The Dud Avocado

Summary (from the publisher):
The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

Review: Sally Jay Gorce, is a charming and original voice that is the heart of The Dud Avocado. The novel opens with young Sally Jay wearing an evening dress in the middle of the day, walking the streets of Paris. She's always hopelessly losing things and forever wearing the wrong things. She can't seem to make up her mind about who she's in love with and is halfheartedly devoted to her acting career. She is a young woman, finally free and independent in Paris in the 1950s.

Sally Jay is one of those exasperatingly flighty individuals who is constantly losing the contents of their handbags, making and breaking plans, changing their mind at the drop of a hat, and generally so laid back as to get carried away with the slightest breeze. Of course, knowing all this about Sally Jay's character, its likely not surprising to learn that she's also at times an unreliable narrator - exaggerating or forgetting to relay details as the notion strikes her.

This little novel is without a doubt amusing. Her fashion faux pas: "I said didn't he think I was a little old to be trailing mother around with me and he said No, by golly, he did not, and I got irritated and said that maybe he ought to be with his mother, and then I realized that my God he was. Not far from us was an enormous mountain, about five hundred tons of insipid grandeur, covered in black velvet and topped by a fleece of white hair [...] It was mothah, all right" (116). Her temper tantrums: "I bit the top off a pear and flung it against a wall like a hand grenade" (166). The company she keeps: "Well, it's competent, it's professional, it doesn't make any real comment, it's - well, not clever so much as adroit. I don't mean it's unedifying, it just not uplifting. Not that there's anything unattractive in not being uplifting, but well, you know what I mean...it's...um, it's...cursory' (95). And her frequently bizarre appearance (dyed pink hair and all): "I was determined that for once, for just once in my life, when I went to those readings, I would be wearing the 'right' thing. [...] To my chagrin, I found all my clothes stubbornly resisting this desired neutrality, splitting themselves resolutely up into three categories: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian. It looked hopeless" (56).

There doesn't seem to be a deep message to Sally Jay's tale, and if they are messages, they're hidden, nestled in the chatter of her narration as one liners that seem to speak a truth that belies Sally Jay's careless ways. Such as, "It's amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you" (33). Sally Jay demonstrates the sheer joy in living life entirely for oneself, devoid of obligations to others; "I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment" (160).

Dundy reveals in the afterword that the title of this novel arose randomly at a party when someone followed a comment referring to a dead avocado plan by saying that would make a good title for a novel. However, within the novel, it takes the form of Sally Jay herself being referred to as an avocado, "'The Typical American Girl,' he said, addressing it. 'A hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing.' He began eating it. 'How I love them,' he murmured greedily. 'So green - so eternally green.'" (224).

Review: 4