Elements of Style
by Wendy Wasserstein
Published by Vintage
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Reviewed by Katherine M. Miller
Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s posthumously published Elements of Style is a sharply witty comedy about several members of New York’s high society as they cope in a post-9/11 world filled with Alvar Aalto bowls, Gustave Lefavre photographs and Jimmy Choo sandals.
Readers are introduced to Wasserstein’s cliche socialite characters through the compassionate eyes of Francesca Weissman, an Upper East Side pediatrician. In spite of her East Harlem office, Manhattan magazine names Weissman their number one pediatrician-an honor that forces Weissman to the fringes the city’s upper-most class. Weissman doesn’t oppose the transition at first. In fact, after being invited to her first dinner party, Wasserstein writes “Somewhere, [Francesca] felt enough sense of accomplishment that after thirty years she was finally invited to the cool girls’ table.”
Wasserstein’s other characters include the impossibly polished Samantha Acton (who invited Francesca to the aforementioned dinner party); the relentless social climber, Judy Tremont; the Oscar-winning moviemaker named Barry Santorini and his supermarket heiress wife, Clarice; the lawyer-turned-Hollywood-publicist, Adrienne Strong-Rodman; and a host of others who appear splashed about Page Six.
A series of dark events, including a terrorist bombing in a Starbuck’s and an accidental death, add even more drama to the irony-filled novel. Still, Wasserstein makes her point-that charity and compassion begin in the home and not in “ghetto fabulous” fundraisers-through Weissman’s selfless care for her father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Elements of Style has been called an update of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by several critics, among them Booklist and The Washington Post, and The New York Times calls Wasserstein’s novel “chick-lit with a chill and a pedigree.”
In her plays, Wasserstein was admired for the way she combined true warmth with cool satire, and her first novel will definitely make readers laugh with its charming heroine and its contemptuous characters.
Armchair Interviews says: Laughter abounds.