The Dud Avocado
by Elaine Dundy
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A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest.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 show more when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.
“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx
"[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian. show less
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I am a complete sucker for a beautifully bound book. How could I resist a Virago Modern Classic with such a gorgeous hardback cover? I felt rather retro and special reading this small sized book, set mainly in 1950s Paris. Sally Jay Gorce (what a wonderful name) has struck a deal with her rich uncle – to be financially supported for two years while she sees the world and, oh, does she see it!
Sally Jay comes across as rather empty-headed at first as her days revolve around men, drinking, dancing and sex. There’s a little acting in there too at first. As Sally Jay’s relationships become more tangled, things start to get a bit more interesting. I would suggest persevering through Part One, as the pace and themes pick up greatly in show more the latter parts.
Sally Jay’s talent for losing things and getting entangled with a strange lot come to the fore later in the book. It’s at this time that you realise you’re no longer reading a tale about a silly young girl entertaining herself in Paris, but a girl who is getting into something more sinister. It was this part I enjoyed the most, as Sally Jay has to use her mettle to escape without putting her foot in it any further!
The ending is somewhat surprising (random characters disappear and reappear all the time in The Dud Avocado) but surprisingly, traditional. Sally Jay prides herself on being avant-garde – no better seen than in the conversations with the vapid Judy – why did she settle? I’ll leave you to read that in Sally Jay’s own words.
The title of The Dud Avocado refers to Sally Jay herself – she realises that sometimes she makes silly choices, but she’s kind of mysterious and exotic, like an avocado seemed back then. This is part of what makes Sally Jay such a likeable character despite all the scrapes she finds herself in! Her self-depreciating humour often made me smile.
Funny and wry, a lot of the observations Dundy makes are still relevant today. I loved the part about the types of tourists! It’s fun and frothy on the surface, but much darker towards the end. I was pleasantly surprised to read how modern the book felt.
http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less
Sally Jay comes across as rather empty-headed at first as her days revolve around men, drinking, dancing and sex. There’s a little acting in there too at first. As Sally Jay’s relationships become more tangled, things start to get a bit more interesting. I would suggest persevering through Part One, as the pace and themes pick up greatly in show more the latter parts.
Sally Jay’s talent for losing things and getting entangled with a strange lot come to the fore later in the book. It’s at this time that you realise you’re no longer reading a tale about a silly young girl entertaining herself in Paris, but a girl who is getting into something more sinister. It was this part I enjoyed the most, as Sally Jay has to use her mettle to escape without putting her foot in it any further!
The ending is somewhat surprising (random characters disappear and reappear all the time in The Dud Avocado) but surprisingly, traditional. Sally Jay prides herself on being avant-garde – no better seen than in the conversations with the vapid Judy – why did she settle? I’ll leave you to read that in Sally Jay’s own words.
The title of The Dud Avocado refers to Sally Jay herself – she realises that sometimes she makes silly choices, but she’s kind of mysterious and exotic, like an avocado seemed back then. This is part of what makes Sally Jay such a likeable character despite all the scrapes she finds herself in! Her self-depreciating humour often made me smile.
Funny and wry, a lot of the observations Dundy makes are still relevant today. I loved the part about the types of tourists! It’s fun and frothy on the surface, but much darker towards the end. I was pleasantly surprised to read how modern the book felt.
http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less
"Last night was one of THOSE evenings. I wouldn't know what to call it. Eventful in an uneventful way. Boring; but interesting. Nothing much happening on the surface and everybody seething and stewing underneath---changing character all over the place." Page 180
I don't think I've read another novel where the protagonist came roaring off the page like Sally Jay Gorce does in this book. A twenty year old American girl who is spending the year (1958) in Paris, she is so fresh, so dynamic, so filled with energy that I couldn't help cheer her on as she faced one disaster after another. Lots of books have been written about Americans abroad but this one is the one that will stand out for me. All the characterizations are great but Sally Jay show more will stay with me for sure. Wild and wonderful.Enhanced by the terrific Backlisted podcast. show less
I don't think I've read another novel where the protagonist came roaring off the page like Sally Jay Gorce does in this book. A twenty year old American girl who is spending the year (1958) in Paris, she is so fresh, so dynamic, so filled with energy that I couldn't help cheer her on as she faced one disaster after another. Lots of books have been written about Americans abroad but this one is the one that will stand out for me. All the characterizations are great but Sally Jay show more will stay with me for sure. Wild and wonderful.Enhanced by the terrific Backlisted podcast. show less
This strikes me as a story that was good fiction and edgy when published in 1958, and which is now good fiction and historically interesting in 2023. Sally Jay Gorce embarks on adventures in discovering herself while discovering Paris, funded by a rich uncle after fulfilling a promise to complete her education first. I found some of the writing devices interesting and unique ("I stiffened my spine and tried to dance disapprovingly. Try it."). If you like fun fiction and tales of decades gone by, this is a worthy choice.
Light fare about the exploits of a young woman in France. On the one hand it seems ahead of its time and a precursor to books like "Bridget Jones's Diary", on the other hand it's "too light" at times and a bit dated. I suspect if you're young, female, and traveling this book may be of interest and resonate better with you.
