This book completely won me over. At first, I was a little overwhelmed by the large cast of characters, wondering if I’d be able to keep everyone straight, but by the end of chapter 3, I was hooked. Rudnick masterfully brings each voice to life, and before I knew it, I was fully invested in this beautiful, messy, hilarious, and heartfelt ensemble.

If you love found-family stories with sharp wit and genuine emotional warmth, this one delivers. It reminded me of The Celebrants by Steven Rowley in that it gave me that same feeling of being welcomed into a tight-knit friend group that you don’t want to leave. I was truly sad to see it end.

Highly recommended for readers who love layered characters, smart dialogue, and stories that balance humor with heart.

Too much and not enough happening at the same time. The focus was pulled in too many directions and there wasn’t a clear message at the end of the book. Rudnick should’ve narrowed the focus to the gay New Yorkers for a clearer and funnier story. Way too much backstory, it overshadowed any actual plot. The language was flowery and unnecessary.

This book unfortunately, didn’t work for me. I tend to enjoy interwoven, character-driven stories, but the lack of plot and the fragmented structure made it hard to connect. The characters had potential, but their emotional depth felt lost. On the other hand, lt was very —sweet, funny, and full of heart. It did make me laugh out loud and loved the authentic LGBTQ+ representation. It was not for me but it will be for someone!

Thanks for the opportunity to read. The strange structure of the beginning of the book made it difficult for me to attach to the variety of characters.

Unfortunately, this did not work for me at all. I usually love interwoven stories, but the general lack of plot made it difficult to engage with the narrative. I love a good character study as much as the next person, but the structural approach and writing style really hindered that exploration for me rather than enhanced it. The characters themselves are somewhat interesting as is, but there was a lot of lost potential here in the end, frustratingly.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
This took me forever to get to, I started it before pub date but kept starting other books rather than finishing it. I'm glad I perservered because it got really interesting and around the 2/3 mark I was hooked. I needed to get to know these characters to enjoy the story and that took a while. This is a really interesting tale but it needed a stronger and more engaging opening. I do recommend it if you don't mind a slow beginning, as I said it gets really interesting in the middle once you know everyone.

I listened to the audiobook and Erin Mallon does a fantastic job giving these quirky characters their own unique voices and highlighting the wit and dark humor. I enjoyed listening to the cadence of Paul's words and I can appreciate the charm of his storytelling despite not really following the story from listen to listen. It's very character driven so I think I would absorb this book better reading the physical copy and since Atria kindly provided one for me I will do a reread to get the full scope of his writing prowess.

Sweet and funny rom-com, and I love the LGBTQ rep! I laughed a lot reading this one. Rom-com's are not usually my go-to genre but when I received a copy of this one, the cover caught my attention and the premise sounded funny. I'm glad I gave it a chance!

I was skeptical about this book. But, I ended up loving the ending for each character. It was very Love, Actually, but more chaotic. It was SUPER messy. It involves infidelity and wild thoughts, sometimes verbally expressed. I felt that this book was relatable at times (i.e. Tremble’s journey to NY and the greater unknown, Rob’s grief) while other times felt a little forced (the parts with Trone and Isabelle).

I appreciated that Linda and Sean didn’t get back together, despite the TroneTek device saying they are the ultimate pairing. I felt this was realistic. Linda’s hurt ran too deep, and Sean was self aware enough to know he is meant to be a terminal bachelor. People with amazing chemistry sometimes don’t end up together, and honesty about where people are in their personal journeys is the mature choice. Everybody doesn’t get (or deserve- looking at Sean intensely) a happily ever after.

Rob’s moment with Jake’s watch at the end was wonderfully written. It juxtaposed Linda and Sean’s flashy love, as a more intimate and deeply personal love. Rob and Jake were free of hurt during their relationship until the very end, whereas Sean hurt Linda in the middle of their marriage. It made Rob’s grief more tangible to me after reading their meet cute and their relationship’s progression.

Overall, What is Wrong with You? is a spectacular look at intertwined uplifting friendships, love in various forms, and liberation from perilous monotony. It answers the book’s title by normalizing authentic people and their choices and validates that people simply are who they are.

Thank you for the opportunity to review this book!

Major CWs for sickness, death, and cheating in the book.

The first thing you will notice about this book is its prose, which is very verbose and lengthy, with sentences unfolding over the course of full paragraphs at times.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a character study rather than a plot-driven narrative. The majority of the actual plot unfolds in the latter half of the book, with most "present" events occurring over the course of just two days. Instead of focusing on the events at the wedding mentioned in the synopsis, the book uses the bulk of its content to explore the characters' backstories and their motivations + goals while heading into the aforementioned wedding.

This book is mostly praised for being "hilarious," which, yeah, it had its moments, but the humor is also quite bleak. The subject matter is tragic at its core and the humor does not alleviate the gravity of the scenes at all, but rather paints a cynical, grim picture using a "f*ck it, better laugh about it" mentality. The epilogue ends on a hopeful note, but heck, I spent most of the book feeling miserable.

