Eastern, Western.(The Nanny Diaries, 3:10 to Yuma)(Movie review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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In the 2002 best-seller "The Nanny Diaries," the N.Y.U. graduates Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, who had spent some time taking care of children on the Upper East Side, pooled their anecdotes, merged into a single voice, and compiled a fiction about a young nanny's suffering at the hands of a tyrannical Park Avenue couple. The book was both a cry of exasperation and an attack on the fatuity of wealth. Near the beginning, the heroine walks into a room and encounters what she calls "the full range of Upper East Side diversity--half the women are dressed in Chanel suits and Manolo Blahniks, half are in six-hundred-dollar barn jackets, looking as if they might be asked to pitch an Aquascutum tent at any moment." This is clever, I suppose, yet the list of boutique products suggests that the heroine has pretty much the same values as the women she's teasing, without having anything like their money. Parts of "The Nanny Diaries" read like a peculiarly self-pitying and envious piece of magazine journalism in which the upscale knowingness of the victim serves only to fuel her outrage over how badly she's being treated. The book, more snark than satire, provides eager glimpses of emotional squalor and lousy parenting among the super-rich; it seems to be written for people who want to feel superior to the swells whose goods they in fact covet.

The talented writer-director team...

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