Word: rudnick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...glory without the fame. The distinction is explained by a character in Rudnick's 1991 Broadway comedy I Hate Hamlet: "Fame pays better. Fame has beachfront property. Fame needs bodyguards." But Rudnick's pay is fine, thanks. He doesn't need Malibu acreage; he has a dashingly ornate apartment -- one previously tenanted by John Barrymore, just like the I Hate Hamlet flat -- in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Rudnick would laugh off bodyguards; he is an unguarded fellow in an edgy age. "Paul is so charming," says his old friend William Ivey Long, a Tony-winning costume designer, "that you suspect...
...couldn't show you the fall line of skeletons in Rudnick's closet, because he came out of it long ago. He seems wildly well adjusted, at ease with his career, his sexuality, his place on earth. He is a happy camper and a nonstop talker; he's like a character in his novel Social Disease, who "had pledged a lifelong vow of chatter, as surely as Trappists chose silence." He writes what he wants, and people like it. He eats what he wants -- a deplorable diet of M&M's and bagels -- yet has a slim figure and good...
...delirious whirl of the Manhattan club scene depicted in Social Disease (1986), le plus chic twosome is Guy and Venice Huber, dancing their youth away -- and, because they are Rudnick people, constantly refreshing it. With its Evelyn Waugh drawl, Social Disease is Rudnick's revenge on the less- than-zilch nightlife novels of the mid-'80s. So I'll Take It (1989) must be his anti-Portnoy. A Jewish boy who loves and enjoys his mother -- call the cops! Paul's mom Selma and her sisters Lillian and Hilda are the models for Hedy Reckler and her bargain-hunter siblings...
...term in Social Disease, a heist at L.L. Bean in I'll Take It -- but these are as unwelcome as the roast beef a heedless hostess might plop on Paul's dinner plate. The M&M's of bon mots are the real nourishment. Which suggests a criticism of Rudnick's prose: it's all candy. Wouldn't a truly serious author hang crape on Guy and Venice, or Hedy and her sisters? But Rudnick sees them as variations on the Addams family: they may be crazy, but they have fun and love each other. And so he loves them...
...feels the same about the Rudnick clan of Piscataway, N.J. Paul's father Norman was a physicist at Gulton Industries, which, Paul says, "developed a lot of things that to this day I do not understand: capacitors, transistor devices that would go into everything from Osterizers to rocket ships." Later he edited one of the first textbooks on AIDS. Selma has worked for Partisan Review, for the Pennsylvania Ballet and now for a Philadelphia concert producer. Paul's older brother Evan, a jack-of-all-trades, lives near Ithaca, N.Y. "He has long hair and a beard and is very...