Gossip of the Starlings

Long is the litany of fiction about privileged youth—witness the success of rich-kid drama Gossip Girl—and de Gramont isn’t shy about diving in headfirst. In this story of debutantes behaving badly, the girls ride horses, snort cocaine and get naked with boys beneath the moonlight on sandbars off the Cape Cod shore.

Catherine Morrow and Skye Butterfield both end up at Esther Percy School for Girls after landing in trouble at their previous schools for the well-to-do. Catherine’s dad pulled her from the exclusive Waverly after she was caught in bed with her lower-crust boyfriend, John Paul. Skye was expelled from her previous school after a couple of offenses—playing hooky to protest a plant that produces plutonium triggers and writing papers for a near-illiterate scholarship student. Both of Skye’s transgressions, however, are of the noble variety, which provides convenient campaign spin for her father, the famed and charming U.S. Sen. Douglas Butterfield.

Skye chooses Catherine as her closest (and only) friend at Esther Percy, and the two take to toking like it’s going out of style (the novel is set in 1984, so in fairness, maybe it was). After a failed excursion to the Butterfields’ summer estate, during which Catherine unsuccessfully tries to meld Skye with her old friends, frissons of tension crackle between the two, leading to the sort of high-drama tragedy that only the privileged get to partake in.

De Gramont writes with uncommon grace about the hypnotizing effect of fame on Catherine: “I would look up from a book, or open my eyes from sleep, and there Skye would be: standing over me—all gauzy smiles and invitation—for my weak and restless heart to follow.” Catherine’s story is one of alienation—from her past friends, from the sparkling sheen of the Butterfields’ Babylon. But when the story awkwardly tilts toward suspense, the emotional depth de Gramont spent so long digging disappears.