Rent Elements of Style

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.

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