By CAROLINE LEAVITT Elements of Style By Wendy Wasserstein

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I love Wendy Wasserstein. She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, a doting mother of a young daughter, and by all accounts, one of the best friends anyone could have, and her death robbed us all of a brilliant talent and an extraordinary human being. She never lived to see the publication of this, her first novel, and though I was dearly hoping to give it an unqualified rave because I adored her plays so much, the critic in me is… well, a little critical.

Elements of Style is chick-lit with bite, but that’s not necessarily a compliment for the Über-talented Ms. Wasserstein. Filled with designer names, spas, tony restaurants, and a rarified atmosphere of upper-echelon New York City, the book gaily zips in and out of the lives of the supposed crème de la crème of Manhattan society in post-9/11 times. But to the characters populating Elements, 9/11 is nothing more than an annoying shadow on their lives, and these privileged people still believe that “life could be controlled if only you had the right resources.”

There’s Clarisse, married to powerful film honcho Barry, who wants to be taken care of as much as he wants the next gorgeous woman around. Samantha is the dazzling empress of style whom everyone wants to emulate, and who constantly battles herself because she wants to feel necessary. She’s married to good-guy Charlie, who has a revolutionary new way of smoothing out wrinkles with the fat he takes from his clients’ posteriors. And there’s gossipy Judy, who will do anything to cozy up to Samantha. (“I sort of like her,” Samantha says. “She believes our lives have a purpose.”)

And of course there is Frankie Weissman, a Jewish girl who grew up in Queens, and a character for which the whole novel might be forgiven. As a child, Frankie was desperate to be Madeline, the little girl who grew up in a convent, and now, as an adult, a pediatrician, she is again on the outside looking in, this time on her wealthy patients’ lives. Frankie is frankly stupendous. She genuinely cares for her clients, and she yearns for love, fending off the “ossifying loneliness” in this world. She’s the doctor to these society stars’ pampered children, and she has a social conscience. Her waiting room is equal opportunity for children of all races and bank accounts, a group of human beings that the other style mavens resent and resist, claiming that their presence makes for a waiting room that is more like Port Authority than the Upper East Side. Frankie, too, is the only character who seems to have real connections to other human beings. Her scenes with her father, who is descending into Alzheimer’s, are real and moving to the point of heartbreak. And when she falls in love with Charlie, the novel becomes, at least for a moment, luminous and important.

In the course of the novel, all these people exchange partners, fall in and out of lust (and occasionally what they think is love), and they namedrop a whole lot of products, vacation spots, and beauty procedures. But part of the problem is that, except for Frankie, no one here is very sympathetic or terribly surprising, so the book begins to seem predictable. Like the film La Ronde, Elements of Style circles around the elements of upper crust New York. This is post-9/11 New York, but the concerns of these people still are more about Prada and getting the right pediatrician than about terrorists, though they do refuse to let their nannies take the children in taxis anymore.

As evinced by her plays, Wasserstein is, of course, an extraordinary writer. Here, the satire is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. But the jokes are so fast and furious and clever that they become more like a laugh track on a sitcom than the humor needed for a multi-layered novel, and the effect is wearying.

These are people who feel they deserve another person to make it all right. At the end of the book, Wasserstein begins to tie up loose ends, and everyone begins to get their just desserts, which are not always the crème Brule they aspire to. Truthfully, I can’t deny that I did like the book and had fun reading it. It’s a page-turner that I will give to friends, but the problem is that while it may be a good enough read, it’s not what I want or expect from a talent like Wendy Wasserstein.

What gives a person character, the book asks? The answer is using your mind and never forgetting about your heart, something Wendy Wasserstein always, always did in her extraordinary plays, and something one could wish she had done more of in this book.

Caroline Leavitt is a book critic for The Boston Globe and most recently the author of "Girls In Trouble." She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.

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