The Two Mrs. Grenvilles by Dominick Dunne

This novel by Dominick Dunne is everything the backcover blurbs promise – compelling, steamy, engrossing, fast-paced, and diverting. Dunne has a reputation for being on the inside when it comes to information about the rich and famous, and this novel is no departure from that. His tale takes a sexually promiscuous showgirl and turns her into a society stunner after she marries the only son and heir to the New York Grenville fortune.

While not an original plot, Dunne’s treatment of Urse Mertens, a little nobody from Pittsburg, Kansas who turns into Ann Arden Grenville, arbiter of style and member of the jet-set and ultimately murderess, is fascinating. Dunne writes well, and only a few glitches (like saying that someone is a direct relation to Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s 5^th wife, who got her head cut off before she could produce any children for him) shows him to be fallible with the facts. His other details about the right place to buy one’s flowers, linens and clothes in New York, I’m hoping, are more en pointe.

Mostly, Dunne has a good sense for what makes people tick. His portraits not only of gold digger Ann, but of her stuffy mother-in-law Alice, and her hapless husband, Junior “Billy” Grenville, are rich and layered. He is not content to make them caricatures of themselves, but allows them to grow as people who make decisions and choices for very understandable human reasons, even if those decisions are not the right ones to make. Dunne shows Ann’s cleverness, which of course must face off against that of her wealthy boyfriend’s snobbish family. He shows their snobbishness, and that of their friends, but in the end it is only Ann’s crime that brings her back to being a person of little consequence.

It is not a short book, being over 300 pages, but it is an interesting one from beginning to end, as Ann is pursued by a writer who wants to know the truth behind the night her husband died, and to get a little revenge of his own for being marginalized by her years earlier. I sense hints of Truman Capote’s story here, a story Dunne would also know well, but he could be talking about his own experience of getting to the heart of high–profile, high-class crime.

I strongly recommend this book for adults, because some of the sexual escapades would probably be a bit much for young teens. I think you need to be a bit cynical to enjoy the story, which is a story of luck and ambition, both of which eventually run out for the younger Mrs. G. This would make a great book to take along to a spa or resort, because it will take you some hours of leisure living to get through, but you won’t want to put it down until you do.