Rating: 3/5, average
This is the first Danielle Steel book I have read. I can count the romance books I’ve read on one hand, so this is not my usual genre, however, I got curious about Danielle Steel after reading an interview with her in Glamour in which she talks about her harsh schedule. Steel says she writes all day every day until she’s tired enough to pass out on the floor, and then sleeps for maybe 4 hours. She wrote 179 books and raised nine kids. With that extreme of a writing regimen, I was wondering how much the quality would suffer, so I decided to find out for myself and picked this up off the supermarket shelf. I was expecting it to be terrible, but it was actually… okay.
The Cast is about a woman in her 50s named Kait who looks very much like the author. She works as an advice columnist at a magazine in New York. Her three children are grown and living their separate lives, and she misses them dearly, but she loves her work so she doesn’t like to take too much time off. I think some of the parts where she talks about how much she misses and worries about her kids are pretty moving and I think boomer moms would find that they speak to their struggles.
The book starts with Kait hosting Christmas at her house. She spends all day and night before her family comes cooking and cleaning, and everything is wealthy-fantasy perfect, down to Kait giving designer boots to her daughter-in-law.
Kait falls into a melancholic mood after they leave. A few weeks later, her co-worker invites her to a New Year’s Eve party. She’s not feeling up to it, but her co-worker pressures her into going. She chats at the party with a Hollywood producer named Zach who’s a fan of her advice column and wants her to write a bible (outline) for a TV show. Kait is attracted to Zach but knows she’s not his type as he usually dates much younger women. Nonetheless, Kait writes the bible for the TV show and Zach hires a team to produce it.
Most of the book is about the process of creating the show and dealing with life issues that pop up and cause grief or hassle. There is very little romance in this; it’s mostly a career fantasy. Lots of problems happen along the way, but all of the problems are neatly tucked away within 5-10 pages. In a way, it’s uplifting because it gives the impression that even really big scary problems (ex: alcoholism) can be overcome with the right attitude, but for me it let go of any suspense before it could build up.
My general impression of this book was “good, but bland”. Kait was a pretty relatable character, very stable, caring, and clear-headed. It took me a long time to get through this because I kept getting bored, but I think this is really aiming for a different audience than me. Where I like depth and novelty, Steel’s readers are looking for comforting and predictable. I don’t mean that with any judgment, it’s just a different kind of appeal.
This book has a strong boomer mentality, which is kind of interesting. There’s a skepticism of millennial lifestyles that pervades, with Kait picking on her daughter Stephanie for wearing hiking shoes everywhere (Kait’s style of dress is New York-polished) and wanting her other daughter, Candace, to stop working as a journalist in dangerous, far-away “shithole countries”. In the end, though, she’s supportive, it just their ways of living seem foreign to her.
Work is a huge part of this book. The Cast contains a lot of boomer attitudes about work. Kait’s grandmother is a riches-to-rags-to-riches story, as her family lost their wealth in the 20s and Kait’s grandmother built a new fortune by selling cookies, growing a business from the ground up.
Each character reads like a parable about work:
Kait – very busy with her column, hardly takes days off, uses it to distract herself from the pain of missing her grown children
Zach – Hollywood producer, obviously very busy and into his work
Stephanie – works at Google, computers are an all-consuming passion
Candace – works as a journalist helping oppressed women in foreign countries, willing to risk her life for work
Tom – Kait’s son, works for his father-in-law, who’s a wealthy business owner
Maeve – is willing to sign to work on the TV show even though her husband’s health is going downhill (because he wouldn’t want her to stop doing what she loves on his account).
Agnes – an aging former movie star. Being out of work has enabled her to slip into alcoholism, but getting back to work on the TV show gives her the motivation to give up drinking.
Charlotte – plays around but also takes her work very seriously, continues on the TV show even after [spoilers]
Dan – is a playboy and doesn’t take being an actor very seriously
Nick – definitely has enough money he doesn’t need to keep working, but he does because he’s good at it (even though he dislikes Hollywood).
Carmen – contrast with Kait, a coworker who is more of a 9-5 working type, doesn’t take her work home with her and doesn’t think it’s healthy that Kait does.
Becca – very unprofessional at first but when given a hard deadline she gets the job done
Scott – Kait’s ex-husband who was a rich playboy that didn’t want to work. He wanted to go on adventures instead of raising children, and ends up dying unceremoniously of a tropical illness.
This book paints a very rosy picture of work. In The Cast, work is often chosen and in an area one is passionate about. Family is portrayed as sometimes more important and sometimes less important than work, but family obligations never keep anyone from working. Work in The Cast is never: dirty, exploitative, or morally gray, the characters are economically privileged enough that they don’t have to think about that kind of work. Work is always shown as salubrious, bringing individuals into exchange with society in a way that is beneficial to both parties.
I mean, it’s not wrong for middle-to-upper-class people, but the bootstraps mentality is not going to work in every case. There are a lot of people stuck in minimum-wage jobs, disabled people, people whose skills aren’t economically viable, those that choose not to work, and those who consider work a mere necessity (rather than a purpose) that are excluded from the Protestant work ethic.
The impressive thing about Danielle Steel, though, is that she actually lives up to her prescriptions. She’s been publishing a book or more a year since 1977. She has five books being released in 2019. Even if her books are now being written by ghostwriters, she did manage to build a profitable brand on her own work, and that’s worthy of respect.
Reading that article about her was kind of inspirational, not just for how hard she works, but for how little she cares of what her detractors or the wider literary community thinks. The first rule you read in any “how to write book” is “read a lot”, and often it comes off as “a real writer is always reading something”. Danielle Steel breaks this rule; she doesn’t read while she’s writing, and she’s almost always writing, so basically she’s a writer who doesn’t read. That’s really kind of revolutionary if you think about it: she’s not working with the expectation or knowledge of a literary canon, she’s just doing her own thing, writing what feels true to her, not aspiring or genuflecting to past or contemporary literary greatness.
I think people who want to be writers could learn something from this aspect of Danielle Steel. I often feel stymied because I feel like I don’t know the canon well enough or what I want to write (subject or style) isn’t what would be considered “good writing”. To be honest, I don’t really know what I want to write, but my impression of worthy writing is definitely not contemporary because as I went through the school system everything we were taught to aspire to as writers was at least 80 years old, classic, and literary.
It was also mostly white male authors, which made it hard for me to see “good writers” as a group I could possibly belong to (except in spite of my gender, but in any case I knew gender wouldn’t be irrelevant to how I’d be perceived as a writer). There’s pressure for female authors to write about things that men think are interesting (war, politics, violence, triumph of man over nature) in order to be perceived as serious and legitimate.
I think it would be good if people were open not just to female authors but to feminine-coded subjects like romance, family, fantasy, and fairy tales because women are also people whose lived experiences are interesting.
And from an aspiring writer’s standpoint I think it’s important to read contemporary and peer works as well as older classic works so that you don’t get stymied by only comparing yourself to the best or to writers from a different era.
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