‘Elements of Style’ more than chick lit
“Elements of Style”
by Wendy Wasserstein (Knopf, 320 pages, $23.95)
Wendy Wasserstein’s smart, funny sensibility bubbles up on almost every page of her first and last novel.
The voice of a generation of women who found that the price of having it all could be much higher than they imagined, the prolific Wasserstein had numerous plays and essays, one screenplay, a children’s book, a libretto and an in-the-works musical to her credit when she died of lymphoma in January at age 55. She also had finished “Elements of Style,” a Pulitzer Prize winner’s foray into chick lit – if a book so observant and sharp can be shoved into a genre not generally embraced by writers as accomplished as Wasserstein.
Set in post-9/11 Manhattan, Wasserstein’s character-driven tale is drenched in sorrow, though the novel is also full of the ironic humor she brought to the stage in “Uncommon Women and Others” (the play that launched her career), “The Heidi Chronicles” (which won her the Pulitzer) and “The Sisters Rosensweig.”
Wasserstein’s Upper East Siders are the women Tom Wolfe labeled “social X-rays” in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Glorious Samantha Acton, striving Judy Tremont, chic Clarice Santorini, tough Adrienne Strong-Rodman and society decorator Pippa Rose roam the same moneyed turf.
They’re impossibly thin, a size 2 or maybe on fat days a size 4; highly educated, though unemployed by choice; married to merely rich or fabulously wealthy men; unerring in their choice of the right designer, the hot restaurant, the best private school, the most socially advantageous gala. They are vividly drawn and amusingly shallow, fairy-tale society dames whom Wasserstein refuses to allow a rose-colored happy ending.
Dr. Frankie Weissman, who interacts with but isn’t really of this glittering social circle, is the character closest to Wasserstein herself, a Jewish pediatrician with a strong social conscience.
Wasserstein’s novel takes its title from the William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White style manual for writers. She uses it ironically, of course. In their search for all things that bespeak style, too many of her characters forget about substance.
Chick lit doesn’t aspire to dazzling literary achievement, and neither does “Elements of Style.” But those who knew much about Wasserstein will recognize the small plot points that flowed from her own life.
Frankie sometimes treats premature babies, and Wasserstein’s beloved daughter Lucy Jane weighed less than 2 pounds at birth. Frankie’s dad took the family to Miami Beach at Christmas, as did Morris Wasserstein.
And so her one and only novel serves as a poignant reminder of a talented, astute, warm-hearted woman gone too soon.