[In the following review, Grosskurth finds in Mrs. Harris what he considers an unnecessarily disdainful attitude toward the principal characters in the murder case.]

Just about everyone knows most of the details of the murder of the ‘inventor’ of the Scarsdale Diet by his discarded mistress. In a culture obsessed with bodies, the case provided a gamut of titillation. Additional interest was given to the trial by the knowledge that Diana Trilling, widow of Lionel Trilling, was writing a book about it [Mrs. Harris], thus giving it an intellectual imprimatur.

I found myself as interested in Mrs Trilling's reactions as I was in Jean Harris's story. A general tone of de haut en bas pervades her account, a self-conscious awareness that she is slumming. She is careful to establish social distinctions. Dr Tarnower was of Eastern European extraction, a kind of Gatsby who had managed to worm his way into the secure echelons of mid-European American Jewry. When his neighbour Alfred Knopf's name is mis-pronounced, Mrs Trilling winces. Mrs Harris is a book as much about standards—Mrs Trilling's standards—as it is about a murder trial. She is bored by the evidence of the ballistics experts but fascinated by the life-style of the protagonists. She gives a brilliantly caustic description of the victim's multi-balconied Japanese-style house whose meagre rooms betray its superficiality.

As for the girls' boarding-school in Virginia where Mrs Harris has been headmistress, it appears that it wasn't quite top-drawer. After all, not many of its graduates made the Ivy League. She is appalled to learn that the juniors spend one day a week working for Congressmen. As though that was any way to learn about democracy! Mrs Trilling's own brand of Thirties liberalism is barely kept in check.

Early in the book she responds ironically to comments about Jean Harris's clothes—too many pastels, not quite the best brand names. However, it later becomes clear that she herself is uneasy about the studied ‘demeanour’ (a word, she assures us, she never uses!) of the accused. That they share a common humanity is not clear to her until the shock of Jean Harris's deterioration by the time she is sentenced. Mrs Trilling's eyes devour the devastation.

There is a good deal of talk, too, about how the tawdriness of TV has replaced the insights into life that great novels used to give us. Repeatedly her analogies are drawn from literature. Certainly literature should illuminate life, but there is a danger that if everything is seen through the eyes of literature, if something cannot be understood except from an aesthetic perspective, the uniqueness of people and situations may be blurred.

‘What a set! What a world!’, Matthew Arnold exclaimed about the Shelley circle. This is largely Mrs Trilling's attitude to the egregious Tarnower and his harem of commonplace women. However, the enormity of the life sentence forces her to a reappraisal of Jean Harris, who was not, as she originally assumed, a jumped-up provincial, but a person of genuine breeding and standards. ‘Mrs Harris was in the wrong company’, she opines.

This was her crime in Diana Trilling's eyes—that she had let herself down by her fixation on a vulgarian, not that she happened also to have killed him.