This particular brand of humor is also borderline offensive most of the time (I know, I'm such a Isabelle, right? 🫠). The shock-value often works for me, I'm an easy gal to please, but even I found myself raising eyebrows at times. The reference to the Heaven's Gate and Peoples Temple's mass suicides, mocked for their fashion choices, left a bitter taste in my mouth. Also, most of the book's references will age like milk.

The characters are difficult to root for, with most of them being off-putting if not downright abhorrent. The only redeeming one is good-guy Rob, but Rob is also miserable and going through some heavy stuff at the moment, so you know, he's not going to bring sunshine and rainbows to the pity party.
I loved the decades-long friendship between Sean and Rob though, and in the end, I'm happy their relationship came to be the "moral" of the story, giving a high finale to an overall somber story.

I did enjoy this book at the end of the day; I thought the pacing was really tight and I didn't mind spending 80% of the book in flashbacks. This is a surprise coming from me so I think it highlights the author's story-crafting skills!

I'd recommend this book if you live in a big city and the constant ambient noise from police sirens have irreparably damaged your brain chemistry. Or if you're a millennial (or older) who's really depressed and using dark humor as your main coping mechanism. Also, if you find kids falling down to be top comedy.

Loved it. Interesting exploration into a wide range of characters, and it was witty. Not a lot happens but I don’t care.

You either find Paul Rudnick hilarious, or you don't. I adore his loopy inventiveness, and though his perspective is firmly that of an educated upper-middle-class gay white cis male Manhattanite, his sympathies are also firmly progressive. The fun he pokes at certain hyperdelicate progressive sensibilities feels affectionate, whereas the fun he pokes at corrupt politicians and right-wingers in general is decidedly hostile.

Still, the first quarter or so of "What Is Wrong with You?" lagged for me, arch wit for its own sake overwhelming the plot and the characters. Rudnick is very, very good at both when he attends to them, however; once he gets going here, the going involves plenty of snort-laughing but also plenty of sorrow, as we learn more and more about the widowhood of Rob, who lost his beloved husband to ALS, and about how Sean, who adored his wife, Linda, nevertheless blew up their marriage by fully Insta-documented cheating.

The fun and the poignancy here are undermined to some extent by real-life circumstances that Rudnick couldn't have predicted. To begin with we have the depredations of Elon Musk and his merry band of incels. That billionaires in general would kiss Trump's ring is of course entirely predictable, but the speed and extent of democracy's wreckage (or the wreckage of the potential for democracy, at least) maybe not so much. Trone Meston, a multibillionaire tech genius, is another of the principals in "What Is Wrong with You?"; while he's not presented as a hero, he's also not a supervillain. But in the real world it's now impossible to see the billionaire class, and especially the tech billionaire class, as anything else. For my money (ha) not making Trone a villain was a bad call anyway, so the not-wholly-unsympathetic laughs Rudnick plays him for take some of the shine off this otherwise extremely entertaining book.

Honestly, though, if you read this for no other reason read it for the story of Rob and Jake and the heartbroken laughter it'll evoke. Thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

I could not dream up this cast of characters if I tried. With the initial introductions to Rob, Sean, Tremble, and more, it's a struggle to see how this will all come together. But as the wedding approaches and the characters all end up in Maine together, the interactions finally come together. I have to say that Isabelle was a bit too much of a caricature of the uber progressive, cis, straight, white woman, but then again I can see that being the perception that others have. It seemed hard to believe a company would let her behavior stand, but who am I to say. No spoilers about the ending, but I was kind of surprised that things ended the way they did based on the results of Trone's new device.

Rob Barnett is down on his luck, recently let go from his publishing job on the one-year anniversary of his husband’s death. Rob’s friend and personal trainer, Sean, gets invited to his ex-wife Linda’s destination wedding to the third-richest man in the country. Sean and Rob decide to attend - if not to stop the wedding, at least to witness the groom’s simultaneous announcement of a mysterious technological invention. Also in attendance - legitimately and otherwise - is an ambitious woman from Rob’s former employer, a fiery blogger-turned-author with her debut novel on the line, a dentist running from his stalker, and a vigilante mayor seeking glory for himself and his town. Jumping between the past and the present, each of them must reckon with a part of their past that they are running from.

It’s hard to pin this book down, in part because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Each character embodies a trope - Rob as the man who can’t move on from the past, Sean as the man who let fame get in the way of what he truly valued, Linda as the woman who has to learn to let others in, and so on. The first few pages of the novel introduces the reader to eight different characters, each with varying degrees of importance to the narrative as a whole. The dialogue is quippy, the situation silly. Rudnick is a talented enough writer to sink some earnest moments into the equation as well.

I found myself wishing this book would have given less time to some of the side characters, especially those whose plot lines were quickly resolved or deemed to be a misunderstanding. The arc of the story was like a jagged mountain road - back and forth, up and down. The characters get introduced in the beginning, then the reader is taken on a journey of how each one got to the “present day” of the wedding, bouncing between perspectives and timelines. It was hard to follow, at times.

