JEREMY THRANE

A spirited take on the oft-told tale of a life falling apart, then patching itself together again: witty, humane, romantic, and just gossipy enough to keep you flipping pages.

Could life get much worse for Jeremy? He’s spent the last decade or so working on an unpublishable novel and serving as the inept caretaker of his boyfriend’s Manhattan brownstone. The boyfriend, though, is Ted Masterson, Hollywood’s hottest action hero, who’s not only absent most of the year but deeply in the closet and recently married. As the story opens, Ted, his super-starlet wife Giselle, and their adopted child have swept into town. But any chance of a hot if complicated reunion is quickly squelched when paranoid Ted presents Jeremy with his walking papers. Jeremy’s like the gay member of The First Wives Club, suddenly without a husband, a job, or a home. He even gets revenge, albeit bittersweet: a gossip columnist overhears him in a restaurant analyzing the breakup, which leads to a blind item that brings about Ted’s downfall. Fortunately, Jeremy’s got his family, biological or not. There’s sis, preoccupied with her band and her loutish husband, but with a spare room that Jeremy briefly occupies. Mom, a successful poet, busy with her third husband, who’s developing Alzheimer’s. Best friend Felicia, who picks now, of all times, to enter rehab and kick that nasty heroin habit. And even Dad, who headed off to Turkey 20 years ago but remains alive as the subject of Jeremy’s novel. Then sweaty-palmed, bug-eyed Sebastian—a former high-school mate and now the publisher of Boytoy—gives Jeremy his first job, writing porno. And slowly Jeremy starts to put his life together. He finds his own place. A production company wants to produce a nearly forgotten screenplay. He lands a better job as a copyeditor. An editor is interested in his novel. He calls his father. He gets a date.

Credible? Just barely. Fun? Immensely. As a chronicler of hip urban travails, Christensen (In the Drink, 1999) is first-rate.