O tempora, O mores. Eheu fugaces. Servants are not what they were. We employ them, and they turn on us. The employers excoriated by Nanny in The Nanny Diaries could be any one of us. While I was growing up servants were humble and loyal: servants knew their place. Of course the employers ridiculed in this disgraceful novel made a foolish mistake, employing a college-girl with aspirations far above her station, a girl with delusions of social equality with her employers, and indeed moral superiority over them. In my family we employed illiterate Irish peasant girls who were instructed firmly (but fairly) in their duties, and who were grateful for our condescension in allowing them a diet of potatoes and oatmeal, and a piece of smoked haddock both at Christmas and at Easter, grateful for being allowed to sleep indoors, on luxurious palliasses above the cows in the byre at the home farm.
Instead of regarding herself, as she ought to have done, as a hired child-minder, the wretched girl sets herself up as a surrogate mother of the only child of the family, a boy, becoming emotionally involved with the him in a sickening, sentimental fashion, striking, fundamentally, at the first requirement of membership of the upper-class, complete personal self-sufficiency, and moral detachment, as displayed by his parents. How is an upper-class child, pampered like some molly-coddled middle-class brat, to attain the ruthlessness and selfishness necessary to fit him for membership in the class to which he belongs?
Despite the frequently repeated efforts of his mother to teach both the child and the nanny by example, the nanny persists in trying to turn the child into a milksop. Had she been successful, God alone knows how he would cope when he was first buggered at the expensive prep-school he is destined to go to.
The employers are themselves excessively liberal: for example, they rearrange their departure on holiday so that the nanny may graduate with a comical degree at some piffling concrete college without so much as a hint of ivy about it; and their generosity is received with scant gratitude by the ingrate they employ.
In the end, the wretched nanny exhausts the patient tolerance of her employers, and is dismissed, without a reference as she deserves to be.
The perverse behaviour of the odiously disloyal nanny is presented in a humorous light that tries to engage the reader's sympathy, unfortunately with some success among the undiscriminating.
Altogether this is a deeply subversive book and I cannot recommend it.
A poignant satire, this New York Times bestselling sensation is written by two former nannies and punctures the glamour of Manhattan s upper class to ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.