Social Disease - Hardcover

Rudnick, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394552709 ISBN 13: 9780394552705

Publisher: Knopf, 1986

Synopsis

Guy Huber, his wife Venice, and their spangled, be-furred, leather-swathed, neon-haired, sexually-ambiguous, nocturnal friends take to the downtown Manhattan club scene, lofts, boutiques, to a courtroom, and to a prison until Hollywood makes their escapades just a comedy

About this title

Review:

Paul Rudnick, famous for Hollywood hits such as Addams Family Values and Jeffrey first found fame as a novelist. Social Disease, his 1986 comic masterpiece, has just been reissued and is as funny as it was a decade ago. Setting his book at the height of pre-AIDS Manhattan club life, Rudnick lampoons not only disco madness and Studio 54, but also the megalomania engendered by an out-of-control celebrity culture that promotes style over substance, money over morals. Like Evelyn Waugh 's lacerating Vile Bodies, Rudnick's Social Disease is a satire that defines our times even as it deflates our sense of self importance.

From Publishers Weekly:

Guy Huber is a sympathetic, spoiled rich kid who isn't unwilling to get a jobhe's just certain he won't be able to find one doing what he does best, which is sleep. He's madly in love with his wife of one week, Venice, whom he met at the fashionable Club de, and he's benevolently amused by her gay chatterbox friend-turned-maid, Licky Banes. At the prompting of his father, who's just realized that his son is out of school, Guy gets a job as the doorman at Club de, where he embarrassingly lets in some people from New Jersey on his first night. The fun-loving wives of a rich sheik seek him out, and he is mistakenly thought to have kidnapped them, for which he ends up in a resort-like prison, where he runs into his father, Venice and Licky, each there for different reasons. By the time Guy is released, Club de has become an unrecognizable haven for the hopelessly suburban. Rudnick has a gifted eye and a smooth, sentient style, but the tale he's chosen to weave in this first novel is so light and insubstantial that one comes away feeling he's bitten off far less than he could capably chew.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0394552709
• ISBN 13: 9780394552705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 195