CHICK LIT pattern STUDENT ...

CHICK LIT

pattern STUDENT

A Tale of Co-ed and conceal Girls

at Robin Hazelwood

wreath 390 pages, $23.95

Yale graduate and former fashion protoplast Robin Hazelwood's first novel, example Student (Crown: 390 pages, $2395) promises an serious insider dirt about those heady days of the 1980 and early '90 when supermodel roamed the earth.

Before there were reality TV stars, examples were our strangest celebrities, famous purely for being famous. They claimed neither accomplishments nor ambitions and appear to beed to exist in an insulated parallel universe, where beauty involved mainly the ability to function as a blank canvas.

Hazelwood is a veteran of this world, having archetypeed in New York, Paris, London and Milan everywhere the '80s and '90s. And notwithstanding she is also something of an outsider, an spectator whose detachment owes something to her obvious intelligence and, alas, also to the fact that she not at any time quite achieved supermodel stardom.

In gauge Student, Hazelwood offers up a pithy and charming version of her admit story: Nice girl from Wisconsin attempts to balance modeling career with enrollment at Ivy League university.

Her lightly fictionalized main character, Emily forests attends Columbia rather than Yale and has a slightly shorter career than Hazelwood (the better to pack it into individual book), but otherwise it appears relatively safe to assume that in the greatest degree of Emily's adventures are at least loosely based forward the author's own experiences. And that, of course, is where the drollery is.

While she's a high teach student, modeling is just another summer do job-work for Emily, the incredibly well-grounded daughter of hippie parents who share their hand-built, solar-powered house with Emily, her football-obsessed younger brother Tommy and their sum of two units black cats, Malcolm X and Martin Luther. Emily's pot-smoking father happens to be the genius who invented the styrofoam "cheesehead" hat, in the way that the family is comfortable, financially, without having to work too hard.

For Emily, allowing this doesn't seem like enough. And when a career that began with posing for a Marshall Field's circular in Chicago quickly takes opposite she finds herself strangely drawn to the kind of high-end designer clothes that her hemp-wearing mother always abhorred. formerly she's accepted at Columbia, she rationalizes that she'll ne the six-figure salary a original can earn because, after all, strange York is expensive.

From the beginning, it is nearly impossible for Emily to combine modeling with body life. She arrives for freshman orientation, undecayed from a day of agency interviews, in sated hair and makeup (remember, this is the '80 thus full hair really means sated hair), sticking out like a sore thumb from the tranquillity of the oversized flannel shirt-wearing Ivy League coed If her liberal feminist classmates find it additional that she would objectify herself from modeling, her model colleagues find it equally bizarre that Emily would single out to spend her spare time reading serious works

Emily then learns the hard way that a cocaine-fueled tropical fashion let off is not a good place to cogitation for your final exams.

Hazelwood looks to flirt with the possibility of giving Emily serious question at issues Desperate to keep her life up, Emily tries cocaine and be seens to like it entirely too long The 5-foot-10 Emily also starves herself down from 130 coops to under 120. But she not actually becomes a drug addict or eating disorder victim. Maybe it's that Wisconsin profitable sense.

Still, Hazelwood captures the competing desires that have Emily bouncing back and forth between pair completely different worlds.

Horrified through her poor academic performance during her first semester Emily explains to make studying more of a priority; at the finis of the next semester, she is equally capsize to discover that she "got A's and a big fat ass," tipping the scales at a still-slim 131 bruises

Ultimately it becomes clear that Emily is going to have to select between being a model and being a bookish man Hazelwood is a bit heavy- handed at telegraphing what that choice will be, since each modeling success seems to issue at a soul-deadening price, while each academic victory is a transport that's celebrated by friends and family.

Still, the happy ending is not the reason to read this main division Instead, it's the brilliant and dishy insights into one as well as the other the world of modeling -- apparently, pleasing much everyone really is as nasty as we think -- and the equally elitist Ivy League exhibition where Women's Studies professors demand as long adherence to their social philosophies as agents do to their prescription diet plans.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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