Overall, this book does have a lot of heart. For readers who like banter-heavy stories with a large cast of characters (think Anxious People by Fredrik Backman), this book could be a good addition to your list.

**Thank you to Simon & Schuster (Atria Books Imprint) and Paul Rudnick for providing this e-book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.**

Utterly hilarious! A quick read that had me laughing out loud and falling in love with the absolutely over the top, ridiculous characters. Rob, the editor who lost the love of his life, Jake, and is unable to recover. His trainer, Sean, who enlists him to attend the wedding of his ex wife, Linda, to billionaire Trone Meston. Tremble, the outrageous author who Rob wants to publish. Paolo, Rob’s best friend who may or may not have a stalker. And Isabelle, the “feminist” co-worker at Rob’s publishing firm who wants him gone. Throwing all of these wild characters together created a perfect riot of fun. Definitely recommend.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of this title!

“What Is Wrong With You?” by Paul Rudnick started off kind of slow, but honestly, I think that worked for the story. I really liked how the relationships between the characters unfolded—it was messy, funny, emotional, and just super real. The characters themselves were total chaos in the best way: frustrating at times, but also really charming and hilarious. It felt like one of those books where you’re supposed to love some and want to shake others, and I was totally here for it.

The storyline between Rob and Jake really got to me. Their relationship was such a rollercoaster, and I kept wanting more of their story the whole way through.

Rudnick’s writing style took me a minute to get into, but once it clicked, I started enjoying it a lot more. Some of the humor didn’t quite land for me and kind of pulled me out of a few emotional moments, but overall, I really liked the way he told this story.

The epilogue is what really saved this for me.

3.75 rounded up. An unusual cast of characters thrown together by life. They are all grieving in their own ways and it not only affects their lives but their relationships, too. Book started a little slow for me but kept getting better. Stronger finish!

Advanced reader copy provided by Atria and NetGalley but all opinions are my own.

3.75! This book is like getting slapped in the face by dark humor and then hugged by a little bit of heart. It’s chaotic, weirdly bleak, and somehow still funny in a “we’re all doomed so might as well laugh” kinda way. The story throws a bunch of messy, mostly awful people onto a billionaire’s island for a wedding/product launch gone wrong, and chaos absolutely ensues. But underneath the absurdity and razor-sharp jabs, there’s this bittersweet thread about friendship, grief, and finding connection in a world that feels completely unhinged. If your coping mechanism is inappropriate laughter and existential dread, this one’s for you.

Well, it's only the top of April and I am positive I have just read one of my absolute favorite books of 2025.

Paul Rudnick's third novel in four years is arguably his strongest, the perfect mash-up of his truly riotous Playing the Palace and his deeply heartfelt and utterly charming Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style. Rudnick, a published veteran of stage, screen, and the printed word, is without a doubt one of the funniest humans walking on planet earth. His wit is relentless and the vividness and accuracy of his metaphors and asides are unmatched. For his newest novel, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?, Rudnick takes us to a remote island straight out of Glass Onion, where a near omniscient billionaire has managed to gather up some of the weirdest, wildest, occasionally worst people on the planet to bear witness to his over-the-top wedding: There's the recently fired, recently widowed editor, his crass literary protege, the politically correct zealot who fired the editor, the best friend of the editor, a gay dentist who might have a stalker on the island who is another gay dentist, and the editor's trainer, who is a former movie star, a blundering fool, and, oh yeah, the ex-husband of the woman marrying the eccentric billionaire. I am desperate to know what plotting out this novel might have looked like.

While the novel is an absurdist tour-de-force of hi-jinxes and WTF moments leading up to the big wedding (and the life-changing tech launch that the billionaire will be releasing concurrent to his nuptials), Rudnick's novel, with its crazy name that speaks volumes about its characters, is ultimately a rich character study about this group of individuals, from so many backgrounds and world views, and how they all search for love. For a second love. For moving on from love. For physical love. For love that matches their own ego. For the love of literature. For the love of gains. And, ultimately, I often know I've found a favorite novel based on how many lines I want to pull out of it and tattoo on my body, and this book has packed them all in, whether because they are life-affirming, lush, and deeply thoughtful about the queer experience, or because they are just so freaking stupid. Yes, the plot in this one is zany. Yes, it's a novel that points to a time in the future (like maybe a year away) where everything is controlled by oligarchs and that makes it super nihilistic. But there's so much joy and laughter on the pages of this book, and we can all use a bit more of that right now.

I wanted to love this so bad, and I see what it was trying to do, but I don't think it entirely succeeded. I did like the character introductions that occured early on in the book. But once the characters started inter-weaving and time passed by I really had a hard time keeping everything straight. So, I am leaving this book with no idea what is wrong with these people lol. My own conclusion: they're just bad people that need therapy.

I would still recommend this one for people who like character-based books. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!