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It is hard to review Wendy Wasserstein's Elements of Style. Hard to separate truly liking the novel from wanting to like it, since at the time she was writing what would be her first and last novel, Wasserstein, a Pulitzer winning playwright, sparkling screenwriter and quick-witted essayist was, like one of her characters in the novel, facing her own impending death.

Wasserstein has given us quite a cast of characters. The most important is Francesca Weissman, aka Frankie, our heroine of sorts. Hailing from Queen's, Frankie, whose dad now has Alzheimer's, has been voted the most popular pediatrician by a Manhattan magazine. Frankie's point of view might well be the stand-in for Wasserstein's own bemused (to put it mildly) take on society as Frankie's wealthy patients have trouble accepting her move to Fifth Avenue and 102nd St on the border between posh and poverty.

As a foil to Frankie, there is her college classmate, blue-blooded Samantha Acton (descended from the Carnegies) and her dermatologist husband, who stores his patients "butt fat" in his refrigerator until it's time to inject it into their faces. Then there is California-raised Judy Tremont, who comes from a blue-collar family and is the paradigm for a social climber. Wasserstein writes that Judy has "a personal assistant, a calligrapher, a dog walker, two housekeepers, a driver and a cook." Add to that mix, nice but bland-as-white-bread Clarice Santorini and her husband, Barry, the charmless and brash Oscar winning producer whose most sophisticated word seems to be "classy." Throw in some minor characters, and you have what is essentially a mosaic of the life of New York's privileged.

In what has been called a "scathing comedy" about post 9/ll New York, these entitled characters do what characters do in novels in pre 9/ll times. They have affairs of one sort or another. Samantha falls for Barry. Barry and Clarice split. Samantha's dermatologist husband begins an affair with Frankie. During all of this, we get to follow them as they shop on Madison Avenue, have drinks at Bemelman's and dinner at Da Silvano. To tell more would be to give away the ending. Suffice it to say there's a tragic death on a ski-slope, and the tragedy of terminal cancer. Those two combine to effect a final reshuffling of these characters' lives.

Accidents and cancer aren't the only tragedies of this novel. The true tragedy — even if presented as a comedy, albeit a dark one — is the shallowness of the characters themselves. Samantha and her dermatologist husband turn out to be eerily like Fitzgerald's Tom and Daisy. But this story has no Gatsby, no dreamer we can mourn. Unless perhaps it is Jil Taillou, an art dealer with an invented name who cannot bring himself, even in modern day New York, to be open about who he really is.

In fact, the flaw in the book is that it's too much about style and not enough substance. Reading it, one can't help but think if only. If only Wasserstein had been given the gift of more time, she could have tweaked the novel to inject many more of her clever turns of phrase; she could have called upon her gift for infusing a certain warmth into her characters even as she renders them pitiful; she could have given this novel the signature grace that crowns her satire.

There are readers who will argue that reasons for the flaws are not important. A flaw is a flaw. But Wendy Wasserstein on her worst writing day could still write. She could see the most subtle pretensions that sneak into all of our lives and nail us with them, the "grits on endive with blue cheese." So while this is not Wasserstein at her best, there is enough of Wasserstein's style here, and enough humanity in Frankie, especially her relationship to her dad, to make it a recommended read.

If you want to read more of Wasserstein, which is what reading Elements will make readers (and writers) want to do, read her Shiksa Goddess, a book of essays that shows her talent for being irreverently funny and empathetic at the same time.

Myra McLarey

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