Guardian Review

Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel encapsulated an essence of the female experience, but is it worth reading today? The first thing you notice, rereading Valley of the Dolls is how badly it functions as fiction. First published in 1966, it has a status in the Virago canon that means many of us will have read it young, as a necessary classic, in that interim phase as a reader where you consume books like air, not stopping to interrogate their quality. I didn't realise how bad it was. It covers the fortunes and friendship, but mainly the drug addiction, of three women: the prim but outrageously beautiful Anne Welles; the Judy Garland -inspired vaudeville star Neely O'Hara; and the busty airhead Jennifer North. The characterisation is flaky, and the relationships two-dimensional. Anne leaves Lawrenceville to escape her petty, judgmental mother, and yet their dialogue -- "Did you ever kiss any other boy?" ... "Oh, a few years back, when Willie and I first started dating, we'd play Spin the Bottle" -- is trusting and open, as if between two friends, with no trace of the secrecy and resentment that such a harsh and punitive mother-daughter dyad would create. The plot is just preposterous: Jennifer, the talentless showgirl, falls in love with Tony Polar without noticing that he has a mental age of 12, which she discovers via his malicious half-sister, and without demur aborts the foetus that five minutes before she had invested with all her hopes for future intimacy. How could she have fallen for him in the first place? And if he has passed through life as an effortless heart-winner, why would that have been such an untenable legacy for an unborn child? It makes literally no sense. The scene-setting -- particularly all the gory details, the sex, the drugs -- is extremely sketchy. Compare Jennifer's abortion -- "the nurse jabbed her arm with a needle -- sodium pentothal, it was called, and it was a greater sensation than even Seconals. When she woke, it was over" -- with the termination scene in Hollywood Wives. Sure, Jackie Collins was writing nearly two decades later, having arguably had the way cleared for her by Valley, but the granular physicality, the microscopic menace, is simply and in every way superior. And yet, it is immediately obvious what made Valley of the Dolls the success it was, what lassoed 30 million readers. It would be a stretch to call it a work of feminism -- a central motivating force in the lives of all three protagonists is finding a man who can support them in high style -- and yet it distilled some essence of the female experience to remarkable potency. It was almost because of the lack of nuance and detail, because of the way Jacqueline Susann 's obsessions, trials, anxieties, and, above all, I think, anger, spring so unmediated on to the page, that the book gathered the momentum it did, and still has today. The caricatured question of second-wave feminism was "Are all men rapists?" This was the idea used to deflate and ridicule it, the conflation of a bid for equality with an unshakable animus to men. In fact, the critical question was much more subtle but just as threatening to the patriarchy: are you a Neely ("Look -- if someone loved me, I'd love him") or an Anne, with a sexual destiny of her own, a set of desires that were not just triggered by the lust of another, but were self-generating? This was the fight of the 60s, subverted over the 70s and 80s into a victim narrative: were women something other than the gatekeepers of sex? Did they have appetites of their own? Helen Lawson, an older actor who makes vile remarks and operates as the competitive, undermining side of the sisterhood, might be a predatory cougar, a trope as old as Chaucer, and probably older. But Susann's insistence, on the one hand that female desire was potent and couldn't be simulated (in the character of Anne) and, on the other, that femaleness was something far larger than femininity (in the character of Jennifer) was a powerful waypoint in the mapping of a feminist terrain. It is also salient and a bit chastening to consider the primacy, depth and succour of female friendships in the book. There are moments of vaudeville competitiveness at the edges, but in a landscape in which a man can have a mental age of 12 without any of his girlfriends noticing, the burning intimacy of Neely and Anne, for instance, stands out. You would not, in short, want feminism to end with Valley of the Dolls, but you'd be poorer without it. - Zoe Williams.