National Lampoon’s Book Club: Inaugural Edition

Here at National Lampoon we are dedicated to forwarding the beaux arts, those which sustain, revitalize, and renew mankind’s cultural heritage and remind us of the unknown possibilities and potentialities of perception. Dear reader, let this be the beginning of a beautiful thing: the National Lampoon Book Club. We don’t have the stickers, or a name with an easy transition to aesthetically-pleasing designs, as Oprah does. What we do have, like Oprah, but arguably more infantile, is a keen literary sense.

It is for that reason, that we have elected to give you all, our lovely and beautiful readers, a sneak peak of the best new book of the summer: L.A. Candy by Lauren Conrad.

The book details the Dostoevskian travails of two young women, Jane and Scarlett, as they find themselves thrown into the abyss that is Los Angeles. Lost amid paparazzi, glamour, cocaine, reality shows, friendship, and, most innocuously, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, the two girls venture into the soul-crushing world that is LaLaLand. Whether they make it out with friendship intact—we cannot say. But rest assured, there are tearjerking moments, there is pain, there is a multiplicity of life lessons, and there are the Pratts.

What really sets this book apart from something like The A-List, or any of those other novels-turned-TV-serials is the emotional core of this novel. Beneath each and every one of the characters lies not so much an emotionally-stunted and bleached-blonde dimwit,  but a truly involved, deeply troubled and insecure young woman who must face the difficult choices of adulthood just as Gregor Samsa must faces his. Where here predecessors fail, Conrad only prevails: her prose is crafted so as to imitate the thought process of her protagonists. The word “like” appears 48921 times in 241 pages, and the grammar is written in such a way that the reader begins to feel illiterate. It is a captivating intellectual exercise on Conrad’s part, and only begins to demonstrate her artistic prowess.

Lauren Conrad is branching out, and every new step she takes proves her a more brilliant and artistic entrepeneur.