Valley of the Dolls
Published 1997 · 448 pages · 123,200 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance
How hard is Valley of the Dolls to read?
Valley of the Dolls scores 25 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Susann writes in plain, conversational contemporary prose with showbiz slang and little ornament. It sits close to Beach Read in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Sentences are short and direct, driven by dialogue and gossip. The syntax asks very little of the reader, much like Beach Read.
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- The book stays on concrete events: contracts, affairs, pills, marriages and breakdowns. Its ideas about fame and addiction come through plot and character rather than argument, like It Ends with Us.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- Several storylines run across two decades, but the pace is fast and each reveal is easy to follow. It feels closer to The Housemaid than to any dense novel.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Susann tells readers what characters feel and what happens, with little left to infer. The omniscient narration works like Beach Read's: what you see is what you get.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The pills, the 'valley' of the title and the body as commodity carry the main symbolism, and all of it is signposted. It is lighter than 1984's allegory.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- The tone is earnest melodrama with some knowing gossip about Hollywood. There is little gap between what the narrator says and what Susann means, near It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Susann resolves each woman's fate with a clear, melodramatic ending. It is closer to the genre-expected finish of Beach Read than to open-ended fiction.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- The plot moves chronologically across two decades, following three women between New York and Hollywood. The structure is as linear as Beach Read's.
How Valley of the Dolls is regarded
Valley of the Dolls holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.