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Getting Over Homer
"Wise and forgiving . . . tough-minded and tender-hearted" (The New York Times), this delicious "coming of middle age" novel takes a lyrical, winsome, and genuinely side-splitting look at the heartbreak, aging, the search for home, and the madness of love between two mismatched men. "A stylish mix of humorous irony and realistic detail."--San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Mark O'Donnell
25 books4 followersMark O’Donnell was an American writer and humorist. O’Donnell 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.
O’Donnell’s novels include Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay. Along with Bill Irwin, he wrote Scapin, a 1997 play adapted from the original by Molière.
A 1980 article he wrote for Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion," was both widely quoted ("1. Any body suspended in space will remain suspended in space until made aware of its situation") and widely circulated by fans of cartoon physics.
O’Donnell’s novels include Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay. Along with Bill Irwin, he wrote Scapin, a 1997 play adapted from the original by Molière.
A 1980 article he wrote for Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion," was both widely quoted ("1. Any body suspended in space will remain suspended in space until made aware of its situation") and widely circulated by fans of cartoon physics.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 8, 2021
Good luck making it through the first chapter: like a standup routine, every line is a one-liner and the effect is, like most standup routines, tedious. Things improve somewhat when O’Donnell actually begins the story. For better or worse, it’s the story, narrated from first-person perspective, of Blue, a largely failed writer of songs and Broadway musicals in New York (his greatest hit having been a product of his preadolescence) who falls in love. Yay. The reader will recognize almost instantly that Homer, the love object, is a compulsive liar, and shortly after that a manipulative and insecure one besides; our narrator, in the throes of his first puppy love “with benefits,” is clueless to the point of provoking more than a little irritation in the reader. You know it’s bad when, after being dumped but before realizing he’s been dumped, Blue proposes to Homer a second weekend on Fire Island, unaware of how poor an impression he’d made on the A-list gay prisses – and Homer – the first time around. But kudos to O’Donnell for the most accurate description of the Fire Island milieu since the fantasy sequence in the film *Parting Glances.* And yes, people as clueless as Blue do exist, as do people like Homer – but this doesn’t make reading about them a pleasant experience, especially when Blue keeps hurling those one-liners. It’s like the act of a class clown being funny so that the bullies will be too busy laughing to beat him up: amusing without the context but oh so pathetic with it.
Finally it occurs to Blue that he needs a change of scenery, so he makes visits to the family as a sort of getting back in touch with his roots. At this point – if not, granted, a hundred or so pages earlier – one begins to wonder (how often this happens in gay fiction!) whether one is reading a novel or autobiography with the names changed. We should already be aware, or at least cautioned, that, like Blue, O’Donnell was, in real life, the gay half of a pair of identical twins from a large Irish Catholic family in Cleveland who moved to New York to write for Broadway. And, like Brian Bouldrey (in his *Genius of Desire*), O’Donnell faces the problem of throwing large fistfuls of characters at the reader (who will be asking: Is it worth the trouble of remembering or even noting all of them and their objective correlatives?) by ignoring the problem altogether. (At least O’Donnell is careful to give each of them an objective correlative; Bouldrey hardly bothers.) Indeed, this episode contributes little if anything to an understanding of Blue as a personality, and the reader is more relieved by Blue’s return to New York than Blue himself is. – Now surely large Irish Catholic families deserve their place in the sun and the Fiction section of the library, but if a reader is supposed to keep track of the family members, then the family should either be given primary focus or the narrative expanded considerably. Thus it turns out that *Cheaper by the Dozen* – a serviceable read if hardly great literature – is a much more successful narrative than either of the novels in question here.
Readers who have made it this far will be rewarded with some set pieces that are handled with an admirably light touch: one with Blue’s sister-in-law-to-be, and two deathbed scenes (friends with AIDS; this is the 1980s, after all). During the second of these, the dying friend remarks that “experience is the ability to recognize a mistake—when you make it again!” . . . which well could be the epigraph, or at least the epitaph, of the novel, because by this point Blue has fallen into a second romance easily recognizable as doomed from the get-go. When the curtain goes down on the novel – which predictably enough ends with a torch song – we find a Blue who has either grown wiser or has eaten his sour grapes with a certain grace. One hardly knows which.
No doubt due to his other work and his New York connections, O’Donnell gets the elite treatment from Knopf, all the way down to the colophon page explaining the typeface chosen for the book. But really, it’s just reading for the beach. Well, maybe not on Fire Island. Three stars, although 2 ½ would be a bit more appropriate.
