How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle

by Ethan Mordden

Book Overview

For a generation, Ethan Mordden's tales about a tightly knit circle of friends who live within the shifting confines of gay Manhattan have entertained tens of thousands of readers and devoted fans.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312333307
• ISBN13: 9780312333300
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Like a gay "Seinfeld"

If you are not familiar with Mordden's work, he created a popular series of books, starting with "I've A Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore: Tales from Gay Manhattan" in 1985, that dealt with incidents in the life of a group of gay friends in Manhattan over the years. This was likely the first "series" of gay novels I became hooked on, so I welcomed this overdue finale' to the stories. Like the books before it, "How's Your Romance?" really doesn't have a specific story line or plot you can explain. The best analogy I can give, for the entire series, is that the books read kind of like a gay "Seinfeld", the infamous "show about nothing," where the stories were really just incidents in the lives of the colorful ensemble characters. In this case, those characters include Bud (the author's alterego, a middle-aged author/musician who is kind of the father/confessor everyone goes to for pearls of wisdom), his enterprising and kind of "way out there" live-in lover/boytoy Cosgrove, Bud's long time best friend Dennis Savage (who lives upstairs), and young golddigger "J" (previously known as "Little Kiwi" in earlier novels, and Dennis Savage's ex, now out on his own.) The "circle" of friends in expanded, in this case, with Bud's gay early-20's cousin Ken, who hangs out with a group of similar shallow Chelsea-Boy gym bunnies (referred to by Bud as "the Kens", as in the 60's era dolls), and a few others. In this finale', Mordden explores issues such as metrosexuality (Both J and Ken are dating seemingly clueless "straight" guys reeking of homoerotic subtext), loyalty ("the Kens" try a sign-up sheet to avoid conflict when someone spots a new hot guy at the gym, etc.), self-respect (Bud's friend Peter is in an abusive relationship with a demi-God), and gay marriage ("the Kens" have a discussion with Bud present). It was amusing and enjoyable for me to "visit" with old friends again, after being acquainted with most of them for twenty years (though others who followed the series in real-time can't help but notice that they aged a lot slower than we did!), but I think the book, of itself, might seem too disjointed and confusing for those not already familiar with at least a couple of the early works. Like "Seinfeld", it is a bit of an acquired taste, and not for everyone. I'd give it four stars (out of five) for the effort.

An excellent conclusion

"How's Your Romance?" is the latest book from Ethan Mordden, the (apparently) concluding volume of his "Buddies" stories. If you've not read these, the series starts with "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore: Tales from gay Manhattan", continues with "Buddies", "Everybody loves you: further adventures of gay Manhattan", and "Some men are lookers." These short stories chronicle the lives of a group of gay men living in Manhattan, as one might imagine from the titles. In my opinion, they rate as classic gay fiction. These stories move beyond the "coming out novel," or the "AIDS novel" not by ignoring the importance of those tales (because they're contained in there too) but by telling all those stories, and more. These books are written about people, and the stories they tell each other. Though set in New York the location doesn't play a big role because the characters don't do things in New York, they just do things. Oh sure, there's a night at the opera, or a bike ride in Central Park, but the action or location isn't what these stories are really about. Having said that, these stories couldn't be set anywhere else, so there is an interesting contradiction there. In the end, these are stories or vignettes which examine the lives of gay men: our rivalries, or factions, our loves -- usually all with exactly the same people. I know some find Mordden's style of writing, particularly his dialogue, annoying. In truth, no one I know actually talks like his characters, particularly the more eccentric ones, but I like it anyway. There is a style, a mental image, or feeling about the person that results from their strange but endearing ways of speaking. This is important to his writing because he rarely spends much time actually describing the setting or details. And, other than the usual "how built is this guy" descriptions, he doesn't spend much time describing the characters either. There isn't much to say about the latest book individually that makes much sense if you haven't read the others. Basically, people's lives change over time, whether we like it or not. Even our self-made families, the glue that holds this series of books together, change over time. But we continue on, defying the world by finding each other. An excellent end to an excellent series.