Late playwright's novel has more style than substance

Elements of Style, By Wendy Wasserstein, Knopf, 320 pp., $23.95

A few months ago, playwright Wendy Wasserstein died at age 55, leaving behind a collection of essays and plays that chronicled, illuminated, and humanized the women's movement of the past 40 years. ''Elements of Style," her first novel, was also her final offering. And while this tale of high-society New Yorkers trying to get on with life in the wake of Sept. 11 has the wit and crackling dialogue of her plays, it lacks their resonance.

Frankie Weissman, Manhattan magazine's ''Best Pediatrician on the Upper East Side," serves as both the social hub and the moral center of the book. Her office at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 102d Street encapsulates her character. She is committed to serving her poor East Harlem patients, but also tends to the children of the city's cultural aristocracy and is oddly attracted to its leading lights.

And ''oddly" is the operative word, because a more caricatured and despicable group of characters has rarely been assembled in the first 50 pages of a book. Take Judy, a self-made woman who has married into wealth and firmly believes (for nothing about Judy is anything other than firm) that ''life could be controlled if you only had the right resources." When not spending her time running, doing Pilates, getting groomed, shopping, or chowing down on her favorite midmorning snack of ''four soybeans, for protein, and a chocolate chip, for fun," Judy gossips, arranges parties, and strives to achieve ever greater esteem-by-association.

Samantha, who comes from old New York money, is the socialite with whom Judy and her peers most want to be associated. She has an innate sense of style that the others can only imitate, and an ease in her own skin that they can only covet.

Fittingly, Samantha's dermatologist husband, Charlie, helps the women in this social circle inch a little closer toward perfection by sucking the cellulite from their derrieres and reinjecting it to smooth out the unsightly wrinkles on their faces (thereby lending new meaning to the term ''self-absorption"). Charlie, like Judy, was not to the manner born. He built his own ladder, one fat cell at a time. Now, having treated some 9/11 burn victims and gotten reacquainted with the admirable Frankie, he is briefly reminded that, as a doctor, he could be contributing more to the greater good.

But Charlie's stirring of conscience is faint. Though he and most of the other characters have been vaguely awakened by the collapse of the World Trade Towers -- just enough to fly to Palm Beach instead of abroad for a holiday, have an affair, notice their children, or fleetingly question their purpose in life -- all are desperate to return to obliviousness as quickly as possible. And while the drive for stasis is an interesting phenomenon, it makes for a pretty flat book. Ironically, about the only character who shows any significant development is Frankie's father, whose descent into Alzheimer's disease is poignantly described.

Plays are limited to mining a few moments, and Wasserstein's achieve their impact not just through her superb dialogue but through the opportunities she affords her actors. But with no actors to flesh out the characters and give them depth, their snippy repartee simply feels shallow when spread out across the breadth of a novel.

Still, ''Elements of Style" is an entertaining read, and Frankie Weissman's hope and will in the face of chaos and fear are emblematic, not just of her city, but of her creator.