Books: Tidings of Joy

To the urbane entertainment consumer there is perhaps no scarier assessment of a cultural product than one that includes the words, "It will make you laugh; it will make you cry." The '90s have left people so well nourished on irony and irrelevance that many of us have no digestive tolerance left for movies, television shows or books that want to be both funny and heartfelt. And can we be blamed when, so often, that impulse results in something like The Mirror Has Two Faces?

When we keep this in mind, writer Mark O'Donnell emerges as a true gift. A humorist and playwright, O'Donnell has mastered the art of conveying the bittersweet. In his first novel, Getting Over Homer, O'Donnell wryly traced a twin's failing quest to find a bond similar to the one he shared with his sibling. In his second novel, Let Nothing You Dismay (Knopf; 193 pages; $22), O'Donnell is once again obsessed with a young man's search for wholeness, and here too the author's witticisms flow felicitously.

It is the holiday season, and Tad Leary really needs to knit up all that the year has unraveled. Tad has broken up with his boyfriend, lost his Manhattan apartment and found himself fired from his teaching job at the lauded Excelsior prep school. During a single day right before Christmas, Tad embarks on a round of partygoing that takes him through his past, and, he hopes, will help him make sense of it.

Throughout, O'Donnell paints a subtly poignant picture of a young man struggling with a dual identity: as the child of a modest Irish-Catholic background and as a well-connected graduate of prestigious "Hale University." Ask yourself how many contemporary comic novels have dealt with the issue of class, and you will come up with a short list. Moreover, ask yourself how many manage to skewer Swedish cinema, performance art, silly doctoral theses and the "Poverty Barn" along the way, and you'll begin to see why this one is such a treat.

--By Ginia Bellafante