Review of the Book: The Dud Avocado

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Author's strong, passionate feminine voice makes the novel.
788 words
3.5
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It ran in the New York Times on May 10th 2008 in a short, but touching article and although it was over a week late and I discovered the article in a literary blog, the title: "Elaine Dundy, Author of 'The Dud Avocado' is dead at 86," I was shocked and saddened. Elaine Dundy actually died on May 1st from a heart attack only a few weeks after I had read the book. Ironically, the book had just been reissued by The New York Review of Books in 2007.

During her lifetime Dundy wrote three novels and then turned to nonfiction books, but 'The Dud Avocado' remained her most successful book. Most critics note that the book is flawed, but the author's strong and passionate feminine voice utterly redeems the novel. Much like Anais Nin (A Spy in the House of Love, et.al.) did in the early to mid 1900s, Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) did in the seventies, Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary) and Sex in the City did in the 1990s and 2000s, Dundy's character Sally Jay Gorce triumphantly defined the carefree single woman of the 50s.

Sally Jay Gorce, a 21 year old American college graduate living in Paris experiencing the ex-patriot life along the Champs-Élysées. As the book opens she meets a friend from the United States while sipping wine at on outdoor café. While the reader is introduced to this guy as merely an acquaintance of Sally Jay's and the guy's attitude toward her is like that towards an annoying younger sister, we soon come to realize she has a crush on him.

After the scene at the café, Sally Jay joins an American theatre troupe that her crush is affiliated with and begins traveling throughout Paris and France. Bumbling along the way, she meets and sleeps with a few directors, a couple of painters, and an Italian diplomat, who proposes to her, offering to sweep away from it all into a life of luxury.

In the midst of all her stumbling from relationship to relationship, she continues to be drawn to her crush, walking away from the diplomat and everything he offers, as well as an American painter who seems to be a perfect match for her. Along the way, as she falls into bed with these men as well as occasionally with her crush, we learn she has lost her passport, a seemingly innocent fact that becomes more and more sinister as the novel progresses.

As Sally Jay begins searching for her passport and later as she takes the first steps in obtaining another she starts to learn a few things about the man she's had a crush on all these months. Things get dicey as she talks to officials about her lost passport. Thinking further on how she came to lose the passport she figures out that the last time she saw her passport was when she went with her crush to a café. She happened to leave her purse at the table when stopping in the restroom, she didn't remember seeing after that.

Suddenly her lovable bungling makes her vulnerable in a dangerous international crime. She realizes that the police are watching the man she has a crush on and because she doesn't have her passport, she finds herself more and more dependent of this man. The other men who had been interested in her had given up as she continued her pursuit of her crush, so now she found herself alone and in need of help. Finally, she is able to get through to the painter who seemed so right for her. With his help she is able to contact a rich uncle back in the United States who gets the State Department on her side. Of course just about the time you sigh in relief, things get dicey again. What a lovable bungler this Sally Jay turns out to be.

Strokers will want to steer clear of this book because, while there are some sexual scenes, most of the contact fades behind closed doors, where the actual physical act becomes what the reader can make of it as two naked, or semi-naked people slip into bed. It's called imagination and Dundy does an excellent job creating the situation and then leaves the mechanics to us. Frankly I found myself so interested in finding out what else Sally Jay was going to bumble into that I probably would have found myself skipping over the telescopic views of her legs spread for one or another pulsing cock had she included those images. Thankfully she did not.

The latest edition of "The Dud Avocado" is available at Amazon and other book outlets. It's a book well worth the price.

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