The Dud Avocado

I both hate and love Sally Jay. Everybody should read this book, is such a romp. Book in great condition.

When Sally Jay Gorce was a teenager her rich uncle told her that when she graduated from college he'd pay for her to live in Paris and she took him up on it. Once in France she sets out to get herself laid. She's looking for freedom, experience and sex and it seems Paris in the 50s is the perfect place to find all three. Sally Jay has affairs, but that's one of the reasons she's there, so no surprise. She had a lousy one with an older guy, falls in love with a cad (no other word for it), then meets Mr. Nice Guy, you know, the kind of guy who always finishes last and he does here too, because she goes back to the cad, you know the kind of a guy girls seem to fall for, but shouldn't. Of course, she finally figures out that Mr. Wrong isn't Mr. Right, but not before head and heart have been broken and trashed into zillions of pieces. This is a nice story, a precursor to chick-lit, I think. Sally Jay is bright, witty, crazy (in a wacky way), impulsive and sometimes she doesn't seem to be very bright, but she sure as heck is a joy to read about and in addition to meeting Sally Jay Gorce in this book we also get drawn into Paris in the 50s. What a great place that must have been to live.

I dragged my feet on reading The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics) by Elaine Dundy. I'm not sure why. Maybe it looked too "chick lit" for me. Finally, I decided that I'd better do it because I had a review that was due. I figured if I could slog through "Rhett Butler's People," I could slog through this book. What a surprise. Written in 1958, Sally Jay Gorce is a heroine that is more modern and bold and nervy than all the chick lit heroines that have been published over the past five years. How could I not like a heroine who declares in the first chapter that while in Paris, the desire to bathe "somehow gets lost. To hell with that, she figures." Sally Jay is recently out of college and off to Paris. She is no innocent flower of youth. She's smart and opinionated but still gets herself into trouble because she has a way of going for it before she realizes that perhaps a safety net would be a good thing. That's the charm of this novel and the heroine. Sally Jay does it all and then tries again. The theme is to live life and so it is that Sally Jay lives it. Besides the heroine, the other strength of the novel is Dundy's sharp and witty descriptions of people and places. Even if I hadn't liked Sally Jay, Dundy's writing alone is a reason for me to keep this novel on the shelf.

Have you ever read a book that makes you want to go relive your twenties? This one did it for me. Sally Jay wanted to live her life to the fullest, and experience everything--and she did just that, come he** or high water. This book is SO beautifully written it becomes addicting and you can't put it down. Not a dumbed-down romance novel, it challenges your brain, makes you laugh, makes you cry, and makes you appreciate the bohemian lifestyle through the eyes of a pink-haired rebellious twenty-something girl. I recommend this book for the not-faint-of-heart adult who is looking for some good entertainment. I wouldn't recommend it to impressionable young teens--the english used would frustrate and the ideals described wouldn't be as accepted today (nor would such choices in lifestyle be as safe). I wasn't born until '67, and the 50's always seemed so "innocent" to me...I'm glad that there are books like this out there that show that the innocence went only so far, and things haven't changed much...The drive to see and do everything has been around for generations, and my generation or the following generations won't be any different. I love this book and highly recommend it to adult readers.

THE DUD AVOCADO is funny. The heroine narrator is Sally Jay Gorse. The setting is Paris. Meeting Larry Keevil Sally Jay decides to have a drink with him at a nearby cafe. After a time, Larry notices that his companion is wearing an evening dress. She explains that she hasn't picked up her laundry. Later on, Sally Jay and her friend Judy term a group of painters the Hard Core. Part of the plot is driven by the circumstance that Sally Jay has misplaced her passport. When she seeks to replace it she is met with disbelief and is accused of wanting to sell it and jeopardizing the free world. While visiting Biarritz she is lucky that her party is admitted to the casino since the establishment would be in trouble for having underage patrons on the premises. A friend, Teddy, accuses Sally Jay of behaving like a guttersnipe. She thinks of him as a Machiavellian monster In the Afterword it is learned that the author married Ken Tynan. It seems that he was jealous of the book's success. It is believed that Elaine Dundy never wrote another long work. It is understandable that THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS saw fit to republish this novel since it is scream and a lot of copies of it will probably be sold on this go-around. I love the idea of Americans knocking about in Paris in the fifties. Surely it was a time of relative innocence.

Years ago, I came across this book at Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford and absolutly devoured it. I let my mother borrow it, an aunt, several friends and then lost my copy in the mix of it all. Since I was then living in NYC, it was impossible to come by a copy so I ended up buying about 10 copies and giving them as gifts to friends over the years. Dundy's prose isn't remarkable, but her youthful expression, her ways of seeing the artistic world surrounding her, the blissful madness of a young twenty-year-old alone in Paris all make this a tresure. Find a copy. Share it.