Flirting With Disaster
Wasserstein skewers the upper crust of the Upper East Side.
ELEMENTS OF STYLE
A Novel
  The late Wendy Wasserstein (© Bill Eichner) |
By Wendy Wasserstein
Knopf. 307 pp. $23.95
A posthumous work by a beloved writer can only be welcomed with open and respectful arms. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein's first novel, Elements of Style , arrives just three months after her death at age 55. It is a satiric tale of good versus shallow, an Upper East Side sliver of the Big Apple, set in the wake of 9/11. Wasserstein's aftermath is not the fall of 2001 filled with funerals, bagpipe dirges on Fifth Avenue or "Portraits of Grief" in the New York Times. Hers is, pointedly, the post-9/11 of the rich and the fashionable, of Blue Bloods and those desperate to join them, cushioned by parties and gracious living, distracted as much by the challenges of private-school admissions as by national tragedy.
If we don't feel sympathy for the majority of Wasserstein's characters, their creator would undoubtedly would have said, "Good. You weren't supposed to." Raised and schooled on the Upper East Side, Wasserstein must have known these people and have been delighted to skewer them. The story delivers a point-of-view festival, with alternating characters providing third-person slice-of-life reports. Samantha Acton represents the Babe Paley of the new century, a New York thoroughbred who personifies social order and effortless good taste, self-described as "the only person who feels contented with the status quo." Judy Tremont is the "aspirational Upper East Sider," size four, born and raised humbly in Modesto, Calif., who married up, lunches conscientiously (hold the bacon, hold the dairy, dressing on the side).
A little fuzzy in the character-differentiation department is Adrienne Strong-Rodman, once a lawyer and Hollywood publicist, "hard and entitled," now married to a multibillionaire and in possession of a yoga hut on the roof of her twin townhouses. Deliciously crass and demi-monde-ish is the movie producer Barry Santorini, blunt, aggressive, uncouth, a send-up that could become a Hollywood guessing game. And there is more than a passing resemblance between the author and Francesca "Frankie" Weissman, M.D., the novel's uncommon woman of substance.
These people raise money, spend money and hire nannies who worked for princes. Unmarried and devoted to caring for her father, only Frankie Weissman remains above the plutocratic fray. She lives modestly, works diligently, admits to "ossifying loneliness." She has moved her pediatric Upper East Side office farther up Fifth Avenue to East Harlem, annoying and inconveniencing the backbone of her practice, those narcissistic socialite moms who don't like to wait among the germy underprivileged.
Through Frankie's selflessness and the toll it takes on her social life, Wasserstein delivers the message that charity begins at home, not at misguided fundraisers such as the one whose invitation noted, in an excess worthy of The Bonfire of the Vanities , "Dress Ghetto Fabulous." Wasserstein's contempt for her decadent neighbors is cloaked in what appears to be faithful reportage.
"Since 9/11 Judy had made a few obvious changes in her life," she writes. "First of all she never let her nannies take her children in taxis anymore. Any turbaned driver talking on a cell phone could be a terrorist. She kept a supply of iodine pills in her home plus gas masks for the entire family and their pets. Every day she carried a Fendi emergency kit in her purse neatly packed with Cipro. . . . And perhaps the biggest change was she always wore her good jewelry in the event she'd have to trade it for easy passage off Manhattan."
Nudged in the ribs, we understand that the constant invoking of designer goods and their price tags ("$1,950 rust crocodile Manolo Blahnik mules"; "three-hundred-dollar Bonpoint cashmere painter's overalls") required research by an author whose values do not come with iconic brand names.
Cheating and coupling jump the boundaries between old money and new. The new-money Barry "was in awe of girls like Samantha, who could trace their family fortunes back to the Van Rensselaers and the Carnegies. He also knew that as much as he was in awe of Samantha, society girls like her couldn't get enough of real Hollywood players like him. And besides, Barry had seen her husband. He was a runt from Princeton. A dermatologist. That's practically like being a skin care girl at Bliss spa or Georgette Klinger."
The trivial does give way to tragedy: Cancer strikes the novel's most boorish adulterer, and an accident (or murder?) on the slopes claims a principal. When a bomb goes off in a Starbucks, it is not a chapter from a post-9/11 history book, but the opening of act three, theater-like, a blast of light and sound offstage.
First and famously, Wasserstein was a playwright, whose words enjoyed the benefit of actors breathing life into them, signaling in voice, gesture and dress where attitude ends and irony begins. Thus a theater audience would know how to process the reply, "Do you think this is why Alex didn't get into Collegiate?" when a mother learns that her son has a brain tumor. Similarly, the reader can imagine the laugh Dianne Wiest or Madeline Kahn would have earned when referring to a morning pick-me-up as "four soybeans, for protein, and a chocolate chip, for fun." Readers who haven't seen Wasserstein's plays might wonder if Elements of Style was meant to celebrate or satirize high society and its trappings. But we have seen them, and we know. We trust that a dear playwright-friend of hers will take this work from page to stage, with luminous results. ·
Elinor Lipman's eighth novel, "My Latest Grievance," was published this month.
