The TV series Sex And The City didn't just have fans; it had disciples. Single women across the country felt the show described their lives, or at least the lives they wished they had; by the time Sex And The City ended its run last year, women who watched it in college had graduated and were arranging their professional and social world the way Sarah Jessica Parker and company did on television. All of which makes Natalie Krinsky's breezy debut novel Chloe Does Yale hard to evaluate. Krinsky has written a blatant Sex And The City clone, based on her own experiences at the Yale Daily News, where she penned a column called "Sex And The (Elm) City." But Krinsky's tacit acknowledgement of her debt to Candace Bushnell—whose sex columns inspired the original Sex And The City—doesn't make Chloe Does Yale's slangy style, knowing tone, and erotic misadventures any less derivative. On the other hand, the book's lack of originality may make it an accurate record of its times. If Krinsky intends to capture campus life the way it is right now, and if right now the women of the Ivy League are pretending to be Bushnell heroines, then that's not exactly Krinsky's fault, is it?
The real question is whether Krinsky has any business writing about sexual etiquette when—judging by the actions of her surrogate in the novel—she's not especially sexually adventurous herself. The Chloe of Chloe Does Yale spends the bulk of her slim volume dithering about ex-boyfriends and secret admirers, in a romantic mystery plot that's not all that mysterious. Krinsky is lucky that Chloe Does Yale comes on the heels of Tom Wolfe's even clumsier state-of-the-student-body farce I Am Charlotte Simmons, which reduced one sheltered young girl's college experience to her torturous sexual urges. Chloe Does Yale, by contrast, actually acknowledges that some collegians stop fornicating long enough to study, and have a few dorm-room bull sessions.
Krinsky can also be pretty funny, and she offers some real insight about the way sex affects the power balance of relationships, and about how a college kid's bedroom at home smells better after a semester away at school. The book is at its best when delving into the specifics of Yale life, like the semester-opening "shopping period," or the clandestine "naked parties." On the whole though, Chloe Does Yale is as sketchy and tentative as its protagonist, who at one point buys a vibrator, but fails to put it to use. While aiming for universality, Krinsky emerges with an inconsequential text that's too timid to give any real insider dish or offer any clear point of view. Krinsky's friends will probably love Chloe Does Yale, but anyone not actually in the book should shrug.