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.
[A] life-filled rom-com ... While the endeavor is quite epic in scope, it’s made deliciously bite-size by Rudnick’s densely funny writing style and the gimlet eye he has given Nate ... Though Rudnick delivers the multiple-laughs-per-paragraph pace that fans of his sendups in The New Yorker might expect, the aim of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is closer to heart-tugging than to rib-jabbing ... Rudnick’s worldview is so effortlessly, gleefully campy that even when he plays it straight — please allow the world’s largest quotation marks here — it can feel like a setup to a punchline ... Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.
A comic novel that overflows with bons mots and bad turns ... As only Rudnick could manage, the two men keep it light through the darkness ... Very little is left unsaid. It’s Rudnick’s brave way forward, and he reminds any reader how we’ve only just begun to depict gays hugging and hurting, alternately. Rudnick has long been one of New York’s most puckish wits, but now he shows how wisdom can back it up.
Comic, but with a fair amount of tragedy ... Things bog down toward the end but, like Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy, Farrell deconstructs rom-coms while embracing their many pleasures.
