name “Diana”; the main character calls herself Lydia Snaresbrook. And because Lydia is a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs, Ali has written a novel about a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs. In a recent essay for the British newspaper The Daily Mail, Ali expressed admiration for both Diana’s rebelliousness and her candor. Yet Diana’s contradictions — that she was a vain clotheshorse who also fought seriously against land mines and reached out to those with AIDS, that she was extremely visible yet desperately lonely, that she was needy and endearing and charming and difficult all at once — are nowhere in these pages.
The most interesting part of “Lydia’s” tale, how she faked her death, is 10 years past when the novel opens in April 2007. Lydia is now a dark-haired 40-something living in the Midwestern American town of Kensington, a place she settled in partly as an inside joke. Ali is deliberately vague about the location of Kensington, another choice that doesn’t serve the novel, but it’s an affluent place where Lydia has bought a house with a pool and taken a job at a kennel (a position that seems mostly designed to elicit laughs — Princess Di rolling around with Rottweilers!), is dating a nice guy who wants to know more about her past and has acquired a triad of American girlfriends.
It is these girlfriends who, on the very first page, set off alarm bells. To be fair, they aren’t Ugly Americans, but they are very, very Cheesy Americans. It’s difficult to keep them straight. Their main distinctions seem to be that one is single and childless, one is divorced with children and one is married with children. When together, they like to drink white wine and make disparaging comments about their bodies. They say things like, “These reduced-calorie Ruffles? Forget it, not going there.” Like Lydia’s boyfriend, the women have no idea of her real identity.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s most recent novel is “American Wife.”
Like many women of my generation, I count the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles as one of my most vivid early memories. I was 5 when it occurred, and I rose at dawn to watch it on a black-and-white television with my family. I was so captivated by the grandeur — the billowing dress with its 25-foot train, the horse-drawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace — that I asked my parents what steps I myself might take in order to marry a prince. It wouldn’t be possible, they informed me, because we weren’t Episcopalians. It seems, in retrospect, strangely evasive of my mother and father to imply that religion was all that stood between me and the British throne, but maybe I was lucky to have my dreams quashed so early. Apparently, the experience of watching that royal wedding at a formative age is now routinely blamed for turning countless little girls into adult Bridezillas.
Sixteen years later, after Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris, I rose again at dawn to watch her funeral. I had graduated from college a few months earlier and was interning as a reporter in North Carolina, working a 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. In the days and weeks that followed the funeral, I’d drive around a city I didn’t really know in a newly acquired secondhand car, and whenever “Candle in the Wind 1997” came on the radio, which was approximately every 10 minutes, I’d burst into tears. I have, of course, heard the argument that the death of a pampered, neurotic woman famous for being pretty as much as for anything else was not exactly tragic — but isn’t there room in the world for many kinds of tragedies?
All of which is to say that for someone like me, the idea behind Monica Ali’s new novel, “Untold Story,” is irresistible: What if, Ali asks, Diana had survived that accident? What if she had faked her own death and eventually gone to live under an assumed name in America? Such a premise immediately achieves two things. It corrects the heartbreaking error of Diana’s early death, and it creates, at least for American readers, the delicious fantasy that there could be a princess among us.
Unfortunately, the premise is the best part of “Untold Story.” There is no pleasure in criticizing a writer as talented as Ali, who won many fans with her terrific first novel, “Brick Lane,” which follows, over several decades, a woman who emigrates from Bangladesh to London for an arranged marriage. It’s funny and sad, smart and ambitious. Its characters are complex, its insights wise and compassionate. Clearly, Ali is capable of writing a novel about anything, including Diana. But somehow “Untold Story” has come out all wrong.
In creating a story about Diana’s escape from public life, Ali has allowed Diana herself to escape from the novel. Ali never uses the name “Diana”; the main character calls herself Lydia Snaresbrook. And because Lydia is a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs, Ali has written a novel about a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs. In a recent essay for the British newspaper The Daily Mail, Ali expressed admiration for both Diana’s rebelliousness and her candor. Yet Diana’s contradictions — that she was a vain clotheshorse who also fought seriously against land mines and reached out to those with AIDS, that she was extremely visible yet desperately lonely, that she was needy and endearing and charming and difficult all at once — are nowhere in these pages.
The most interesting part of “Lydia’s” tale, how she faked her death, is 10 years past when the novel opens in April 2007. Lydia is now a dark-haired 40-something living in the Midwestern American town of Kensington, a place she settled in partly as an inside joke. Ali is deliberately vague about the location of Kensington, another choice that doesn’t serve the novel, but it’s an affluent place where Lydia has bought a house with a pool and taken a job at a kennel (a position that seems mostly designed to elicit laughs — Princess Di rolling around with Rottweilers!), is dating a nice guy who wants to know more about her past and has acquired a triad of American girlfriends.
It is these girlfriends who, on the very first page, set off alarm bells. To be fair, they aren’t Ugly Americans, but they are very, very Cheesy Americans. It’s difficult to keep them straight. Their main distinctions seem to be that one is single and childless, one is divorced with children and one is married with children. When together, they like to drink white wine and make disparaging comments about their bodies. They say things like, “These reduced-calorie Ruffles? Forget it, not going there.” Like Lydia’s boyfriend, the women have no idea of her real identity.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s most recent novel is “American Wife.”
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