Or this passage, as notable for its elisions as its skewering of a particularly humorless kind of gay vanity:

Nicholas had taken me to a place where men did not wear ties. Ties were not allowed. Sweaters were not allowed. The sign at the door listed what was not allowed. Cologne was not allowed. Certain kinds of shirts were not allowed. Shirts could be checked at the door. Anything could be checked at the door. Some men checked everything but their shoes.

The pool table was not used for pool.

The passage exemplifies Coe’s style in I Look Divine: a sequence of short sentences, repetitions, lists will suddenly open out into broad humor or rhapsodic song.

“Maybe you can tell me,” Nicholas said, “why everybody wears these trousers, with the labels in the back that tell the waist size. Why do all of you want to go around telling the world your waist size? I mean, disclosing it. And maybe you can tell me why it is always, always thirty.”

The heartbreak here—as in so much of the novel—is that Nicholas doesn’t fit in to the bar. The men ignore him—and for Nicholas, to be ignored is far worse than to be ridiculed. For despite his self-proclaimed splendor, Nicholas does not belong to the age in which he lives. Rather he is a throwback to the teens and twenties, to the heyday of Ronald Firbank, who was famous for eating a meal consisting of champagne and a single pea on a porcelain plate (and whose novels, not incidentally, this one recalls). Even Nicholas’s vanity is dated, as the narrator observes in the Rome nightclub where “the most beautiful men” dance with themselves in front of mirrors. “It was not only true that they were not looking at each other,” Coe writes; “it was also the truth that, when they danced by themselves in mirrors the most beautiful men in Rome were not looking at Nicholas…He was sitting between two older, good-enough-looking men at a front table, in several hundred dollars’ worth of clothes, and the most beautiful men in Rome were not looking at his drop-dead bone structure, and it was not going over.”