FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE, by Paul Rudnick
Nate Reminger, a New Jersey-born, gay, Jewish and unabashedly horny virgin, shows up at Yale University in 1973 and instantly sets his sights on the one man he’ll be gazing at for the next four decades.
As a budding writer with a knack for shrewd description, Nate spends the length of Paul Rudnick’s life-filled rom-com trying to find ways to describe that man, Farrell Covington: He is a “blinding sun god,” a “blank check,” an “unhinged cipher” and more. In so doing, Nate also reaches for a new way of seeing himself and what he believes to be possible for two men in love.
To Nate’s surprise, Farrell returns his gaze with an even stronger intensity. It supersedes the look of a crush — it’s an appraisal, a reverie.
And of the pair, Farrell is the one with an eye for beauty. A devastatingly handsome, unimaginably wealthy aesthete, Farrell considers style his armor — “a form of protest, against gross inhumanity or inclement weather.” As the scion of an ultraconservative family, he is not so much the black sheep as the gilded one. He speaks in a mid-Atlantic accent that sounds “as if a person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” He is, as the kids would later say, everything.
He and Nate quickly become everything to each other, and though Farrell has the kind of charmed life that allows him to avoid such inconveniences as Yale’s housing rules — he has a townhouse, with an original Hockney and a butler — it will not shield him from bigoted parents hellbent on keeping their son on the straight and narrow. Nate and Farrell are separated against their will, sending Nate spiraling downward and beginning a pattern of estrangement and reunion that recurs throughout the novel.
The irony of Farrell’s charmed life is that it serves as the complicating factor in the couple’s relationship, as they move from college to New York to Hollywood and beyond, all while navigating the AIDS epidemic, crises of faith and a family that rivals the Ewings of “Dallas” for wealthy wickedness.
While the endeavor is quite epic in scope, it’s made deliciously bite-size by Rudnick’s densely funny writing style and the gimlet eye he has given Nate, a clear avatar for the author in this semiautobiographical tome. “I had vague theatrical ambitions,” he tells us, “as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people ‘darling.’”
Though Rudnick delivers the multiple-laughs-per-paragraph pace that fans of his sendups in The New Yorker might expect, the aim of “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is closer to heart-tugging than to rib-jabbing. This does create tonal whiplash in spots, as when an emotional hospital sequence is capped by the sudden arrival of a sari-wearing acolyte from Mother Teresa’s order. Rudnick’s worldview is so effortlessly, gleefully campy that even when he plays it straight — please allow the world’s largest quotation marks here — it can feel like a setup to a punchline.
This tendency also directs one’s gaze to the smallest of quibbles. Farrell is a glittering bauble of a man, an architecture-loving manic-pixie dreamboat, a walking interrobang, but he’ll never be more captivating than his creator and, by extension, his creator’s stand-in. We’re in Nate’s point of view, and we spend long stretches separated from Farrell altogether. And even without Farrell’s privilege, Nate’s path from college to Broadway to a successful screenwriting career is relatively frictionless, which gives some sections the desultory feeling of a light memoir rather than a novel.
Another way of considering it, however, frames the central question around neither Nate’s nor Farrell’s individual obstacles but rather their shared destiny. If we encounter the true subject in those first pages — that mutual gaze — then this novel is more about their ways of seeing each other and the world’s way of seeing their possibility.
Consider what Rudnick offers almost without comment: the comparatively rare opportunity to spend decades watching two men navigate love. Like so much of the author’s work in other media — the play “Jeffrey,” the film “In and Out” — “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” seems less interested in serving as a gay museum piece than as a filigreed statement.
Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.
R. Eric Thomas’s latest book of essays, “Congratulations, the Best Is Over!,” will be published in August.
FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE | By Paul Rudnick | 368 pp. | Atria Books | $28.99
