The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

Typical of Bainsbridge she leaves out much of the background detail in her novels, but the beauty of her writing is that she brings it out as the story progresses as if the reader is living it as they read. Her oblique but spare style and dark humour is memorable. Set in 1968, this is about Rose, a teenager searching for Dr Wheeler, a man who helped her in a troubled time and who is part of Robert Kennedy's entourage. She is aided by Washington Harold, also seeking Wheeler but for a very different reason. He has offered to transport her across America in his camper. Their link is unlikely as they have little in common apart from a common goal. The book ends almost abruptly when they reach Los Angeles during a tragic moment in American show more history. Bainsbridge, who died in 2010, wrote the final pages of the almost-finished book during her last days in hospital. Her editor chose to publish it much as Bainsbridge left it. show less

Wow, the first Europa I didn't like. I just couldn't connect with this story about two people on a road trip to California to find the mysterious Mr. Wheeler. Who are these people? Why are they making the trip? Bainbridge tells the story with less than the minimum exposition; you have to feel your way through. Their motivations and personalities are revealed slowly and somehow it all connects up with the RFK assassination, too. Weird.

This short, puzzling novel follows Rose, an enigmatic young English woman, and Harold, a slightly less enigmatic middle-aged American man, as they take a road trip across the United States in the fraught months in 1968 between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in search of the mysterious Mr. Wheeler. Rose, who seems damaged in some way but is occasionally surprisingly perceptive, is looking for Mr. Wheeler because he was kind and helpful to her in her troubled teenage years; Harold for reasons of his own. As they travel, they encounter a variety of people and are involved in a variety of incidents; some seem shocking to the reader, but almost bounce off Rose, who lives more in the past than in the present. show more Although the novel reveals how much our pasts affect our present, the lasting impacts of neglect if not abuse, and how difficult it can be for people to understand and communicate with each other, it is as much about the US, and the craziness of 1968, as it is about the main characters.

The striking part of this novel for me was how Bainbridge writes. Characters act and speak as they would in real life, without any explanations to the reader, who is mystified for much of the novel as to what happened in the past and why the characters behave as they do. Even at the end, as the reader realizes we are heading straight to the Kennedy assassination (the novel stops just before it), much is still unclear.

This novel was almost but not completely finished when Bainbridge died and has been published posthumously as she left it. Although I haven't read anything else by Bainbridge, I've read a little bit about her and understand that this spare style and the lack of explanation are typical of her writing, and not an artifact of the novel being unfinished. I also read the Paris Review interview with her that is accessible from her LT author page and discovered that some of Rose's experiences come from Bainbridge's own life. show less

Beryl Bainbridge was famous for writing fiction strewn with mordant humor and this, her last (and unfinished) novel is no exception. The author was in the process of writing this book when she died of cancer in 2010 and the final book was brought to publication by her editor. This probably accounts for the somewhat abrupt end.

The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress follows one of the oldest storytelling forms - the quest. Rose is a 20-something young woman who has arrived from England in search of the mysterious Dr. Wheeler, who she regards as the saviour who helped her survive her miserable childhood. She is met at the airport by Harold Grasse, who she calls Washington Harold, who is also in search of Wheeler for very different show more reasons.

Incompatible almost from the start, the two drive from Washington to Los Angeles in Harold's new used camper van encountering a cast of characters along the way including a racist preacher, a theosophist, a back to the earth mother and, apparently Sirhan Sirhan.

Bainbridge"s mordant humor gives the reader lots of laugh out loud moments but also covers more serious topics of love and death and abandonment> This is not an easy novel to read, but if the reader perseveres he or she will be greatly rewarded. show less

Like many other authors, Beryl Bainbridge drew on the experiences of her own life for the events, themes and settings of her novels. She once claimed she had never really written fiction because all her books were depictions of events that she herself had witnessed or experienced. For her, real life was more peculiar and riveting than anything she could have imagined or created. Though many of her later novels were in the historical fiction genre, she never completely abandoned the re-working of some incident from her past.

In Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, her eighteenth and final novel, she recreates a journey across America that she made in 1968. It was a turbulent period in American history: the country was at war with Vietnam, J F show more Kennedy had been assassinated and Martin Luther King murdered. Racial tension manifested itself in riots in many parts of the country.

It’s against this background that Bainbridge sends her two central characters on a quest across the country. Rose, a 30-year-old girl with an unhappy childhood, arrives in America in search of a man who befriended her many years ago but has since disappeared. Her host is Washington Harold, a bearded pedantic man in his fifties whom she barely knows. Harold also wants to find Wheeler. The two join forces to travel from Washington to Los Angeles, from Maryland to California, sleeping in a battered camper van or in the spare rooms of Harold’s odd assortment of acquaintances. But whenever they arrive, it’s to find that Wheeler has just left.

Quite who Wheeler is, remains unclear throughout the book though we get hints that he might be something in the secret service and is involved in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Equally elliptical are the reasons why the two unlikely travelling companions seem so intent on tracking him down. The answers and the backgrounds of these individuals are disclosed in fragmentary fashion, almost as if they are dropped accidentally into the narrative. So subtle is this technique, that often the significance of what I’d just read only became apparent a few pages later. It’s an approach that is characteristic of Bainbridge’s style it seems. In an obituary written by Janet Watts at The Guardian, she comments that:

Beryl’s literary fiction can have a quality of a detective story: only when we reach a novel’s final denouement do we see that we were given the key to its coded mystery at the start.

Unfortunately the resolution never materialises in this novel because Bainbridge died before it was completed. She left detailed instructions for her friend and editor, Brendan King, on how to prepare the text for publication from her working manuscript, the concluding chapters were not fleshed out sufficiently for him to do more than give a summary type of ending. Which for me was such a let down because Bainbridge had created in Rose, one of those characters who stay in the memory and I wanted to follow her story through to more of an ending.

Rose is rather childlike; more interested in chewing her fingernails and smoking than the sights of America that flash by the windows of the camper van. When Harold repeatedly fails in his attempts to engage her interest, he concludes that she is ‘a retard’. For Rose, the country is simply ”a confusion of flyovers, underpasses, intersections, junctions, toll gates….. Sometimes there were fields full of cows, once a river, brown and swollen, once a town with a railway track running down the middle of its street.” Though the scenery is dull and she doesn’t comprehend most of what she hears, she feels at home amongst Harold’s group of beatnik, depressive friends. The novel’s final sentence is fittingly engimatic for this mercurial character : “A star of blood, delicate as a snowflake, melted upon her upper lip.” show less

This was a nice reading. I loved Bainbridge's spelling style. Within the story I liked the journey through the USA from the view of two completely different persons who were looking both to find a Mr. Wheeler. Whereas Harold was looking to the task ahead, Rose was living in the past and her memories of Mr. Wheeler were more important than what she would intend to to do once they would find him. During there trip they met a lot of different people which were mostly connected to Harold and his past but also some completely strangers whereat Rose found a better way to communicate with them.

I did not realize until the end that The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress was an unfinished work. But the story itself was so jerky, that the ending didn't seem to matter. Two odd ducks - an awkward English girl and a secretive American guy, a camper road-trip from Baltimore to California to find the missing Mr. Wheeler, strange characters met along the way, political discussions with said strange characters. This odd assemblage of people, conversation and non-events seem to rumble toward Robert Kennedy's assassination, without quite getting there.

An odd story, thankfully short.