MALLON

Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor By Diana Trilling Harcourt Brace, 341 pp., $14.95 Exclusive schools have a way of disappointing Diana Trilling. We can recall, from We Must March My Darlings (1977), how upset she was by the Columbia riots in 1968, and how troubled she was by the garbage in the living room of Briggs Hall when she returned to her alma mater, Radcliffe, in 1971. In 1980 the headmistress of the Madeira School went on trial for shooting the author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. This was too much; it was the sort of thing Mrs. Trilling had to see for herself.

Mrs. Harris is the record of her plucky commute to White Plains for a fivemonth murder trial that exhausted reporters fifty years younger than herself. Her energies are entirely admirable; indeed, her prose is less ponderous here than in her earlier books. But certain habits of mind continue to block her vision. Messes, in particular, still preoccupy her; she likes to refer to her cleaning lady, and she tells us that the courthouse press room, with its candy wrappers and soda cans, got to be as filthy as Briggs did back in ’71. This familiar fastidiousness might be appealing if it weren’t so often fatal to her understanding. Mrs. Trilling has in the past failed to see the forest for the trash, and in Mrs. Harris she shows an odd but deliberate confusion of the ethical and the decorous.

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Thomas Mallon

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Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor By Diana Trilling Harcourt Brace, 341 pp., $14.95 Exclusive schools have a way of disappointing Diana Trilling. We can recall, from We Must March My Darlings (1977), how upset she was by the Columbia riots in 1968, and how troubled she was by the garbage in the living room of Briggs Hall when she returned to her alma mater, Radcliffe, in 1971. In 1980 the headmistress of the Madeira School went on trial for shooting the author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. This was too much; it was the sort of thing Mrs. Trilling had to see for herself.

Mrs. Harris is the record of her plucky commute to White Plains for a fivemonth murder trial that exhausted reporters fifty years younger than herself. Her energies are entirely admirable; indeed, her prose is less ponderous here than in her earlier books. But certain habits of mind continue to block her vision. Messes, in particular, still preoccupy her; she likes to refer to her cleaning lady, and she tells us that the courthouse press room, with its candy wrappers and soda cans, got to be as filthy as Briggs did back in ’71. This familiar fastidiousness might be appealing if it weren’t so often fatal to her understanding. Mrs. Trilling has in the past failed to see the forest for the trash, and in Mrs. Harris she shows an odd but deliberate confusion of the ethical and the decorous.