The pampered lives of elite New Yorkers

By Deirdre Donahue
USA Today

"The Nanny Diaries" by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus; St. Martin's, hardback, $24.95

Remarkably, the double byline works. Often a recipe for disaster, it has generated a seamless, witty, detail-rich story that perfectly captures the strange and pampered life of New York's elites as they skillfully evade raising their own offspring. This book will be seen on beach blankets all summer. Except on Nantucket, the Hamptons and wherever else these people congregate.

It's also elegantly put together. Under the heading, "The Interview," the prologue wonderfully sets up the world of very rich women who devote enormous energy to monitoring what their children eat but who never actually sit down with them. "Just how does an intelligent, adult woman become someone whose whole sterile kingdom has been reduced to alphabetized lingerie drawers and imported French dairy substitutes? Where is the child in this home?"

In a sense, the rest of the novel answers that question. Nanny, an energetic, appealing NYU senior majoring in child development, narrates the story. She likes children and has worked for other families. But a chance encounter brings her into the sphere of Mr. and Mrs. X and their 4-year-old son, Grayer Addison X. A perfect size 2, Mrs. X devotes herself to maintaining her looks, the pristine elegance of her lavish apartment (there's a full-time housekeeper, of course) and making sure that Grayer does not muss up her Prada togs. She does have serious concerns: Which private school will he go to? Mr. X is always at the office generating the millions that keep the family in splendor. Both see Grayer as a prestige accessory, not as a little boy with emotional needs. Grayer is an appealing tot who yearns for the one thing he can't have: his parents' attention.

"The Nanny Diaries" traces the year that Nanny works for the Xs. (While Nanny has a rocky time, the authors make it clear that it is the illegal-immigrant nannies who really suffer.) Although Mrs. X's behavior toward Nanny verges on the criminal by the end, the authors make it clear that she is not the sole source of this family's dysfunction. Mr. X is a selfish man whose business skill makes him a pasha with the ladies. But the scenes with his mother, the well-born harridan Elizabeth X, reveals him to be seriously nurture-deprived. And there is the shapely Ms. Chicago scheming to become the next Mrs. X.

Although "The Nanny Diaries" is screamingly funny, it's also painfully sad. A very effective combination.