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So far, he has the 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 something is lurking underneath. But amazingly, he really is a nice guy."
We 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 teeth. "I have the eating habits of a four-year-old," Rudnick says. "I'm fond of anything you'd have after school." No wonder the message of Rudnick's most personal work (Jeffrey, Social Disease and his other novel, I'll Take It) is that the strangest people have the sweetest hearts. You lift a rock expecting to find insects, and instead: beachfront.
In the 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. The novel is "only" about a New England shopping tour, on which Hedy's son Joe hitches a ride. But if war novels can teach us about manhood, why can't a shopping novel reconcile capitalism and humanism? And do so in a voice that merges Jane Austen with a Bloomingdale's catalog? I'll Take It is about informed, unconditional family love; this makes it rare among modern novels.
Plots eventually intrude in both books -- a jail 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.