What I liked:
- The voice; it's true to itself.
- The woman's perspective evident throughout the book, in the small things like how men look at her body, or in larger things, like relationships, and the conflict between desire and guilt. Or in somewhat random things, like how long it takes to prepare, cook, feed, and clean while entertaining, or the awkwardness of reacting at a 'nude show' as a woman in order to not show more appear prudish, jealous, or lesbian.
- The feeling of "oh to be young and in Paris"; on coming of age and the joy of travel. And, while abroad, the observations on 'ugly Americans' as well as European haughtiness and pretentiousness.
- Humor; the book is not laugh-out-loud funny but it has its moments, and is entertaining in a light kind of way.
- The expression of female sexual desire, which I imagine must have been a little shocking in the 50's. I get a kick out of reading it a half a century later. "You know how it is. Some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and you come ... yes, I mean that's what happened, I mean I came." Or: "I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with me. I felt a vague melancholy sensation running through me, not at all unpleasant."
- The title. :-)
What I disliked:
- At times the book is muddled in the sea of characters being lampooned.
- In the worst of cases the voice is true and real, but banal (especially evident in the diary of part two, e.g. "I sit for hours afterwards staring idly at the snails clinging to knife-blade leaves growing in our garden. Sometimes I pick them off. They make a sucking noise and there's a small round wet spot where they sat.") Hey it ain't Doestoevsky folks.
- As the book goes on, the writing style becomes a bit tedous at times, e.g. "And Angela - well, Angela was just Angela, and I ain't never seen the likes. Whoever called the English reticent must have had his ears full of golf balls."
- A couple of the book's less-than-PC references. While one could say they reflect true voices and perspectives from the era, and while it's common to run across these things in fiction from the past, the casualness of how club members were "white enough" to do someone a good turn made me cringe a bit.
Favorite quotes:
"Read! I didn't want to read, it was just a substitute for living." (I got a laugh out of typing this one in for folks on LibraryThing :-))
"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."
"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."
"The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?"
"Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, 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." show less
What I liked:
- The voice; it's true to itself.
- The woman's perspective evident throughout the book, in the small things like how men look at her body, or in larger things, like relationships, and the conflict between desire and guilt. Or in somewhat random things, like how long it takes to prepare, cook, feed, and clean while entertaining, or the awkwardness of reacting at a 'nude show' as a woman in order to not show more appear prudish, jealous, or lesbian.
- The feeling of "oh to be young and in Paris"; on coming of age and the joy of travel. And, while abroad, the observations on 'ugly Americans' as well as European haughtiness and pretentiousness.
- Humor; the book is not laugh-out-loud funny but it has its moments, and is entertaining in a light kind of way.
- The expression of female sexual desire, which I imagine must have been a little shocking in the 50's. I get a kick out of reading it a half a century later. "You know how it is. Some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and you come ... yes, I mean that's what happened, I mean I came." Or: "I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with me. I felt a vague melancholy sensation running through me, not at all unpleasant."
- The title. :-)
What I disliked:
- At times the book is muddled in the sea of characters being lampooned.
- In the worst of cases the voice is true and real, but banal (especially evident in the diary of part two, e.g. "I sit for hours afterwards staring idly at the snails clinging to knife-blade leaves growing in our garden. Sometimes I pick them off. They make a sucking noise and there's a small round wet spot where they sat.") Hey it ain't Doestoevsky folks.
- As the book goes on, the writing style becomes a bit tedous at times, e.g. "And Angela - well, Angela was just Angela, and I ain't never seen the likes. Whoever called the English reticent must have had his ears full of golf balls."
- A couple of the book's less-than-PC references. While one could say they reflect true voices and perspectives from the era, and while it's common to run across these things in fiction from the past, the casualness of how club members were "white enough" to do someone a good turn made me cringe a bit.
Favorite quotes:
"Read! I didn't want to read, it was just a substitute for living." (I got a laugh out of typing this one in for folks on LibraryThing :-))
"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."
"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."
"The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?"
"Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, 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." show less
Zop zop! This novel just sings with its own triumphant off-key warble. Sally Jay Gorce could be the big sister of Holden Caulfield. She's just as funny and impulsive, but her wanderlust has brought her to more grown-up European adventures.
