Rustic Charm

With all of her la dolce vita accoutrements—the white Jaguar, the Mark Hampton-inspired Upper East Side apartment, and the chummy relationship with the maitre d' at Le Bilboquet—28-year-old author Marina Rust seems better fit for the pages of Women's Wear Daily than Publishers Weekly. Now, thanks in part to her friend Bret Easton Ellis, this great-great-granddaughter of Chicago department-store baron Marshall Field is qualified for both. "Marina gave me a manuscript [in 1987], and I found it shockingly accomplished,'' says Ellis. "I showed it to my agent [Amanda "Binky" Urban] and my editor [Bob Asahina of Simon & Schuster], both of whom took her on.'' (It so happens that her grandfather Marshall Field III had owned the publishing house for a time in the 1950s.) This month, Rust makes her literary debut with Gatherings, conceived when she was in prep school. The novel's heroine, like her creator, is the privileged great-great-granddaughter of a Chicago retailer whose "name was synonymous with the city's." But Rust insists "the family I wrote about is not my family. The issues," she concedes, "are the same."

PETER STEVENSON