Beyond the Bubble
Freeze Bookshelf: The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
Reviewed by Kelly Faircloth
April 6, 2008
The unique problem and privilege of the Harvard woman is the nagging question, “What am I going to do with my life?” It’s a privilege, since our problem stems from too many, rather than too few options. Even the worst resume, so long as it contains the words “Harvard (or Yale/ Berkley/ Northwestern) University,” opens a host of doors, forcing us to evaluate an endless array of paths: medicine, law, activism, public service, the creative arts, or some combination of the above. Everyone you know and love has an opinion; people you’ve just met feel free to weigh in. The cumulative effect is rather like the old frog slowly boiled alive—only with stress, not water.
While this situation is very much a product of our historical moment, the truth is, young women have always had to make a series of crucial decisions about their lives’ future course. Hence Pride and Prejudice and, 140 years later, Elaine Dundy’s 1958 novel The Dud Avocado. Dundy’s novel lands square in a long tradition of women’s novels, and if you don’t see in Avocado a forerunner of chick lit, well, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s not to say that it follows the conventions of the genre which, after all, didn’t exist yet. But, if you have read a good deal of chick lit, part of the pleasure of this particular read is how it almost, but doesn’t quite fit the mold. If you like Jennifer Weiner and Helen Feilding, but you’re ready to pick up something a tad different, this might be just what you’re seeking.
The downside to Dud Avocado? For days after you finish, you’ll walk around attempting to drop Sally Jay’s bon mots in conversation, and no one will have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. The novel has been in and out and in and out of print since original publication, its latest appearance a snazzy—but not particularly coded-for-chick-lit—avocado-green edition from New York Review Books. Maybe this go-round, The Dud Avocado will get the acclaim it deserves.
As per a childhood pact with her wealthy Uncle Roger, recent college grad and American naïf Sally Jay Gorce moves to Paris. She has kept her promise not to run away from home until granted a degree, and so Uncle Roger will fund her adventures for two years, during which time he doesn’t want to hear a word from her. When the two years are up, she has to come home and tell him what it was like. I therefore like to think of Sally Jay’s first-person narrative as an unorthodox grant report.
What’s wonderful about The Dud Avocado is how it reminds you that, while the transition to fully realized adult is serious business, it needn’t be all angst and anguish and anxiety. This is the beauty of the novel: it’s outrageously funny. Sally Jay is a testament to the power of the humorous outlook on life: she’ll short-circuit your vicious cycle of stress through sheer, electric hilarity. With gems like, “I flashed a look of amusement at Larry which, to my astonishment, never landed,” Gorce has as much fun picking her words as she is determined to have traipsing about Paris.
Perhaps this irreverent tone is why Sally Jay seems so modern and relevant. She lives in the fifties, but far from the decade as popularly imagined: repressive, bland, and prepackaged—the world as microwave dinner. Take, for example, the novel’s frank treatment of sex. Within the first chapter, we find that Sally Jay, for all her fresh-faced American-ness, is no virgin. But she isn’t immediately characterized as a suffering, soon-to-be-repentant sinner, either. Without becoming hysterical or judgmental, and without ultimately concluding that you’d better off just giving up on the whole business, Dundy manages to illuminate the pitfalls that sex can put into a girl’s path. As Sally Jay says: “What a world. Nothing but sex as far as the eye can see.”
Sally Jay’s life is real and messy, her personality occasionally tending to whiny and annoying, and her judgment sometimes misfires. In other words, she’s not a perfect, glossy facsimile, but an actual person, one with a compelling voice and a depth of amused self-awareness. Her willingness to savor both language and experience, pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off attitude, and generally delighted approach to the world inspire a giddy appreciation of the world’s being wide open. Just the antidote to the Harvard grind.