Paris is a glitzy ordeal swallowed whole. From the giddy, liquor-saturated highs, to the morose, self-incriminating lows, she tries out decadence (first of the old-guard variety and then of the bohemian); she consorts with artists and takes lovers; she poses nude, loses her passport, and dyes her hair pink. The wry wisdom of this intrepid, surprisingly vulnerable American woman slices through with arrogance and naivete. Amazingly, it doesn't matter a bit that the voice is from the 1950s. The emotional show more honesty, sexual bravado, and unflagging energy of Sally Jay Gorce stamp her experiences with a seamless and vibrant modernity. show less
Paris is a glitzy ordeal swallowed whole. From the giddy, liquor-saturated highs, to the morose, self-incriminating lows, she tries out decadence (first of the old-guard variety and then of the bohemian); she consorts with artists and takes lovers; she poses nude, loses her passport, and dyes her hair pink. The wry wisdom of this intrepid, surprisingly vulnerable American woman slices through with arrogance and naivete. Amazingly, it doesn't matter a bit that the voice is from the 1950s. The emotional show more honesty, sexual bravado, and unflagging energy of Sally Jay Gorce stamp her experiences with a seamless and vibrant modernity. show less
The Dud Avocado follows the adventures of one Sally Jay Gorce, an aspiring young American actress as she tries her best to live in the Paris of the late 1950s. In some ways, it's a shockingly modern book for those of us who are used to thinking of the 50s as being a very repressed and conservative decade, while in others it is most definitely antiquated. The dialogue in particular seems particularly odd; the idiosyncracies of American speech at that time are so unusual that it, at times, makes the novel seem strangely like a pastiche for all that it is a contemporary work. The humour and charm of the book, therefore, lies mostly not in the dialogue, but in the narrative of the finely drawn protagonist, Sally Jay. Any such subtlety or show more charm is sadly lacking in the other characters, though, and the prose is not really good enough to make up for their shortcomings. A nice example of its era, but not something I think I'll be coming back to. show less
This is the story of a young woman in the 1950s who has escaped her dull American life with a two-year fully-financed jaunt in Paris, courtesy of a rich uncle. She does a little bit of acting but mostly a lot of nothing. I hate to say it but everything from the lead character's name (Sally Jay Gorce) to her impulsive escape to the French Riviera bothered me. Although I had heard repeatedly how funny this novel was, I can't remember laughing or even smiling a single time. Sally Jay was not a malicious or stupid character and I didn't actually dislike her but I didn't really care what happened to her either. When she got into hairy situations, I felt she never got more than she deserved.
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Author Information
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Writer Elaine Dundy was born in New York City in 1921. She studied acting at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. After graduating, she moved to Europe and lived in Paris and later London. She married legendary critic Kenneth Tynan in 1951 and they divorced in 1964. She worked as an actress with only moderate success and Tynan suggested she try show more writing a novel. The end result was The Dud Avocado published in 1958. She wrote two more novels and a couple of plays before focusing on biography in 1980. Her other works include Finch, Bloody Finch; Elvis and Gladys; Ferriday, Louisiana; and Life Itself! She died because of a heart attack on May 1, 2008. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Dud Avocado
- Original title
- The Dud Avocado
- Original publication date
- 1958
- People/Characters
- Sally Jay Gorce; Larry Keevil; Judy Galache; Jim Breit; Teddy Alfredo Ourselli Visconti; the Contessa (show all 7); Sawyer Baxter
- Important places
- Paris, France; Hôtel Ritz, Paris, France; Côte d'Argent, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France
- Epigraph
- "I want you to meet Miss Gorce, she's in the embalming game."
- James Thurber (Men, Women and Dogs) - First words
- It was a hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September.
- Quotations
- And this was odd because two Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over. Especially me. I'd ma... (show all)de a vow when I got over here never to speak to anyone I'd ever known before. Yet here we were, two Americans who hadn't really seen each other for years; here was someone from "home" who knew me when, if you like, and, instead of shambling back into the bushes like a startled rhino, I was absolutely thrilled at the whole idea.
I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground, as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell.
Whereas I was hell-bent for living, she was content, at least for the time being, to leave all that to others. Just as long as she could hear all about it. She really was funny about this. Folded every which way on ... (show all)the floor, looking like Bambi - all eyes and legs and no chin - she would listen for ages and ages with rapt attention to absolutely any drivel that you happened to be talking. It was unbelievable
(People really do say You Americans, by the way.)
There was quite a large group around him that evening; many of the Hard Core and, to get really technical - all the Inner Hard Core.
That was another thing about the Hard Core, though maybe not the nicest. They went all out for satire. They not only suffered fools, they suffered them gladly. And I mean they sought them out; they tracked them down. Only... (show all) they had to be really big ones.
There's plenty to be said for the theory that giving money to a beggar only encourages poverty; certainly without the small donations that I and others felt obliged to contribute from time to time, the epic battle of Blair ve... (show all)rsus No Visible Means of Support would have ended long ago.
I could see that he didn't love any of them, that he didn't even particular like them; he - I don't know what he them'd.
I mean I simply don't know what to do about a Nude Show. I just can't seem to behave naturally in front of them. The thing is, I don't get much of a charge out of them in the first place, so any act I put on is bound to be ... (show all)a phony. But I still haven't discovered what you're supposed to do. I mean if you stare straight ahead with a bright smile pasted on your face you're being a prig, and if you look at it critically and say "They're really not so hot are they?" you're being jealous, and if you fling yourself into it and say "Oh, golly, doesn't she have a lovely body" someone looks at you very peculiarly and says "Hmm. You like her do you? That's very interesting," and if you just relax and look bored, you've committed the greatest crime of all
A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable. (p. 31)
I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. (p. 38-9) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It's zymotic.
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