The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Funny can age badly, because what each generation thinks is funny changes. The more generations, the more change, and eventually we need learned professors to explain to us that Shakespeare is approximately 15% dick-and-vagina jokes by volume.

The Dud Avocado is a humorous novel, in the based-on-my-life style, set in the early 1950s in Paris, narrated by a madcap young would-be actress named Sally Jay Gorce. How much of it is "really" what happened to author Elaine Dundy and how much is a fictionalization...who can say at this point? And who would care? What matters now is whether the people still connect, whether the funny stuff is still funny, the thoughtful stuff still thoughtful, and the emotional stuff still true.

The edition I read, the 2006 New York Review of Books trade paperback [1], notes that Dud Avocado is one of those cult novels that gets re-issued with minor fanfare every decade or so, and then mostly sinks beneath the waves before the next burst of cult interest. (Of course, most sixty-year-old books don't even get that: they got a first publication, and maybe a paperback, and possibly a reissue with the next book from the author, and then nothing at all from then on.) Terry Teachout, who said that in his introduction, makes it sound like a sad thing, but it's actually how novels live, for all but the biggest, most ubiquitous writers. They pop in and out of print, in and out of public discourse, because we can't think about or talk about everything at once.

So Dud Avocado has stayed alive. It's been rediscovered multiple times, by two more generations, including a lot of people who didn't get to run off to Paris on family money the way Sally Jay (and maybe Dundy) did. So no matter what I say about it, my questions above about people and funny and thoughtful and emotional are "yes," for a sizable number of people, as recently as 2006. (And, to be frank, "people" is me being deliberately vague: I think Dundy and Dud Avocado speak more clearly to women than to men, more directly to young people than older people.)

Sally Jay is willful and scattered and free-wheeling and all-too-easily led, enthusiastic and prone to fall in love at the drop of a hat and enamored with her own bohemianism. She's also not nearly as self-reflective as she seems to be: I'm not sure whether that's Dundy's point or not. Even this far back, the scatterbrained young woman -- pretty enough for a lot of men to be interested in her, nutty enough to drive a lot of them away, clumsy as the standard endearing/quirky trait -- was the model, though I don't know if modern romantic comedy got that from Dundy or if there's an earlier incarnation I'm forgetting at the moment. She's a modern enough woman to fall into bed without much trouble, and Sally Jay seems to enjoy it though Dundy (writing in 1958, let's remember) leaves it clear that there was a falling-into-bed without saying much more.

The story of Dud Avocado is Sally Jay: her voice, her misadventures, her emotions, her love-affairs, all in one tangled ball. The through-line, such as it is, is bound up in an old friend named Larry Keevil: she meets him again in Paris on page 1, falls in love with him in the first chapter, gets pulled into his schemes (and vice versa) for a few hundred pages, wanders through Paris and some provincial towns doing things that may be scandalous to herself or her relatives back home or even the locals, and eventually learns unpleasant truths about Larry near the end. Those are all things that happen; what matters is how Sally Jay tells us about them and how she feels about them.

She's a mess, in that unformed early-twenties way: unsure what she wants but determined to get it right now. The whole book is in her voice, and the reader has to be able to go with that: to sympathize with what a less kind reader might call a sex-mad spoiled rich white girl on a tear overseas, sowing wild oats madly before inevitably settling down to domesticity and a blandly conventional American marriage. (Spoiler alert: there is something like settling down at the very end of the book, somewhat abruptly, though I misrepresent it here. It feels like Dundy knew she needed to end the book and wasn't able to figure out something more plausible than her own random marriage to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, and so just fictionalized that as best she could.)

I found Sally Jay a fun protagonist to spend 250 pages with, though she'd be exhausting in real life. (I went to Vassar; I knew girls not a million miles from Sally Jay.) I'm a huge fan of novels written in distinctive voices, and Dud Avocado hits all of those buttons. And, frankly, a lot of it was still funny, to a man born twenty years later, who never had a rich uncle to send him anywhere. I imagine even more of it would be funny to readers closer to the life Sally Jay lives, and I expect there will be another new edition of Dud Avocado in 2025 or so, popping it back up for the attention of yet another generation.


[1] For the people like me who wondered: no, the cover photo is not Dundy. It's an unnamed model in New York in 1962, photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld. I guess mid-century is mid-century, right? 1951 Paris, 1962 New York, comme ci, comme ca?