Getting Over Homer

Perhaps it's a rite of passage. Mark O'Donnell's young protagonist seeks a meaningful relationship in New York City, and he seems always to fall for the wrong guy. His musing, his heartbreak and his courage evoke the reader's caring He may be gay, but his meanders through the users, the meaningless, the self-involved is familiar to all seekers of love.

After I first read this book, I couldn't believe Mark O'Donnell wasn't a more famous writer. He is truly gifted. The characters are hilariously real and the writing is just amazing--the similes and metaphors are to die for. This book was a laugh riot from beginning to end. It's theme is universal--LOVE hurts but you survive it, even though you're dead sure you won't.

Just what we need: yet another novel in which a youngish gay man searches wryly for true love in the Northeast. The streets that first-time novelist Mark O'Donnell treads are pretty well-worn, walked by Armistead Maupin, Stephen McCauley and a number of others. But O'Donnell brings remarkable freshness to his chronicle. He delivers a breathlessly funny novel that rewards the more careful reader, piling quip upon quip, precariously stacking clever puns and turns of phrase until they seem about to topple."I might as well tell you the whole arguably beautiful ordeal," his narrator sighs. "It's one of those coming-of-middle-age stories. A *bull-dung*-whatever. 'Lost Labors Loved.'" The narrator, Hans Christian Monahan (nicknamed Blue), was a child prodigy of sorts, writing a popular song (the sappy "Love Is the Answer") at age 11; since then he's slowly declined to become, in his 30s, a pianist and songwriter of less than great reknown, "a drowning, unaccompanied, pasty guy."Still believing that love is indeed the answer ("I'm a beauty fool. A hope dope."), Blue searches New York for the perfect guy. What he finds is Homer, a dazzling party consultant of uncertain past and future, a man who turns out to be "ultimately more mirage than marriage." Blue describes his love life: "A few painful misfires, a few wonderful misfires, and then Homer. Homer, who cried with happiness when I carried him up to the roof of his own building he'd never even been on. Homer, who then left me alone with the ocean." He unsuccessfully seeks comfort from his 11 eccentric siblings, from friends, from television, from the Unhappy Hunting Grounds of gay bars. Listless and dispirited, "I was living in the world's dullest nightmare," he says.And then he puts his plight into perspective: "One day I was watching this science-fiction movie on TV, waiting for the seasons to change, and the space victim was being lowered into boiling lava, and I said to myself, `Well, I'm heartbroken, but I'm not being lowered into boiling lav! a.' That's when I knew I was going to make it." Things begin looking up-"Love Is the Answer" is resurrected as a detergent jingle, and Blue turns his despondency into a new song ("Thank You from the Bottom of My Hurt") that's recorded and made a hit by a country singer. "I'd sued life for heartbreak and it settled out of court," Blue says.Finally over Homer, Blue finds Teddy, an uncomplicated twentysomething who seems devoted to him, and things seem on the right track. But "any man in Eden is trespassing," Blue says, and sure enough, Teddy too proves fickle and unpredictable, rejecting him cruelly and capriciously. "I can see," Blue laments, "why gay partnerships are so unstable-with no children or family support to bind them in others' eyes, they're like trying to produce a long-running TV series without sponsors or an audience."The scenes of conflict and breakup should be far more moving than they are-sometimes O'Donnell's one-liners turn frantic, short-cir

Good book. Took a few pages for me to get into it, but it won me over. I was afraid that it would be too limited an outlook, but the writer tells this familiar story so well that getting to the end was pure pleasure page after page. Loved the vicious portrays of the plastic Fire Island queens. With friends like these, you should buy a dog. Hope next time we get a story with a bit more range and scope; I think this author would be good company for a longer book. If I had the love life of the main character, I think I'd resign myself to life with a blow-up doll

Mark O'Donnell throws away the key in this roman-a-clef about a gay man's first romance and its sudden unexplained demise. Some wonderful moments are here, but are surrounded by an unbearable metric ton of cuteness and nicknames and mixed metaphors that prove counterproductive. For a longer review, see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2679/homer.html