Lessing brings back fictional fashion-forward magazine Issues
and its newly minted editorial honcho, sartorially challenged feminist Zoe, sister of She's Got Issues
protagonist Chloe Rose. Publisher Dan Princely (aka Chloe's devoted new husband) has gone gaga for Zoe's agenda and gives her a mandate to revamp the magazine's usual fare of shoes, makeup and shopping into a manifesto of female empowerment, decorum and personal growth. Zoe renames the magazine Miss Understanding
and gleefully introduces it to the staff as a didactic, humorless instruction manual. The staff, predictably, hate Zoe and are willing to go to any length to sabotage her: they include stylish nasties Sloane and Blaire; perennially drunken promotions department head Ruth; and even Dan's regal, evil mother, Anita. As the antics escalate, Zoe's droning, pompous rants on the evils of style and the necessity of fixing female friendship become longer, angrier and more Dworkin-esque, without being funny. By the time the book devolves into a schematic pitched battle between the united, righteous sisters and the psycho, infantile staff, it's hard to care about who's switching covers on the magazine right before it goes to press or how Zoe's running trials with pregnancy will play out. (Nov.)
