Tech bros, TV actors, social-justice warriors, gay dentists--nobody escapes a good-natured ribbing from Paul Rudnick (Gorgeous; Playing the Palace) in What Is Wrong with You?, a pot-stirringly funny novel centered on a wedding that's doubling as the site of a product launch.
Linda Kleinschmidt is engaged to tech entrepreneur Trone Meston, and for a reason she can't get her head around, she has invited her ex-husband, Sean, to the wedding, where Trone plans to launch a mystery product. Sean is sure he understands Linda's motivations for inviting him: as he tells his friend Rob, "She wants me to stop her" from marrying Trone. Sean taps Rob, who could use a diversion, to be his plus-one at the wedding. Rob is still reeling from his husband's year-ago death, which he knows "may very well have been" his fault. What's more, a "sensitivity associate" has just fired Rob from his job as an editor at a publishing house.
These and other characters making up Rudnick's gangbusters ensemble cast take turns with the book's point of view, gradually supplying answers to the novel's key questions, among them: Why did Linda and Sean break up, and how did Rob's husband die? The sheer number of narrative strands can hinder the novel's forward momentum, but the writing is zingy throughout and flush with the ultra-specific thumbnails that Rudnick is known for (one character has "the frostiness and aplomb of a dowager dryly outraged by horseless carriages"). What Is Wrong with You? is an ode to love written with two pens: one dipped in sugar, the other in poison. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer