![]() ![]() “It’s when you’re walking down the street and a well-dressed woman is coming toward you and she’s got a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other, and when she slams into you and drenches you with the coffee, she looks at you as though it’s your fault.” He takes a bite of his vegan chocolate-chip cookie (Rudnick subsists on junk food). With his impeccable elocution and shabby-genteel scorn, Vionnet acts out the pent-up petty animus that boils quietly within Rudnick and all New Yorkers amid daily street life. Vionnet has what I call style rage,” explains Rudnick. But Vionnet provides an irresistible, sneering through-line. There are poignant moments in I Shudder-profiles of his deceased agent Helen Merrill, the costume designer William Ivey Long, and friends who died of AIDS (the circumstances tinged with Rudnickian absurdity, of course). ![]() Actually, he’s a figment of Paul Rudnick’s imagination and a recurring character in his new book of stories and essays, I Shudder: and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey. Elyot Vionnet, an erudite, fastidious, semi-retired substitute teacher who’s lived forever in a rent-controlled studio apartment that almost, but not quite, overlooks Gramercy Park, has ventured out to Cake Shop on the Lower East Side, quietly judgmental. ![]()
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