Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style: A Novel - Softcover

Rudnick, Paul

 
9781668004739: Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668004739 ISBN 13: 9781668004739
Verlag: Atria, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

“A case study in elegant, honest tragicomedy…by the genuinely hilarious Paul Rudnick” (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author) that follows the decades-long, rule-breaking romance between the son of one of America’s wealthiest families and a middle-class aspiring author.

Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He’s a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country’s most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic.

Together, the two embark on a unique romance that spans half a century. They are inseparable—except for the many years when they are apart. Moving from the ivy-covered bastion of Yale to New York City, Los Angeles, and eventually all over the world, Farrell and Nate experience the tremendous upheaval and social change of the last fifty years. From the freedom of gay life in 1970s Manhattan to the Hollywood closet, the AIDS epidemic, and the profound strides of the LGBTQ+ movement, this witty and moving novel shows how the world changes around us while we’re busy doing other things.

Written with “engaging wit, side-eyed perceptiveness, and barbed elan” (Michael Chabon), this modern classic proves that style has its limits, love does not.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Rudnick is the author of What Is Wrong With You? and Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style. His plays have been produced on and off Broadway and include Jeffrey, I Hate Hamlet, Regrets Only, and The New Century. He is the author of eight books, and he’s a frequent contributor to The New Yorker; his writing has also appeared in Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and more. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, Coastal Elites, In & Out, Sister Act, and the film adaptation of Jeffrey. Find out more at PaulRudnick.com and follow him on X at PaulRudnickNY.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1 1
When I arrived at Yale, I had no idea who Farrell Covington was. In 1973, as a middle-class kid from the New Jersey suburbs, I had no idea who anyone was.

As the child of an office manager mom and a physicist dad, I’d been encouraged to apply to Ivy League schools but with Jewish fears attached. I should strive to succeed but expect obstacles. As a gay kid, my image of Yale was based on Cole Porter songs, satiric novels with upper-crust characters named Tad and Muffie, and photos of any university, from Oxford to Harvard, with stalwart brick buildings surrounding leafy, sun-dappled courtyards strolled by students wearing button-downs with Shetland sweaters knotted around their hips, along with news footage of fist-pumping, shaggy-haired undergraduates of the sixties staging die-ins atop the steps of the law schools they were attending.

I was installed in a dormitory suite shared by Breen, a tall, scowling über-Republican who’d already draped an American flag outside our window, and Walt, an affable and outgoing guy from Connecticut who, while sheepishly enjoying golf, also played bass in a band called the Wild Stockbrokers. I’d never lived with anyone but my family, and I was dimly aware of my freakishness, from wearing thrift store gabardine shirts to sporting the blow-dried, feathered mall hair of my Jersey heritage.

My exposure to gay life consisted of the following artifacts: best-selling Gordon Merrick paperback novels, where dashing, strong-bodied men, often surgeons and senators, would rut lustily with each other in penthouses on champagne-colored silk sheets; After Dark magazine, which, while not officially gay (so it could be sold on newsstands), detailed every aspect of show business with an eye to placing seminude male ballet and Broadway dancers on the cover, shielding their crotches with, say, a straw boater or a violin; and porn magazines called Inches or Blueboy or David’s Thing, which I’d buy at fluorescent-lit Times Square smut shops and tuck into the lining of my fake-fur parka for the train ride back to Piscataway, a town named for the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire. Not making sense doesn’t bother anyone in New Jersey.

I never felt guilty about my reading habits. I adored these varied publications and took them as proof that glamorous, sexual gay lives existed. Gorgeously lit black-and-white photography, along with stapled pages of raunchier, hard-core doggy-style couplings, were delicious promises.

