"Scruples is the novel that created publishing history, the first-and widely acknowledged to be the very best-novel ever written about the staggeringly luxurious life of a Beverly Hills boutique and the people who work in it. Scruples was translated into twenty languages and made Rodeo Drive famous around the world. The New York Post said that "Scruples was born to be a smash bestseller. . . It has more inside information about the worlds of high fashion and Hollywood than you'd find in a dozen manuals." With Scruples, Judith Krantz earned her reputation as a blazingly talented and original storyteller. She takes her readers behind the scenes of wealthy and fame to show them the real people and the real emotions that exist at the core of even the most high-powered lives. Scruples is the leader of her #1 best-selling novels." (per Goodreads)
I picked this book out from the Stacks because I was down there looking for something else and walked past Krantz' books . . . and then remembered reading this book a long time ago (felt like a lifetime ago, actually). While I had remembered parts of the story and some of the characters, I found myself thinking more about the writing and some of the details in a more critical way. I admit it: I read this book when I was too young to be reading it. It was published in 1978 and I remember reading it in the early 1980s --- and it's got some pretty steamy parts to it. I was really surprised to read the Goodreads summary which says this is "the very best-novel ever written about the staggeringly luxurious life . . . " Um . . . well, maybe that held up in 1978, but in 2019, I found a lot of the book to be kind of lacking. The one thing that kept striking me was the descriptions of details of Rodeo Drive felt a lot more like the 1980s than the 1970s --- and the descriptions of the main character's style didn't feel like 1960s to me at all. Admittedly, I wound up skimming parts of the book, especially toward the end because I felt like the story dragged on way too long. This was an interesting experiment in nostalgia, but I don't think I'll revisit her books again.
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