Social Disease

Paul Rudnick, famous for Hollywood hits such as Addams Family Values and Jeffrey first found fame as a novelist. Social Disease, his 1986 comic masterpiece, has just been reissued and is as funny as it was a decade ago. Setting his book at the height of pre-AIDS Manhattan club life, Rudnick lampoons not only disco madness and Studio 54, but also the megalomania engendered by an out-of-control celebrity culture that promotes style over substance, money over morals. Like Evelyn Waugh 's lacerating Vile Bodies, Rudnick's Social Disease is a satire that defines our times even as it deflates our sense of self importance.