As a playwright, Wasserstein knew how to center the action on a lovably frumpy alter ego like Frankie. Those tactics are more visibly manipulative on the page, as are the book's shifting points of view and its awkward romantic contrivances. But the touch of a playwright is most apparent in this book's frame of reference. At one point somebody casually quotes from Lola's opening number in "Damn Yankees." At another, disaster strikes near what may have been the epicenter of Wasserstein's world: Lincoln Center. The aftermath of an explosion at a nearby Starbucks, described here with a queasy blend of humor and horror, looks "like an American Kristallnacht, except the shards were splattered with nonfat Frappuccinos."
Throughout Elements of Style lives change, danger intrudes, couples mix and match. But the most affecting parts of the book take place in Frankie's mind. With her world forever changed and her beloved father slipping away, "she thought that her life had never seemed so precarious," the book explains. "She didn't know if it was the American flags so proudly displayed on every Park Avenue building that made her feel so off-balance," or a now-indelible humiliating moment for her father. "But for the first time in her life, Frankie believed there was absolutely nothing pinning her down."
By the end of the book, no amount of shopping and skiing and sleeping around has kept the darkness at bay. One character is a casualty of violence. Another becomes mortally ill and makes stealthy visits to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (where Wasserstein died) in a limousine. Elements of Style is both a blithe, funny feat of escapism and a sobering reminder of the inescapable.
RSS