Like a latter-day version of Jacob Marley’s ghost wandering Manhattan’s social circuit five days before Christmas, Tad Leary is facing a day of seven parties.
And he’s not in the best frame of mind to be jolly. There could not be less cause for celebration. He still hasn’t come to terms with walking out on Angelo Silvarini, his long-time boyfriend. He was just fired from his teaching job over a made-up molestation charge, his doctoral thesis on the “Social Hierarchies of Imaginary Places” is years overdue and he’s about to be evicted from his sublet.
Leary is the invention of playwright, novelist, humorist, cartoonist and occasional actor Mark O’Donnell in the serio-comic novel “Let Nothing You Dismay” (Knopf), but his discomfort at facing a holiday that carries the baggage of romanticized perfection is just about everybody’s.
As O’Donnell writes, Leary “loved people when he was alone but was terrified by the dynamics of actual company. He was his own best friend and his own worst enemy. . . . He wasn’t anything so binary as manic-depressive, but both at once, and through his veins coursed a red-blooded blender of joy, fear and confusion.”
By the time Leary finished his hellish holiday marathon, he had visited his Boston-Irish family, attended a pretentious performance art session in the East Village, crashed a party at the tony private school where he recently worked, had dinner with a college classmate and his family, met a prospective boyfriend named Gabe and experienced the social stratosphere in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, the chapter O’Donnell calls “Twenty Thousand Leagues Out of Your League.”
On top of all his other problems, Leary is short, 5 foot 1, and baby-faced at age 34 — and “everything he’d tried, including growing up, had seemed to come to nothing.”
On a recent visit to Chicago, O’Donnell, who is 44 and 6-feet-3-inches tall, said, “That’s unusual but Everyman is always a little guy, like Mickey Mouse and Charlie Chaplin.
“Remember that Randy Newman song about short people? What I never heard anyone observe is that he’s talking about everybody. Like the world is Lilliput, everybody feels small in some way and has no reason to live. Life is a tenuous bubble.”
In O’Donnell’s case, the saving grace may be having a sense of humor. “Maybe if everything went your way, if you were lucky, you wouldn’t be too funny,” he said. “You might need a little bad luck, the way you have the Jewish and Irish comedians earlier in the century.
“But again, Chevy Chase came from privilege and you could argue that he’s funny.”
O’Donnell grew up in a blue-collar, Irish-Catholic family of 10 children in Cleveland. He’s half of a set of identical twins, and since his brother was born five minutes earlier, he’s technically the baby of the family.
O’Donnell went to Harvard University on a scholarship along with his twin. He majored in English and creative writing, wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and wrote the Hasty Pudding Club’s burlesque musical every year.
He served a newspaper internship at the Cleveland Press but decided quickly that he preferred writing fiction, because “you couldn’t be sued.”
His first job out of college was as a fact checker at Esquire magazine, where “they also let me write `Dubious Achievement Awards’ punch lines and stuff.” Slowly he began getting his cartoons and short stories published, and several of his plays were produced off-Broadway.
He wrote for “Saturday Night Live” in the early ’80s when Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo held sway. Oddly enough, his twin brother, Steve, also is a humorist. He worked as David Letterman’s head writer for many years and recently finished a stint writing for Chris Rock.
The O’Donnell twins, it would seem, come from humorous stock. “My father had a sense of humor,” O’Donnell said. “And my sisters and brothers are funny. One of my sisters is wittier than Roseanne. But they’ve never made a penny at it.”
As for his twin, O’Donnell referred to his first novel, “Getting Over Homer” (Vintage), a sort of roman a clef in which he invented alter egos for himself and his twin. “I nicknamed him `Red’ and me `Blue’ because he was always more fiery and upbeat and I was a little more poetical.
“When twins are depicted in most fiction or movies, usually one is good and the other is evil or they’re absolute doubles in an eerie way,” he said.
“I think my brother and I are variations on one theme. We’re two versions of one person with slight differences.
“I’m gay and he’s straight. That may be the most interesting distinction. I don’t think that makes us so very different. We overlap in so many ways and, of course, there’s a reservoir of shared lore. We have what would look like telepathy to others because we have shorthand and can talk fast. Growing up, we were a built-in vaudeville team.”
Like most fiction writers, O’Donnell mines his own life for his art. At Harvard, which he described as seeming “like Disneyland for a brainy kid from Cleveland,” he got to know the offspring of celebrities.
In “Let Nothing You Dismay,” he reinvented some of these children as the progeny of slapstick movie comic Bobsy Baum and Swedish actress Christine Larsen, who achieved fame by making pictures with legendary director Gunnar Sternland.
The character Tad Leary, O’Donnell said, is a version of “my own self-consciousness socially.”
And being the “poetical” twin, O’Donnell gives Tad a midnight epiphany in Central Park and an overwhelming urge to telephone his former boyfriend, Angelo, who’s now in San Francisco.
“Both the ex-boyfriend and the prospective boyfriend Gabe are angels of sorts,” O’Donnell said. “The point I was hoping to make with Angelo is that he seems lousier. He’s lowbrow and gaudy and he’s got a thick Boston accent and he misuses words (`I’ll leave that to your own discrepancy’). But what Tad needs to learn is that Angelo has more soul and he’s more cosmic and self-accepting and accepting of others than all these fancy, highfalutin phonies.”
It may not be a new insight but it’s a lesson worth repeating, especially when it’s dressed up in O’Donnell’s smart, sparkling wit.
“Just talking about airline food and `The Brady Bunch’ won’t cut it in comedy,” O’Donnell said. “You’ve got to go for family and relationships and mortality and illness and ambition — the scariest stuff possible.
“The idea is (that) to live a good life you have to know all about life but live anyway. Comedy doesn’t fix what’s wrong about life but it makes you defy it and somewhat reconcile yourself to it.”
