Synopsis Wendy Wasserstein's well-heeled Manhattan women carry on in the post-9/11 era as if nothing had happened. With the exception of Francine "Frankie" Weissman, the neurotic lovelorn pediatrician who slums with the socialites, these women are more concerned with dinner party seating arrangements, bicoastal affairs, and haute couture than impending doom. But the doom finds them anyway, and the second half of the novel shatters their rarified world in the form of illness, death, and an explosion at a Starbucks. Wasserstein's comic powers are at a high gloss, her dialogue bubbles and snaps, her observations are wry and pithy, but, as with her brilliant stage plays, it's the underlying depth of feeling, and her humanist politics, that make the novel soar. The book's tragic turn is sadly prescient. Wasserstein died shortly before the book was published. It is her first and only novel.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2007-05-08 | | Series: | Vintage | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 323 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Note A dazzling mosaic of madcap social whirls, fashion, style, and mores captures the lives of New York City's urban upper crust as they make their way through twenty-first-century Manhattan in a post-9/11 world, in a comedic debut novel by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of The Heidi Chronicles. Reprint.
Industry Reviews "[ELEMENTS OF STYLE] is chick-lit with a chill and a pedigree. Tom Wolfe and Edith Wharton can be found peeking through its Candace Bushnell fluff....By the end of the book, no amount of shopping and skiing and sleeping around has kept the darkness at bay.... [The novel] is both a blithe, funny feat of escapism and a sobering reminder of the inescapable." (04/20/2006)
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