The Word Made Flesh

Over breakfast this morning, I read John Lanchester’s intriguing review of The Diana Chronicles, Tina Brown’s new book about Princess Diana. The New Yorker’s reviews are singular, I feel, for their expansion on their subject—rather than simply parsing the pros and cons of a new cultural artifact, the reviewers typically push beyond the project at hand to haul in a trove of evocative supporting details.

In Lanchester’s opinion, Brown’s book is the best of the lot, as far as coverage of Diana goes. He referred to several other substandard missives, including one written by the late princess’s butler, Paul Burrell, entitled The Way We Were—“emetic book, emetic title,” pronounces Lanchester.

Although I work at the Oxford University Press, I’m not a human dictionary, so when I arrived at work I promptly looked up “emetic,” which means, in short, to induce nausea and vomiting. This made me smile when I remembered, in a perfect dose of New York synchronicity (and serendipity), the well-dressed businessman I saw on the subway platform this morning. At first he just seemed to be leaning against the wall, but upon closer examination, something had clearly had its emetic way with him.

The expunging of bodily fluid in its various forms is certainly not an uncommon sight in New York, but I now have a new way to describe it. And sometimes the right word makes all the difference.

But to my point: Lanchester’s review made me curious to take a look at Brown’s work; I’ve never been particularly fascinated by British royalty (although I did have the requisite Princess Diana paper doll set as a child, a gift from my more tiara-enamored Grandma Kay), but Lanchester uses Brown’s book to suggest that, in her legacy, Princess Diana might eventually make British royalty redundant and somewhat beside-the-point. It was certainly clear in last year’s excellent film “The Queen” that certain subjects are fairly exhausted by the attention paid to royalty, but Lanchester posits that the heirs themselves may one day tire of a position that has become something of a career of enforced, inescapable celebrity.

L.A. Times columnist Meghan Daum also recently explored Brown’s tome, and she linked it quite directly to our modern notions of celebrity. Daum compares Diana to the contemporary blonde celebrity of troubled vixens Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton; where, she asks, did we go wrong in our peroxide-washed heroine worship?

Thus, if Diana’s troubled life may one day close the door on modern-day monarchy, might Paris Hilton’s legacy eventually extinguish the torrents of misdirected attention and media-love lavished on flimsy wealthy girls? We won’t know for sure for quite some time, but if the prognostications of Brown (and Lanchester) are any indication, certain incarnations of celebrity live on well beyond the grave. In Lanchester’s study, appropriately entitled “The Naked and the Dead,” the legacy of celebrity will be eternally exhumed and put to use as necessary. Sometimes the right word makes all the difference.