What Was Lost....or, Vogue

What Was Lost is one of those books you will be hearing about everywhere, as it has enjoyed one of the debuts that seem to happen with greater and greater frequency: a hitherto unpublished and very young author comes out of the gate at a gallop, wins or is shortlisted for things her elders can only dream of, and the book soars to the top of bestseller lists worldwide before being optioned by Miramax (if that's what Miramax does) or Plan B, the production company begun by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Plan B options all the good books.

The story begins with a charming take on the Harriet the Spy genre, with Kate Meaney, not mean at all, junior detective. With her notebook and trusty partner Mickey in tow (Mickey being a stuffed monkey who wears a striped suit and spats) she trails suspects through the big shopping centre near her home.

Like Harriet she is sort of lonely and quite an outsider and therefore develops into an interesting, engaging and original character. Her best friend is the son of the news agent, who is really much too old to befriend a ten year old. But, he's a bit of a misfit too and friendship occurs wherever it occurs if you wouldn't mind keeping your filthy suspicions to yourself.

And then the story veers off into a tale of dead ends of all kinds, missed opportunities, missing people, the dead and deadness. Is "deadness" a word? It is certainly a feeling and it pervades the book like the smell of every shopping mall with a fast-food court.

As it turns out, Kate gives someone a life while her disappearance off the face of the earth ends many others, namely that of her friend who could never shuck the suspicion that he was involved in her vanishing. Throughout the book I was hoping that Kate somehow managed to escape the council estate she lived in, managed to disappear into a new life as any undercover junior detective should be able to do.

Heavy treading, this.

The thing is, the entropy, the vortex of same-same and the slow, imperceptible death of hope can really catch even a tiger by the tail. It is so easy to slip into a relationship that's all very nice but not very good, a job that is just a job, it is so easy to let guilt and weakness define you.

I was reading over the weekend a story about how Hillary Clinton is coping with the reality that she may very well not win the nomination despite her hard work, worthiness and determination. One thing struck me -- she is pragmatic, the story said, and knows well enough that someone has to lose but right now she's still got to keep on winning and so simply does not read or listen to anything that nay-says. She needs to keep her eye on the ball, she needs to stay optimistic.

What a practical thing to do. Simply don't let the bad stuff into your head.

And so, as an antidote to this very excellent but nonetheless heavy book I read Vogue cover to cover. Our Biggest Spring Issue Ever! Why Vogue? It is relentlessly upbeat even when it isn't -- even the sad stories about cold mothers and sensitive daughters or whatever are sort of couched. Mother and daughter are attractive and have loads of advantages -- I mean really, they're profiled in Vogue! Vogue is the home of the vitamin enriched sons and daughters of money in the bank, to re-use one of my favorite phrases, and on every page there is the assurance that everything is possible, a pretty girl can decide to design a bag and voila! she's a successful entrepreneur! You can marry a prince really and truly! You can have a glamorous-sounding job that is both truly glamorous and so are you!

Sometimes you need the fairy tales of magazines to offset the hard truths of fiction.