Book Reviews: Paul Rudnick, Christopher Bram, and Gay Teens at Boarding School!

I’ve always had a bit of a schizophrenic fan-relationship with out writer Paul Rudnick: I’ve laughed myself silly at his essays in Premiere and The New Yorker, but his dramatic works – plays like Xanadu and movies scripts for movies such as The Stepford Wives, In & Out, and Jeffrey – often fall pretty flat for me.

Interestingly, I had a decidedly mixed reaction to his new book of humorous essays, I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey (Harper, $23.99).

I loved his essays about his personal experiences about New Jersey, and as a playwright and screenwriter. There’s an old saying that you can’t parody Hollywood because it’s already so insane, and that's quite true, but that doesn’t mean Rudnick doesn’t get credit for his droll, ironic essays that get right to the heart of the insanity of showbiz.

But Rudnick also spends about half the book writing from the point-of-view of a decidedly un-ironic 63-year-old man, Elyot Vionnet. I give him kudos for trying something different, but these essays have none of the spark of his "first-person" ones, and, unlike the writings of his Premiere alter-ego Libby Gelman-Waxner, they aren’t particularly funny either.

The promotional materials for the book claim it’s “laugh-out-loud funny.” Hmm, I'd say “Occasional-smile funny,” perhaps.

Then again – full disclosure – I haven’t found many humorous essayists laugh-out-loud funny lately. Does anyone else feel that even David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs are both sort of phoning it in these days?

I’ve read most of Christopher Bram’s novels, and I’m a big fan (though I agree with his self-assessment that Surprising Myself, his first published book, is far from his best).

Now he’s published Mapping the Territory (Alyson Books, $23.95), a collection of essays that were published in various periodicals from 1981 to 2009. Most of them deal with gay issues: gay books that changed his life, how his novel Father of Frankenstein became the well-received 1998 movie Gods & Monsters, and whether or not Henry James was gay. One essay is provocatively titled, “Can Straight Men Still Write?”

Most of the essays are thoughtful, literate, and well-written – Bram is a terrifically clear writer, which is why I like him so much. And the book is a fascinating snap-shot of issues large and small that have affected gay life over the last thirty years.

But it’s very much a book about looking back. This makes sense, of course, since these are not new or necessarily contemporary essays. What really struck me about the book is how irrelevant so many of the issues now are, and how many of the arguments are long since settled.

The “gay” world that I live in simply isn’t as segregated as the one spelled out in this book. (Sadly, part of what comes across as irrelevant is the role that books play in Bram’s life – a role that they rarely play in society or the GLBT community any more.)

Bram writes a lot about Larry Kramer, and I remember a time when everyone had an opinion about the loud-mouthed gay gadfly. But I haven’t thought about Larry Kramer in years, and I don’t think I’ve written his name in the past three years I’ve written for this site. It’s a testament to how quickly the world has changed that this book reads like such a blast-from-the-past.

Still, as backward glances go, this is a pretty interesting book.