Seven Oaks Magazine.

As a satirical treatment of post-9/11 New York through the lens of its most privileged residents – those with personal airplanes that whisk them out of the city during times of orange and red ‘terror’ alerts – Elements of Style is mostly unsuccessful in substantially challenging the ‘inviolability’ of existing political and cultural norms in War on Terror-era America.

With each chapter highlighting the adventurous mishaps and triumphs of different characters in the narrative, this first novel by late playwright Wendy Wasserstein connects these individual stories – illustrating the overlapping experiences of New York’s richest tier, where no one is particularly loyal to anyone else; where, oftentimes, personal integrity takes a backseat to imbibing gossipy anecdotes and acquiring fresh-off-the-runway fashion.

Frankie Weissman – the only character in this novel continuously represented as sane, intelligent, and well-adjusted – is a pediatrician who serves a racially and economically diverse clientele and whose medical work ethic is more consistent with the principles of Canadian brand health-care-for-all. Her office is equidistant to the Upper East Side and East Harlem: appropriately placed, given Frankie’s “long history of ambivalence toward the entire privileged New York landscape” and her current role as a teacher of preventative medicine at day care centers and elementary schools in East Harlem (page 6). Her workdays, in addition to caring for patients, also comprise of run-ins with maniacal, overbearing Upper East Side mothers who insist upon service-on-demand for their children. Frankie is the pivotal, redemptive character in the novel, navigating the incongruent cultural and geographical regions of the rich and poor. While her balanced life threatens to be thrown off-course by the demanding, Upper East Side mothering elite, she won’t let it: she is fiercely independent, strong-willed, kind, and socially conscious. In Frankie, Wasserstein illuminates the positive qualities of humanity in post 9/11 New York: in a city overtaken by the messages of fear administered and manufactured by its government and dominant media vehicles, Frankie is representative of ordinary Americans – extraordinary in their everyday heroics – who are apprehensive of, and alarmed by, the war-hungry, deceitful policy directions of their country.

Other characters include: Samantha Acton, with riches dating back generations, a fashionable, beautiful socialite whose life and looks are a subject of much jealousy and idolatry; Charlie Acton, her understanding, kind-hearted plastic surgeon-of-a-husband who has remade the bodies and faces of New York’s ‘finest’; Judy Tremont, a woman of modest economic beginnings, who marries rich and becomes consumed by her obsession to clothe herself in the finest designers and gain membership to the wealthiest, most coveted Upper East Side circles; Barry Santorini, the Republican and Oscar-winning director, who represents the most undesirable side of the moneyed male class: selfishness, avarice, and, most of all, machismo.

The most humorous part of the novel illustrates its missed potential. An independent film benefit that takes place in the inner city, aimed at celebrating the achievements of African-American independent filmmakers, intelligently exposes the absurdities borne out of economic and racial inequality.

The uptown socialites who are invited to the event take the “Dress Ghetto Fabulous” dress code too literally and arrive ridiculously adorned in their version of rapper regalia, while the African-American guests arrive dressed in “understated gowns and fitted Armani suits” (146). This situation is not unlike the American fashion industry’s penchant for appropriating the street-style fashion of poor and working class black communities, and regurgitating it back onto fashion runways with a farcically high price tag. It is also not unlike the tendency among the wealthy elite to proclaim false solidarity with marginalized communities – racism is over! we dress like them! – through the uncritical consumption of the cultural symbols that are dominantly understood to be affiliated with such communities.

The benefit is staged at a partially burned down church in the inner city and is given a drastic ornamental facelift by Samantha, the event planner:

[She] had found the site while she was scouting the area with Barry’s current favorite production designer. She chose not to hide the church’s decay, but to light its Victorian details and wooden altar with blue and lavender Christmas lights. The lights were like tiny blue dots creating an air of mystery and sensual decay. The pews in the sanctuary were replaced with blue velvet leopard love seats and massive throw pillows. And for flowers, Samantha triumphed with the unheard of: she had stalks of red gladiolas at every table, the kind sold by the dozen for $6.99 at a Korean market. It was a style coup. (146)

This transformation – from a site of urban decay to one of upscale, lavish luxury fit for a movie star – effectively conveys the forgotten spaces of poor American neighborhoods. Neglected, abandoned, and starved for structural revitalization, these sites become temporary meeting grounds for the rich and famous when photo opportunities and charitable, grandiose gestures are involved. This is not unlike a few weeks ago when I came across an alley in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – commonly used as places of last resort for drug use and urination - being hosed down and disinfected for filmmaking purposes. This sudden initiative to clean up a dangerously unsanitary part of Canada’s most impoverished community tempted a colleague of mine, who works in the area assisting the very people who often use those alleys, to ask those involved in the sterilizing process: “why don’t you do this in all of the alleys all of the time?”

In a national climate with escalating ‘terror’ warnings and emerging legal instruments to quell the urgent and essential voices of anti-war, anti-racist dissent, Wasserstein’s novel chooses, for the most part, to avoid making racial profiling and racism subject matters worthy of as much examination and ridicule as classism and consumerism; this thematic selection is made despite the escalation of racist policy and attitudes so prevalent after the attacks. With the exception of a few references to racial inequality and discrimination here and there, such as the racist tendency among white Americans to equate brown-skinned men with terrorists, the author is mostly silent on a subject that should deserve a great deal more satirical meditation.

Only recently has it become the ‘acceptable’ time for mainstream publishers to capitalize on works like these which poke fun at the ludicrous realities afflicting post 9/11 New York, a few years after the fact – particularly now, when all eyes are focused anxiously on Lebanon. This book would have made more waves had it been released earlier: during the period in which criticisms of the US government and foreign policy were at an all time low – when any discourse traveling beyond the peripheries of sympathy for the victims was highly monitored – this satire might even have seemed rebellious. But then again, had it been written soon after the attacks, chances are unlikely it would have procured a mainstream publisher like Alfred A. Knopf. Had it attained a publisher, its release date would have likely been delayed a few years, until its ability to ‘offend’ had been blunted by time.

In its attempt to expose the folly of old- and new-money Manhattanites, Wasserstein’s first novel is light, benign fare: in the recent tradition of post-9/11 left-of-centre satirical narratives, there is nothing special here. We’ve seen this type of thing on Jon Stewart, and juxtaposed against the searing political critiques of Stephen Colbert, Elements of Style does not stand a chance. Packaged in the form of ‘chick-lit fantasy’ - the book cover imitative of a pink present wrapped in a bow – any existing political commentary is diffused in a marketing scheme that primarily targets straight, female audiences looking for a genre of literature with a vicarious, guilty-pleasure component. Nevertheless, Elements of Style offers a few worthwhile laughs, especially for those still fuming over the ‘brave’ editorial decisions of Danish newspapers.