For queers of a certain age, Rupert Everett would not have had to do anything but play gay Guy Bennett in "Another Country" to command a seat at the table of the gay gods. But he has done more, much more; you should read up on him. Lately he has authored "The American No" (Atria Books), a collection of seven stories and a screenplay that seem perfectly calculated to entertain in hard times.
Such as the stories hew to a theme, it's the double-edged sword of success and, in these cases, failure. They're a working out of projects Everett initiated and pitched but for a variety of the usual reasons did not come to fruition. Unfinished symphonies revisited here in the hope of their getting finished, or maybe being declared finished after all. Everett calls them "jugs of dust."
He introduces each item with a page or three about how they came to be, or not to be. Sometimes bits of these backstories slip into the stories presented as now finished, confusingly until you get used to them. The collection as a whole appears under the cover, in a single page, of the template of "the American no."
It could also be called the Hollywood salute. The ruse: an aspiring (script)writer turns up for a meeting with the studio mogul, who flatters the scribe with quickly vanishing praise, projections of how the project will unfold, followed by being escorted out by the shoulder-hugging agent with the looking-forward-to-it message. After which, nothing at all happens.
My one cavil with this book, which does not suffer cavils gladly, is locating that "no" in America, even our torn and bleeding America of managed expectations fronting broken promises and shattered dreams. But this particular "no" could just as well be Esperanto, since the same camouflaged rejection can be witnessed in many other cultures as well. But Everett has been to Hollywood on business, so I'll hand him his experienced-based deflation.
The hit parade
In truth, these stories could, and do, stand on their own. The reader's imagination reels in synch with Everett's as he spins his yarns about the deathbed confessions of an English woman who decamped to India in the mid-19th century; another dame, an "American countess," who faces the trials of age and sex (here, gender) unexpectedly in a tea shop; "Ten-pound Pom," about the trials and tribulations of travel and emigration if you're a person of color.
"The Wrong Box," a frantically funny story about the Paris funeral of a problematic mother, turns on the survivors' LSD-sparked confusion over the whereabouts of the corpse.
Elsewhere in the funerary cue, a Vietnamese family throws itself, lamenting loudly, on the casket of a child. Only at the gravesite do our protagonists, Napoleon ("Napo") and the narrator, discover that they have followed the wrong casket.
Actual hallucinogens and other "recreational" drugs insinuate these stories from time to time, working their black magic, but with or without their contributions to the narratives, a menacing, otherworldly climate prevails.
In "Cuddles and Associates," a long, meandering tale, fortunes turn on movie agents and their clients, with some newly awakened homosexuality adding twists and turns. But readers are unlikely to forget the subplot, in which the wife of a megarich sultan seeks to provide an heir, and protect a fortune, by having a child.
She fixes on the idea of the sperm coming from a handsome movie star, Matt Dean, currently aging and down on his luck and unlikely to rise to the occasion, given his homosexuality. The account of the insemination is rollickingly comic, and Everett goes to the trouble to describe the crone and her agent lying with their feet up a wall to foster pregnancy.
What the stories lack in what could, in another reality, be called cohesion, they compensate with some drive-by digs. We're barely off the starters' box when Everett quips, incidentally, that a man was "good-looking, in that floppy, collapsed way the English spawned in those days."
The bons mots keep on coming, and the reader welcomes them, first as verbal entertainment and then as offsets of the dire circumstances being recounted. The reader notices, then forgives, Everett's repeated evocations of "eyes on stalks."
Homage to the ancestors
The Everett pitch that did land was "The Happy Prince," the 2018 film he wrote, produced, and starred in about the darker side of the life of Oscar Wilde. In "Sebastian Melmouth. The Morning After and the Night Before," Everett depicts Wilde's final day, soaked in absinthe and buoyed by cocaine and morphine.
In "Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years," Nicholas Frankel takes an unblinkered look at Wilde's last days in Paris, as a bum. With Everett's re-imagining of Wilde's toothless, malodorous last hurrah, the reader enters the land of the unrelievedly bleak.
In a passage that seemingly counts as little other than another surprise interjection into the already compelling narrative, Everett gives us the paternal Wilde reading to his sons. When one asks what his father means by "the mystery of suffering," Wilde replies, "One day you will, my dearest."
In a parenthesis, Everett steps outside the story to comment, about Wilde, "An easy answer. He too does not yet understand. He wrote this when he knew nothing of life. Now that he knows it –there's nothing left to write." It could serve as the unofficial motto of this collection.
Before he serves up his retelling of Wilde's last stand, Everett gives the reader a modicum of consolation. "Oscar was a god, but also a wonderfully flawed fairy. I think that's what it means to be Christ. With his death the road to liberty was born. It had found a face."
"The American No" ends with "The End of Time," a commissioned script for what was to have been a series on Marcel Proust's sprawling, seven-volume novel, "In Search of Lost Time." "In one sense," Everett declares, "these books were the cornerstone of my own career, as my first job out of drama school was as an extra in a legendary production of Proust at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre called 'A Waste of Time.'"
But his deep fear that the project was preposterous, irredeemably so in that nascent form, turned out to be well grounded. He wrote a script for the pilot that he hoped would guarantee the project's completion, but when he announced as much to one of the proposed series' producers, he was brushed off with the response that the producers had changed their minds and no longer wanted to produce the series.
Alfred Agostinelli, the chauffeur who became Proust's amorous obsession, makes an appearance early on. Hard on his heels is the Baron de Charlus, the omnivorous troll who stands in for "real" homosexuals in Proust's novel. But the real surprise is the appearance, in a speaking role, of Monsieur Vintueil, Proust's imaginary composer, a theme from whose music haunts the whole of "In Search."
"Well," Everett concludes, "I have at least written a version of 'Swann's Way.' And while it may never make it to the screen, it now has a flickering existence in this book."
It beams in from another country.
'The American No,' by Rupert Everett, Atria Books, 300 pages, $28.99. www.simonandschuster.com
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