FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE

A gay love story for the ages from one of the great comic voices of his generation.

Known for his plays; screenplays; adult and YA novels; and film criticism written under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner, Rudnick is famously unable to write a single sentence that isn't funny. His latest work, a novel tracing a gay love affair from the 1970s to the near present, features a narrator very close to the author. Nate Reminger, a gay Jewish kid from Piscataway, New Jersey, goes to Yale, writes a play about AIDS (in real life, Rudnick’s Jeffrey) and a movie about nuns (in real life, Sister Act), and bears witness to the devastation wreaked by AIDS on his generation. As Rudnick puts it in the acknowledgments, “This book was written after I’d lived a good long time, and wanted to at least begin to make sense of things.” He also makes clear that the title character, Farrell Covington, is a creation of his imagination, based on a fleeting encounter on a train many years ago. And what a creation he is. Scion of the third richest family in America, his voice is “maddeningly but somehow naturally affected, as if the person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” His “lush, dewy handsomeness” is such that it disconcerts “everyone, even himself.” And yet, soon enough, he appears in Nate’s dorm room, making an announcement: “We’re about to sodomize one another….Does anyone have a manual, or perhaps a brief educational film, with puppets, to help us go about this?” Magic ensues. But just when Nate is getting used to living in la-la land as Farrell’s consort, the evil and deeply homophobic Covington paterfamilias appears from Wichita to shatter his bliss. This is not the end of the relationship but the beginning of the war, as every possible opponent to gay conjugal happiness takes its turn with the couple over a 50-year swath of the American cultural landscape.

Is it a spoiler to say there are no limits? At least not to Rudnick’s ability to brilliantly elegize and entertain.