Many of us have friends abroad right now, taking advantage of roaring nightlife and racking up passport stamps while the rest of us cross our fingers every weekend that Milo’s sporadically becomes fun.
Getting green-eyed seeing Instagram stories of delicious food and various Seven Wonders of the World? I have a book with a green cover that probably won’t help at all, but it’s a little easier to escape into a novel than your social media feed.
“The Dud Avocado” by Elaine Dundy was published all the way back in 1958, but don’t let the decade, or strange title, turn you off. The novel, at 260 pages, is accessible and even relevant to the modern reader, especially the college student.
The book follows the adventures, largely of the romantic and comedic type, of recent American college grad Sally Jay Gorce as she cavorts around Paris for a year, funded by her wealthy uncle. The ambitious Gorce has two quests for her time abroad: to make love — perhaps even fall in love — and star in a French film.
“I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it,” she reflects, gazing out her window on a warm autumn evening.
As I’ve described to many I’ve tried to sell this book to, Gorce is like Holden Caufield of the classic “The Catcher in the Rye” if he was a woman, older, slightly less depressed and a lot more boy-crazy. She says “phony” at least once.
The plot is anchored by Gorce’s love affairs, like the charming Larry, older Teddy, artistic Jim and stoic Baxter. But it picks up when the set is moved to the French coast for a production with an old high school crush she is determined to seduce. The stakes are raised as Gorce fights for a lead role, new leading men are introduced and something is going on with her passport.
Reading “The Dud Avocado” is a lot like listening to your very smart friend tell you about the terrible decisions she made last weekend. Except you can’t tell relatively self-aware Gorce that she’s putting herself into unfavorable positions. You just have to watch with amusement, hoping that she learns from her mistake and has a good one-liner about the situation (“Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.”)
“The Dud Avocado” may qualify as chick lit, but Gorce is a chick with wit. Think Eve Babitz (of which I am also a fan): a party girl who reads. Crazy how two things can be true at once. Gorce’s intelligence shines through her sly commentary on the various Parisian social scenes and her observations about both herself and others. Most importantly, she’s funny, and I hope my selected quotes are enough to make that argument.
I know the title seems irrelevant, but don’t let that turn you off — you’ll figure out the reference at the end. Really, the author just thought it would be a good name for a book (debatable).
