by Leonora Seinfeld

      In the prologue to The Nanny Diaries: A Novel, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, our heroine Nanny introduces us to her typical interview with the wealthy Upper East Side mother. The apartment, of course, is immaculate. The mother, an Every Woman of Park Avenue royalty, is convincing in her aloofness to her child and her condescension to Nanny. Yet although saturated with wealth and Nanny’s vivid description, the apartment is a paper mache house, a doll’s house, that Nanny knocks down with one farcical portrayal after another. The reader finds himself laughing with each new caricature that Nanny dances across the page and through the marble tiled hallway: the sole finger painting that appears to be ordered from a catalogue, the notorious list of the child’s many allergies, the "Spatula Reflex" in which the mother averts her child’s embrace.

      The X family, whom Nanny ends up working for, prepares us for just as much one dimensionality as their anonymous label is designed to imply. First, meet Mrs. X, an emaciated socialite who spends her time evading her son while strategizing with a consultant on how to get him into the best brand name private school. Next, we prepare for our introduction to Mr. X, but instead meet his mistress, a woman of equal ingenuity who strategically places her undergarments around the X’s apartment in hopes of becoming the new Mrs. When we finally do spend more time with Mr. X we are not surprised by the completion of this family portrait, which Nanny paints with the startling colors of satirical invective.

     But outside of the margins of witty commentary and the X’s intimidating entranceway lurks Grayer, the X’s son and the only family member given a name. This very genuine child and his moving relationship with Nanny give the novel its chance to move beyond satire and attain real poignancy and stature. He is also the novel’s most problematic threat. When Grayer’s intimate and endearing moments with Nanny are juxtaposed with ridiculous Halloween costume parties and consultant meetings, parental absurdity shows its true face as parental neglect. Nanny’s humor, the novel’s signature, begins to turn our belly laughs into quieter chuckles, and sometimes pure silences, as the X’s neglect and abuse become more apparent. We owe it to McLaughlin and Kraus’ literary finesse that The Nanny Diaries can still make us smile at harrowing circumstances, even as we recognize their gravity and what is at stake.

     The Nanny Diaries has been compared to The Bonfire of the Vanities due to its expose of the Park Avenue underbelly (which, I imagine, when belonging to a Park Avenue mother, is most often empty). Yet the true genius of both novels lies not only in their satire of the wealthy, but also in their subjects’ rare moments of redemption. By the conclusion of Wolfe’s novel we cannot ignore the main character’s humanity in spite of his flaws. Similarly, Mrs. X is fleshed out from her emotionally and physically starved existence when wailing at her husband’s rejection, "curled up on the floor in her beautiful gown." Like Wolfe, McLaughlin and Kraus also find absurdity even beyond their primary material when sending Nanny to the South Bronx in pursuit of more permanent employment at a children’s organization. Just as Nanny’s "sheer Caucasianness" was a major playing card in the X’s hiring decision, her potential employers turn her away because she is White, in spite of their own pasty complexions, and go on about their own self-importance. In the reader’s mind an analogy is also drawn between the somber faces of the fading children staring out from behind the organization’s posters and the bleak smiles of Park Avenue toddlers, tucked away in a discrete enclave and inside of a Tiffany’s frame. McLaughlin and Kraus show us that ridiculousness and loneliness can be everywhere.

     The Nanny Diaries manages to be at once a humorous social commentary and a compassionate personal story. The reader watches, riveted, as Nanny takes the Park Avenue child out from beyond the confines of the Tiffany’s frame and into her own adventures. As we turn our last page, we can only wonder what these two new authors will come up with next.