Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

Starred review from April 17, 2023
An aspiring writer becomes enamored of a dashing fellow student at Yale in Rudnick’s dazzling and funny latest (after Playing the Palace). It’s 1973, and narrator Nate Reminger, who is Jewish, struggles to achieve his literary ambitions. He soon meets flamboyant and outspoken Farrell Covington, who was raised in a powerful Wasp family and “smells like beauty and money and youth.” Dazzled by Farrell’s sophistication and confidence, Nate quickly falls head over heels for Farrell. Despite their differences, they share affinities for gay culture and such celebrities as Bette Midler, and after sleeping together, they fall into a long-running relationship until Farrell’s father puts a stop to it. After college, Nate moves to New York City, where he hones his playwriting skills and basks in the post-Stonewall gay scene. As Rudnick moves the story into the ’80s, Nate’s successful playwriting career earn him screenwriting work in Hollywood, and, despite the disapproving Covingtons, the pair fight to make time for each other, a resource that suddenly becomes all too precious during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The author proves himself to be in top form, and each page is loaded with quippy dialogue and winning character work. This is a roaring good time.

May 19, 2023

Nate Reminger comes to Yale from suburban New Jersey and begins a decades-long romance with the novel's title character, the youngest son of an extremely wealthy and conservative family. Screenwriter and novelist Rudnick (Jeffrey; In & Out) has created a charming group of friends who support the pair throughout their romantic trials, and it is these interactions and certain set pieces, (such as a dinner party at an aging Broadway actress's home) that entertain. Nate is a likable narrator, and it is clear pretty early on where the story is going, but the problem is Farrell himself. It is stated numerous times how beautiful and charming he is, how everyone he meets becomes instantly smitten, and perhaps if this were a film, one could see that, but he fails to seduce on the page. Rather, he comes off as rather whiny and superficial, which makes the relationship feel flat and not worth the years of Nate's longing. A pleasant read, but one that does not linger. VERDICT For fans of romantic comic novels and LGBTQIA+ literature.--Julie Feighery

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
This latest book by playwright, humorist, and novelist Rudnick (Playing the Palace, 2021) is the epic love story of wannabe dramatist Nate Reminger and the "wonderfully bizarre" Farrell Covington, whose speech is "some sparkling carnival of adjectives and curlicued assessments." They meet in the 1970s as freshmen at Yale and quickly fall in love. They have an idyllic relationship until Farrell's odious father, the third richest man in America, decrees that their relationship must end, or he will disinherit Farrell. When that doesn't work, he threatens Nate and his family, which becomes the catalyst for the boys' separation. During the five years they're apart, Nate writes "one terrible play after another" until one succeeds and gets produced--and is enthusiastically panned by critics. In the meantime, Farrell's father has the good grace to die, and the lovers are reunited. There is much more to come (this is an epic, remember?), all of it delightful in various ways, for Rudnick puts the "ever" in clever. At one point, Nate muses that "gayness remained a central fact of my life," and so it is in this book, which insightfully and beautifully captures its ethos. Readers, rejoice! In Rudnick's exuberant novel, style is unlimited.

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Starred review from May 1, 2023
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.

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