For years I have laughed aloud at Paul Rudnick’s short pieces in the “Shouts and Murmurs” department of The New Yorker, and so when I saw a glowing review of his new novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, I ordered myself a copy and jumped right in. To my surprise—and perhaps unfairly to Rudnick, who has made no promises about how funny anything he writes is going to be—the novel was not breathtakingly hilarious. It was clever. It was well written. But almost immediately I started thinking of Tony Kushner’s subtitle for his two-part Angels in America: “a gay fantasia.” Rudnick’s gay fantasia tells the story of Nate Reminger, a schlubby Jewish guy from New Jersey who falls in love with a WASP Adonis who is not only so extraordinarily good looking that he gets offered movie roles even when he doesn’t work in the movies, but is also richer than Daddy Warbucks and Bill Gates combined and has the altruistic impulses of a Mother Teresa (who is a prominent offstage presence). Most fantasy-fulfilling of all, Farrell Covington is as madly in love with our narrator, Nate Reminger, as Nate is with him.
At times this novel reads like a handbook for those who need to be educated about everyday gay life, as if Nate were Arthur Frommer writing a guidebook to Gayville. (“Style has no limits,” our narrator asserts. “Which is such a gay thing to say.” Or, “Scholars argue: Why are certain gay men so mesmerized by outsize female icons, by single names like Cher, Judy, and Bette? Theories abound….”) Sometimes he over-explains, as when he provides the definition of a portcullis or when he tells us that Joe Allen is a restaurant in the theater district. As we proceed, we sense that we’re reading a memoir disguised as a novel. Nate writes a play about the ghost of a renowned actor who played Hamlet coming back to advise a modern-day actor in the famous role, a play that instantly evokes memories of Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. Nate writes a movie script about a bawdy entertainer who disguises herself as a nun, and readers are going to remember Rudnick’s screenplay for Sister Act. Nate writes an off-Broadway play that nobody wants to produce because it’s a comedy about AIDS, and yet we know that it’s going to be a hit because we know what happened with Rudnick’s Jeffrey. I’m not complaining about Rudnick’s plotting, and the autobiographical novel is hardly unusual. It’s always fun to find Easter eggs, and Rudnick’s dialogue and one-liners are polished and witty. But the greatest strength of this book is that it becomes a grand love story spanning decades. I haven’t read one of those since Wuthering Heights.
Patrick Dennis (real name Edward Everett Tanner III) also wrote a gay fantasia. His appeared in 1955 under the title Auntie Mame, and while Rudnick has written a memoir disguised as a novel, Dennis wrote a novel disguised as a memoir, in which “Patrick Dennis” describes life under the care of his lively, iconoclastic aunt, a woman who, in every sense of that word again, is fabulous. At this point, gentle reader, you may be wondering why I’m calling this novel a gay fantasia when it’s narrated by a straight character and featuring a straight protagonist. Consider, please, that Auntie Mame Dennis represents the iconic gay friend—sassy, flamboyant, unconditionally accepting, loyal, and absolutely free of any sexual interest. When I was still in elementary school, I auditioned with Billy McIlhaney and Buddy Smith for the role of Patrick in the local community theater’s production of the play adapted from the novel (a role that went to my later friend Bristow Hardin, Jr.), and when I didn’t get the part, my parents allowed me as consolation to attend the performance, where my vocabulary improved considerably. (What, I asked, is a lesbian? And a bastard?)
I didn’t want to re-read Auntie Mame, but I could remember reading and enjoying Dennis’s The Joyous Season in the mid-1960’s, when I was in eighth grade. Many of the jokes eluded me, but I could remember it vaguely as a good read. So I ordered a copy from Abe Books and sat down to revisit it, and I was very quickly laughing aloud to a degree that I never reached with the Rudnick novel. Patrick Dennis was a master of social comedy. There were times when his dialogue reminded me of the best of Noel Coward, and The Joyous Season still works beautifully as a comedy-of-manners gem. He’s able to skewer the old money families and their excesses, but he aims his sharpest darts at the climbers, the poseurs, the snobs, the pretentious, the insufferable arrivistes.
Edward Everett Tanner knew well the worlds of which he wrote whether he was using the name Patrick Dennis or Virginia Rowans. He made millions of dollars and lost all of them on impulsive spending and unwise real estate investments. He was a married father of two and was also a bisexual active in the New York gay scene. He quit writing to work as a butler for hyper-wealthy people, including Ray Kroc, the man who gave the world McDonald’s fast food, who said he had no idea that his employee was a famous novelist. He died all too soon in 1976, age 55, of pancreatic cancer. He should have died thereafter, but in those madcap 55 years, he gave the world many joyous seasons. Indeed, The Joyous Season ends in June, the month farthest away from Christmas, and that’s surely a deliberate corrective for those who assume that the title refers to only one time of year.