By Bethenny Frankel A Place of Yes: 10 Rules for Getting Everything You Want Out of Life

While savoring the chow and swilling the wine at the latest of the many, many swank Manhattan literary soirees to which he is inevitably invited, all eyes are suddenly on the reader when he is asked what he thinks is the cause of the apparent collapse of the publishing industry. The reader needs only think for a brief moment before answering, “Why, Bethenny Frankel, of course!” and then returning to his raspberry sorbet.

The reference is, of course, to the smart-mouthed core of the “Real Housewives of New York” franchise on Bravo, now star of her own reality show, “Bethenny Ever After” (sort of an “I Love Lucy” for the 21st century, in which Lucy is pregnant with Little Ricky before marrying Ricky in a great big ceremony at the Four Seasons) and, as she never lets her reader forget for a moment, author of not one but two New York Times bestsellers, The Skinnygirl Dish and Naturally Thin.

Yes, that Bethenny Frankel—the one who appeared on “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart” as a means of “building her brand.” The one who first came to public notice as the mysterious “Princess Pashmina,” when she foisted her cashmere scarves on our sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers for an all-too-brief pre-Uggs winter season. Who then morphed into a chef with her “BethennyBakes” brand of good-for-you baked goods, and who now, for better or worse, is attempting to become the lovechild that Oprah and Dr. Phil never had by struggling to tell us all the Truth, even to the point of burning the original manuscript of this book in front of Bravo’s television cameras to let us all know how hard she was working to get things just right.

Does the reader really think that Bethenny Frankel is responsible for all that is bad in the publishing world? Or course not. But he does think that her present book A Place of Yes: 10 Rules for Getting Everything You Want Out of Life is a prime example of how publishing got to the edge of the cliff.

A Place of Yes, first of all, belongs to that category of book, authored mostly by the Suzannes and Marilus of the world, that presents the premise that anyone who has had either a sitcom or reality series is fully trained and skilled enough to dole out advice on diet and nutrition, surviving menopause, combatting cancer and, in this case, “getting everything you want out of life.”

And yet, despite the fact that Ms. Frankel tells her readers again and again that she herself has gotten everything her little heart desired (often in ways that indicate that she herself is somewhat surprised by the fact of all that she has gotten, something that undermines to no small extent the thesis of her book), this clinical trial of one actually stands as scant evidence that her methods work, or, indeed that she has any actual methodology to offer.

Not that any of these rules are in any way thought provoking or groundbreaking. They seem to be the most over-ripe and lowest hanging fruit on the self-help tree, in that they consist of such bromides as these:

Rule Number One: “Break the Chain. Your past happened, and it’s part of you, but you don’t have to carry forward the bad habits, bad feelings, and ideas about who you are from that part of your life. Break the chain and celebrate coming into your own as an adult who is in control of your own life. What happens from here on out is entirely up to you.”

Or, worse:

Rule Number Five: “All Roads Lead to Rome: You won’t always know what’s over the horizon, but you will get somewhere good if you stay focused on what you want. Even when something bad happens, you’re likely to see why it happened later. Everything you do leads to something else, and in the end, if you stay on your path, you’ll get to the place you wanted to be—even if it isn’t what you expected. It’s probably going to be even better.”

In terms of advice, the reader feels that it is perhaps not bad, but that it is more on a par with that offered by Glinda the Good Witch than anything that Norman Vincent Peale or Zig Zigler had to say. All that’s missing, really, are the ruby slippers.

A Place of Yes fails—and the book is a failure, no doubt about it, failing even to hold the reader’s interest until Frankel’s all-too-brief remembrance of her time spent in Martha Stewart’s company during the taping of “The Apprentice,” and then, for just a few pages, it’s suddenly a hoot, giving some indication of the sort of book the author might have written, what with all those “Housewives” and all—because its author, editor and publisher all seem to all underestimate the intelligence of its readership and the expectations of those same readers when it comes to the contents of what we call a “book.” The reader wants to be challenged, to meet with new ideas and to be thoroughly entertained when cracking open a cover.

Instead, A Place of Yes, sweet little homily to capitalism, show business, narcissism and the cult of celebrity that it is, could have at least made for a simple and terse booklet, had our ten rules been given to us without the padding, the variations of Ms. Frankel’s few and narrow themes of her joyful home complete with handsome hubby and sweet little baby, her mean old Mom and her refusal to give up. Ever. No matter what.

Instead, the Queen of the Skinny Girls has given us something that suffers from severe bloat. It causes the reader to wonder how many first novels, how many slim volumes of poetry and books of enduring literary value could have been published for the cost of this swollen misfire.

And should our author be hoping for a three-peat in terms of the New York Times bestseller list through the publication of this new book, let’s just say that it is likely that she burned the wrong manuscript.

But, given Rule Number Five, in the end, that will likely be all for the best.