The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms: The Chronicle of One of the Strangest Stories Ever to Be Rumoured about Around New York

This is the only novel written in the 20th centuary that can compare to the Great Gatsby in its story of the infinite sadness and subtlety of lost love. Here we have a tale so poignant and devastatingly memorable - a tale of a still beautiful woman of only 42 years, divorced, bereft and lonely in her mansion of equisite taste and infinite emptiness - her children ignoring her in their quest for their new lives and her former husband moving on to a younger woman - whose only wish is to sit her ass on a clean surface. who would have thought that her lonely search for meaning through art could have led her to a funeral home and to a surprising and haunting ending to her tale?

Our book club chose this book because we all loved the title and could definately relate to the desire to use clean restrooms. This novella traces the ups and downs in Jocelyn's life after her husband leaves her to live with his girlfiend in an apartment on West 67th Street. Jocelyn was educated at Bryn Mawr and lives in a beautiful home on Winnapoopoo Road in Scarsdale, but now her life is about to change dramatically. The book is often sad, sometimes bawdy and always entertaining. I would definately recommend this book and would like to order another by Donleavy.

My book group read this and though it was certainly the shortest book we have read, it led to the longest discussion we've ever had. The protagonist is a women whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Because of this and some bad decisions on her part she loses her house, country club membership, friends, kids...status in her community and ends up living in a small room in New York, working at a store for minimum wage. She is miserable. Through a very unusual series of events, she regains her wealth only to realize that it's not the money that made her happy, it was her former life and she can not have that back. The ending leaves you thinking for a long, long time. This book is written as the woman thinks and Donleavy's writing style is hard to get used to at first. It is almost as if you are inside her head. This is a book to pass along to friends so that you can talk about it for hours.

The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Room is Donleavy's second Novella, the first since The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. A marked departure from his earlier works, it features a female protagonist and employs a much more conventional writing style. Few contemporary authors can meld humor and sadness as can Donleavy at his best, and this work ranks among the author's finest work in that regard. Donleavy has long suffered from a fate similar to that of Henry Miller: having first published a huge and controversial best-seller, fresh, shocking, and unforgetable (Miller's Tropic of Cancer; Donleavy's The Ginger Man), too many critics tend to weigh all subsequent works by that achievement. Besides the fact that it's arguable that The Ginger Man outshines any later Donleavy work, those who use his classic first novel as a yard stick for books such as The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms are comparing single malt Isley scotch to vintage champagne. Both fine in of themselves thank you very much.

I was enchanted with this book right from the beginning, perhaps as much for Donleavy's characterization of the protagonist than for his use (love?) of the language. Although Jocelyn Jones' reversals of fortune seem never-ending, she perseveres with real moxy, even while contemplating her end. By story's end, the gods are smiling at her. Or are they smirking? A brief but memorable novel.