The cover art for Wendy Wasserstein's Elements of Style makes this book look like an expensive present. The design cruelly underscores that there will be no more gifts from Wasserstein, the endearingly funny and much-admired Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She died in January at 55. Her first novel is her last.
Superficially, Elements of Style is part of a familiar genre. It includes a spoiled, well-heeled woman who thinks of writing "one of those Park Avenue princess novels," but Wasserstein appears to have beaten her to the punch. Here are New York's social-climbing, back-stabbing, label-flaunting sophisticates, moving restlessly through a conventional comedy of manners. There's only one catch: Their world is coming to an end.
There is a chicken-or-egg quality to this story, a tale that begins shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Did Wasserstein start off writing a lighthearted book and shade it with intimations of mortality? Or did she begin with the disaster and contrast its seriousness with the giddy frivolity and selfishness of her characters?
Either way, Elements of Style is chick-lit with a chill and a pedigree. Tom Wolfe and Edith Wharton can be found peeking through its Candace Bushnell fluff.
Wharton's Age of Innocence has been read by this book's most fatuous nouveau-riche matron, Judy Tremont. Judy is in the process of scaling the most dizzying heights of New York party giving. (The right seating chart can send her into a state of transcendence not attainable in her Ashtanga yoga class.) Judy secretly suspects that she might have been happier in Wharton's day.
"Her recent interest in contemporary art was a concerted effort to catapult herself into the 21st century," the book explains about Judy. "But in all honesty, she'd admit to friends she'd rather have a family silversmith than a washer/dryer."
Instead, Judy makes herself a monument to superficiality. She excitedly pursues the blueblooded Carnegie-Van Rensselaer heiress Samantha Acton. She falls for a salesman's smooth flattery and drops US$20,000 on evening bags in only a few minutes' time. Her response to Sept. 11 is to behave as if nothing happened but to wear better jewelry, in case she has to barter it for survival.
The rest of the book's characters are similarly and poignantly oblivious. "Who wants to stand around the Rainbow Room eating boring shrimp and looking out at that same New York skyline and then move into the main dining room for beef medallions," Samantha complains. "That's in the life's-too-short category." Samantha hasn't a clue about what that means. But Wasserstein suffused this seemingly buoyant book with a warning that life could be too short indeed.
The stereotypically rich and famous figures in Elements of Style do have Darwinian instincts. In Samantha's case, that means being drawn to a boorish movie mogul, Barry Santorini ("Babe, I'll call you tonight either from Deauville or LA."), in part because he and his Gulfstream could flee New York so quickly if they had to. Samantha's marriage to a
fashionable plastic surgeon is no hindrance to her affair with Barry. And it conveniently frees the surgeon, Charlie Acton, to fall for the book's noblest (and most Wasserstein-like) figure, a pedia-trician named Francesca Weissman.
Frankie's bona fides include having helped premature infants in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, earning an A-list professional ranking by a trendy magazine and moving her office north to East Harlem, to the chagrin of the Judy Tremonts of the world. Since Judy lives by a code of rules as strict as Strunk and White's grammar bible, from which the novel takes its title, she cannot possibly take her children to the second-best doctor. Thanks to this same code, Frankie finds herself invited to parties with the book's more glittering figures. "You needed someone dowdy to take the edge off," Judy reasons about Frankie.
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