MRS. HARRIS: THE DEATH OF THE SCARSCALE DIET DOCTOR
by Diana Trilling; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 341 pages; $14.95
The killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower by Jean Harris was—in current parlance—an "upscale" crime. Accordingly, three upscale women were contracted to write books about it. Shana Alexander and Lally Weymouth are journalists with good exposure and better connections. Diana Trilling is a redoubtable essayist whose clear thinking and case-hardened prose have cut through much of the intellectual and political lard of the past 40 years.
The betting was that Trilling, 76, would turn out the most thoughtful account, though not the fastest or most marketable. One hesitates to deliver a verdict before all the evidence is in, but it is unlikely that Trilling's treatment of Tarnower's death and Harris' conviction will be bettered. As the 1981 calendar flattens against the wall, Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor seems the best nonfiction trade book of the year.
This is due largely to what is known in the author's literary circle as resonance—the rich tone that even a tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence. Where newspaper readers saw the case as little more than an upper-middle-class rendition of Frankie and Johnny (he done her wrong. Bang! Bang!), Trilling sees a drama worthy of the talents of Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also teases out enough class conflict to spin a dark web of one of egalitarian America's most sensitive subjects.
For hundreds of hours, Trilling observed the adjudication of this "respectable murder" from a press seat in the White Plains county courthouse. Little escapes an eye trained by the textures and details of the 19th century novel of manners. In fact, the Jean Harris case provides Trilling with all the things that she has found lacking in serious contemporary fiction: "Love and sexual passion, honor, money, envy, jealousy, greed, death, greatness and meanness of spirit, the anguishing anatomy of class differences: all these which were once major themes of the novel were disappearing from literature to find their home in television, whose falsifications steadily weakened our understanding of life even while we boasted our superiority to its influence."
The author does her bit to change this condition with a work of social criticism hat reads like a novel, though she makes no Mailerian claims for the achievement. She heartily dislikes Tarnower, his "repilian" face, his dictatorial and unimaginative diet book and his Westchester, N.Y., house, which she finds "Japanoid" and "claustral." From testimony and private conversation, she concludes that the cardiologist was "a small-time emotional imperialist," and "a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities." She gleefully notes that he took a nightly laxative mixed with applesauce and that, according to the autopsy report, the deceased was overweight by the standards set forth in his book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.