More Pills, Fewer Thrills

By Michele Orecklin

"Whatever happened to Anne Welles?" asks Rae Lawrence in the opening line of Shadow of the Dolls (Crown; 320 pages; $22), a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann's classic 1966 paean to babes, booze and barbiturates. Susann had her own ideas about the fate of Anne, the well-bred supermodel, and her buddy Neely O'Hara, the libidinous, scheming singer. She wrote a plot outline before she died in 1974, and it is partly from this that romance author Lawrence has drawn the new novel.

To make the story seem contemporary, Lawrence introduces a medicine cabinet full of new pharmaceuticals and shaves more than 20 years off the women's ages (when Shadow opens in 1987, the women are roughly the same age they were when the first book ended in 1965), but she does little else to update Susann's formula. Anne and Neely still self-medicate, stage comebacks and sleep around, but the whole thing feels dutiful, even predictable. In her thinly veiled sketches of the wealthy and well known, Susann was one of the first to wallow in the lifestyles of the rich and infamous. She could not have anticipated the E! network, the O.J. trial and her own literary heirs Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins. In Shadow, the flesh is still willing, but Susann's spirit is gone.

--By Michele Orecklin