I was a virgin in so many ways, innocent of physical sex (except for constant masturbation), Brooks Brothers madras patchwork blazers, natural blonds, and, especially, the seriously wealthy. The richest person in Piscataway was a contractor and low-level mobster who’d built his own stucco-drenched, faux Mediterranean compound with an in-ground pool and a three-car garage to hold the van enameled with flames, the Chevy station wagon, and a few mammoth Harley-Davidsons. In New Jersey, money meant not taste but more stuff. For my family, money was something to be strenuously fretted over, encompassing mortgages, used cars, and two August weeks at a beach house far from an actual beach; none of this could be debated in front of me and my older brother. I was the recipient of student loans, which I had no real grasp of. I knew we weren’t rich, but I’d never lacked for anything except a Barbie doll, which a well-timed tantrum eventually achieved.

Glossing over things, and hurriedly ending adult conversations when a child wandered in, was my family’s rule for anything monetary, sexual, or grim (for example, illnesses and deaths). This agonizing politeness and denial could be suffocating, but weirdly helpful for a gay teenager: no one was asking me any squirm-inducing questions.

Knowing no one, I spent my first weeks at Yale investigating the campus, walking everywhere and wondering if I’d ever make any friends. I had vague theatrical ambitions, as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people “darling,” so I pushed myself to attend a freshman orientation at the Yale Dramat, the largest and most well-funded drama club, which availed itself of a gloomy but full-sized theater ordinarily the province of the illustrious graduate drama school. (Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver were enrolled at the time, and yes, just from watching them in misbegotten Chekhov and midnight cabarets, everyone predicted where they were headed. People who’d never met them, and never would, were already referring to these performers as “Meryl” and “Siggy.”)

As I perched on the arm of a battered leather greenroom couch, two seniors introduced thirty assembled wannabes to the joys of painting scenery, taking box office ticket requests, hand-laundering costumes, and other forms of grunt work. “We have a proud history here at the Dramat,” chirped the female senior, a perky administrative type in a Fair Isle cardigan, kilt, and knee socks. “And we also have a heckuva lot of fun,” added her more bohemian male counterpart, wearing white Levi’s and a stretched-out black cotton turtleneck, aiming for James Dean in moody rehearsal wear and landing as a preppie who dared to smoke pot in his parents’ finished basement.

“Oh my,” said a voice that had the oddest and most elegant calibration of Midwestern graciousness and crisp New England diction. It was a voice that could only be classified as mid-Atlantic, that invented MGM mode of sounding unplaceably fancy, as if the person was forever flinging open the double doors to a well-appointed drawing room. The voice was maddeningly but somehow naturally affected, as if the person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.

“Look at all of you,” the voice continued, and the crowd swiveled to see someone vanish from the greenroom doorway, a WASPy blur in khakis, a navy blazer, something hot pink, and something Kelly green, like a well-bred magic trick.

A week later I was splayed across an armchair at the cross-campus library, pretending to read Aeschylus, when the same person materialized from the stacks, like a ghost in a cornfield, coming off as disoriented yet regal, a pedigreed hound sniffing the breeze for a hint of fox or hare. He stared at me and flung himself onto an adjoining armchair.

“You must save me,” he said, in a lower, raspy octave of his impeccably modulated voice.

“From what?”

“From myself, of course.”

For the first time in my life, I felt like I might have a life. No one in Piscataway talked like this. Or took my hand like this. Or lowered his chin like this and gazed directly into my eyes.

“I saw you,” he said, “at that theatrical organization, at whatever that was. I was intrigued yet afraid, of all that yearning for aesthetic grandeur and all that bad skin.”

“Who are you?”

“Farrell Covington. And I may very well be in love with you. Madly in love. Hopelessly in love. Whom would you like me to kill?”

I didn’t know how to take any of this: Was he joking? Was he mocking me, or fabricating a conversation because someone else was following him? His gaze held and he seemed sincere or deranged or both, all of which struck me as seriously sexy. Although at a virginal eighteen, the touch of anyone not related to me could become instantly arousing.

“We need to have sex,” he said.

Oh my God. Was...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668004739
ISBN 13 
9781668004739
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781668004678: Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style: A Novel

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1668004674 ISBN 13:  9781668004678
Verlag: Atria Books, 2023
Hardcover