It's Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve in Manhattan--five days
from the holiday Ground Zero--but Tad Leary, the most confused man on earth,
doesn't know whether to celebrate or go crazy. He's just been fired, he's about
to be evicted from his sublet, he's getting nowhere on his overdue folklore
thesis, "Social Hierarchies of Imaginary Places," and on top of
everything else at age thirty-four (older than Christ), he's five-foot-one and
still baby-faced, so he's treated like a child wherever he goes. Nonetheless,
he's been invited to seven different Christmas parties that day, and he decides
to explore every one of them for possible work, apartments, love, and just plain
distraction.
I picked up Let Nothing You Dismay mainly due to the fact that writer
Mark O’Donnell passed away in August and was reading his bio. He and Thomas
Meehan shared the 2003 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and the Drama Desk
Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical for their work on Hairspray, and they wrote
the 2007 film adaptation. The pair also worked on another John Waters musical
adaptation, Cry-Baby, for which they received a 2008 Tony nomination. His twin
brother, Steve O’Donnell, is the head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and wrote
two episodes of The Simpsons.
So I was intrigued and was able to find a used edition of
his book at Iliad’s in North Hollywood. But while the novel is well written -filled
with some tasty one-liners that will make you smile- the book takes forever to
get going. And at a slim 193 pages, that’s a problem. Also, Tad seems a bit
lost –which I guess is the point of the novel, a man at the crossroads- but I
found this drifting from one party to the next more pointless than interesting.
The book starts great and then there is this whole middle part that seems out
of place with the start, and only in the final few pages does it become
interesting again.
The question is, if I find a used edition of his first book,
Getting Over Homer, do I risk buying it after being somewhat disappointed with
his second?
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