Finally it occurs to Blue that he needs a change of scenery, so he makes visits to the family as a sort of getting back in touch with his roots. At this point – if not, granted, a hundred or so pages earlier – one begins to wonder (how often this happens in gay fiction!) whether one is reading a novel or autobiography with the names changed. We should already be aware, or at least cautioned, that, like Blue, O’Donnell was, in real life, the gay half of a pair of identical twins from a large Irish Catholic family in Cleveland who moved to New York to write for Broadway. And, like Brian Bouldrey (in his *Genius of Desire*), O’Donnell faces the problem of throwing large fistfuls of characters at the reader (who will be asking: Is it worth the trouble of remembering or even noting all of them and their objective correlatives?) by ignoring the problem altogether. (At least O’Donnell is careful to give each of them an objective correlative; Bouldrey hardly bothers.) Indeed, this episode contributes little if anything to an understanding of Blue as a personality, and the reader is more relieved by Blue’s return to New York than Blue himself is. – Now surely large Irish Catholic families deserve their place in the sun and the Fiction section of the library, but if a reader is supposed to keep track of the family members, then the family should either be given primary focus or the narrative expanded considerably. Thus it turns out that *Cheaper by the Dozen* – a serviceable read if hardly great literature – is a much more successful narrative than either of the novels in question here.
Readers who have made it this far will be rewarded with some set pieces that are handled with an admirably light touch: one with Blue’s sister-in-law-to-be, and two deathbed scenes (friends with AIDS; this is the 1980s, after all). During the second of these, the dying friend remarks that “experience is the ability to recognize a mistake—when you make it again!” . . . which well could be the epigraph, or at least the epitaph, of the novel, because by this point Blue has fallen into a second romance easily recognizable as doomed from the get-go. When the curtain goes down on the novel – which predictably enough ends with a torch song – we find a Blue who has either grown wiser or has eaten his sour grapes with a certain grace. One hardly knows which.
No doubt due to his other work and his New York connections, O’Donnell gets the elite treatment from Knopf, all the way down to the colophon page explaining the typeface chosen for the book. But really, it’s just reading for the beach. Well, maybe not on Fire Island. Three stars, although 2 ½ would be a bit more appropriate.
July 8, 2007
Fiction. Not a love story, a break-up story. Blue, our narrator, is desperate and awkward, and I had a hard time feeling any sympathy for him while he bumbles around falling in love with men who don't really want him. And of course he handles that badly, making me want to shield my eyes from his messy neediness. Part of the problem is that we never really get to see Blue happy. The book starts at the end with his failures and then flashes back. We know any happiness he achieves is going to be short-lived. I suppose he learns from his mistakes, eventually, but we don't get to see that either.
Two stars. The writing is great, and I really enjoyed the parts about Blue's family -- his eleven brothers and sisters, including his identical twin, Red -- but mostly this is a story about Blue being bad at reading people. I liked it a lot more when I was younger and loved wallowing in self-inflicted angst. These days I need a little more from a story. Or a happy ending. I would have totally accepted a happier ending.
Two stars. The writing is great, and I really enjoyed the parts about Blue's family -- his eleven brothers and sisters, including his identical twin, Red -- but mostly this is a story about Blue being bad at reading people. I liked it a lot more when I was younger and loved wallowing in self-inflicted angst. These days I need a little more from a story. Or a happy ending. I would have totally accepted a happier ending.
July 22, 2008
CRAP! The main character is not sympathetic as much as he's a sap. You want to slap him for his low self-esteem and self-defeatist attitudes, or at least slap the author for making him so hard to identify with - or his tormentors so obviously wrong in their doings. If love was actually like this in real life, I'd quit.
December 31, 2019
Navigating the issues of middle age while still trying to find the one.
June 19, 2008
While my exposure to gay fiction is limited, Getting Over Homer is quite entertaining when it deals with the protagonist's relationship with his eleven siblings, and the fall-out from their Catholic but not orthodox upbringing. But the ending is sloppy, and Blue's love affair with Homer (and later Teddy) seems superficial and unbelieveable. However, the author's a great wordsmith and there are some lol chuckles to be had.
September 19, 2007
A book that I picked at first solely because of its title.Anyone who knows me well,knows why.It turned out to be an excellent read.It also fit my situation in some ways.One reviewer said it was "a coming of middle age". It is an interesting journey of a midwesterner into the fairy land known as New York. I enjoyed it a lot.
July 11, 2008
Hey! This guy is probably taking the same meds I'm taking!
November 4, 2013
funny, sweet and true
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews