The Dud Avocado

The Dud Avocado

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3.6 of 5 stars 3.60  ·  rating details  ·  2,345 ratings  ·  501 reviews
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 when it was fi...more
Paperback, 272 pages
Published June 5th 2007 by NYRB Classics (first published 1958)
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Community Reviews

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Jessica
I discovered this reissued novel on a swap rack at a hotel in Mexico City last summer...and I was delighted that I did. I've since passed it on to a friend, Heather, whom I met in Mexico is now on GR. It seems like that kind of book: one you should pass on to a friend or stranger. The first person narrator, a young American on her own in Paris, is beguiling. Her adventures and misadventures with men are charmingly recounted in a delightfully understated way. I think it's easy to forget that some...more
Katie
I was prepared to give this a slightly lower rating (goodreads has got me thinking in stars) until the last forty or so pages, which are fabulous, probably perfect. How often can you say that? There's a description of a martini I had to write down. Well, okay, here it is: "We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air." Maybe I'm an alcoholic, but doesn't that sound great? Plus it's set off in its own paragraph. This story of a fun-loving gal's y...more
Tosh
This is a pretty good novel dealing with a (very) young girl making her mark romantically in Paris during the late 50's. Elaine Dundy's background is quite interesting. She was married to theater critic icon Kenneth Tynan as well as wriing a much admired biography on Elvis and his mother.

I met her briefly during a reading for "The Dud Avocado," and she sort of strikes me a a Louise Brooks type of character. Super book smart, lived a great life, and sexy.
oriana
Oct 07, 2012 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars
Recommended to oriana by: L Magazine
Shelves: read-2012
I bought this on the street for $3. I'm really mystified, though: I was totally sure that I'd read a glowing review of it by Emily Gould some time ago, but the internet is hiding it from me or something. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Was it not Emily but someone else? I mean, someone put it in my head that this was one to grab, I didn't just make it up.

Anyways. Super terrifically swell. It's a story of a twenty-something gal in Paris in the fifties being sexy and young and silly and...more
Maureen
the dud avocado reads like a witty woman's take on the sun also rises, with the pink-haired protagonist sally jay gorce, an often silly struggling ingenue, going to parties, falling in love, and trying to find herself in paris in the fifties. eventually, she goes on a road trip to spain where she ends up as an extra on a bullfighter movie, and partying some more. unfortunately, for me the book began to drag while she was there, and i found the ending was rushed, grafted on, and out of sync with...more
Christy
"The Dud Avocado" chronicles the adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, an American bon vivant living in Paris (pink hair; a married Italian lover; once ran away to become a bull-fighter). A delightful cross between "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "A Moveable Feast". I can't believe this progressive novel was written in the fifties.
David
I picked this one up per Terry Teachout's recommendation - he's the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, and also wrote an excellent biography of H.L. Mencken. This is a favorite of his, and I certainly wasn't disappointed - you'd be hard pressed to find a better light reading experience. It's an innocent abroad story - Sally Jay Gorce travels to Paris, pursues acting, loses her virginity, and does all the funny things you'd expect an inexperience girl to do in a foreign city. It's laugh-ou...more
Kimley
Jan 06, 2009 Kimley rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: ingenues
Elaine Dundy is sort of an American Colette. There's even a bit with a cat.

The precocious young American girl in Paris has certainly been done before but our heroine Sally Jay has a lot more self awareness than the typical innocent abroad and at the same time she still manages to get herself into all kinds of amusingly compromising situations. Dundy can give one or two details about a character which are so spot on that you immediately feel like you've met this person. I certainly recognized man...more
Mark
Another book from the low end of the Keith Law 102 and one that, if I was judging by its cover, I was unlikely to have ever read. Indeed, between the tastefully-posed naked woman on the front and the blurb hearkening to Tropic of Cancer (one of the worst books I've ever read) on the back, had I picked it up I would not have given it a shot. And that would have been my loss, because this is a hilarious story of an American girl's blunders through Paris in the 50s.

It's always a surprise to me when...more
Will
"Hated France when I first got here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first whiff of garlic from my traveling...more
Shana
Once upon a time, I was told that what my writing had was voice, that it came naturally and effortlessly and was distinctly mine. Using this gift of my voice, I was meant to go out in the world and say something. Well, so far, that’s yet to happen, but it came as no surprise while reading the afterward of a novel I’d loved madly to see a quote from Gore Vidal to the writer, “You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go.” The novel was bewitching and loveable and exc...more
Sunday
I hated this book because I don't enjoy bourgeois tourism as an expensive alternative to "coming of age" stories. This is a filthy fiction predecessor to things like "Eat, Pray, Love;" where cultures are charmingly fit into tampon-sized life lessons for the Beautiful Blonde American. It just wasn't very funny or enlightening to the large portion of Us Blondes gaining weight on gas station candy bars and dating guys named Carl. Travel braggery is a dirty no-no for an entire generation of girls, l...more
switterbug (Betsey)
The protagonist of Dud Avocado, Sally Jay Gorce, is the reason that this book is engaging and ultimately readable. In 1955, American in Paris Sally is plucky, wry, sardonic, bohemian, sexually liberated, and spontaneous--like a butterfly out of the chrysalis. This book was written in 1958 but Elaine Dundy's prose and narrative still hold up. This was before feminism! But was it really? There are many instances in literature before the women's lib movement where female characters were assertive a...more
Rick
A first novel originally published in 1958 to great critical and commercial, The Dud Avocado is one of those novels that periodically gets re-discovered, or at least rescued from decades of obscurity. The rescuer this time is New York Review Books and it is a worthy and entertaining rescue. Sally Jay Gorce is a 21-year old college graduate who is in Paris for a two year experience of freedom—eating, drinking, staying out, and meeting whoever she wants, however she wants. Of course, the excursion...more
Kat Hagedorn
http://tinyurl.com/59km6m

As the back cover says, "deceptive." Essentially, a tale of the life and times of a young American girl in Paris in the 50s, there's much more depth to this story than at first blush.

Firstly, the author is a great storyteller, weaving honesty, complicity, faith, and the "joys" of being a woman in a man's world into something cohesive. (The book is somewhat autobiographical, so writing from life...) In particular, I like one descriptive passage on why hosting dinner parti...more
Julia
What's more fun than discovering a book that makes you laugh out loud in the middle of the night, while you're reading it by the light of your mobile phone so you can get just one more page in? How about a book that makes you laugh, set in Paris in the 50s, about a totally outrageous girl who would have shaken Holden Caulfield by the shoulders or swung him out on the dance floor to dance some of his jitters away.

Sally Jay has a streak of Holden about her though too - this is a coming of age nove...more
Stephen
If navel-gazing were a sport, Elaine Dundy would win olympic gold. In this pointless pseudo-novel (actually a memoir), which reads like A Moveable Feast crossed with Sex and the City (yet somehow managing to surpass both in banality and narcissism), a young American expatriate in Paris deals with such vital problems as "if I could only figure out if it was Larry I was in love with, or just love" and the worry that she's too much of a stereotypical tourist (and then wondering if her worrying is i...more
Teri
Feb 23, 2008 Teri rated it 3 of 5 stars
Recommended to Teri by: bas bleu
Shelves: fiction, 2008
I think Elaine Dundy is a brilliant writer. That being said, I don't know if I can recommend this book to anyone. It took me about 50 pages to decide I did indeed like it, even with the great writing. The story is strange to me at times. I liked it more as I continued on. Still I don't know if it will appeal to any of my friends. It was written in 1958 and I am sure a very wild book for the time. Groucho Marx and Laurence Olivier were fans of this book. If that says anything.
Melee
Well! I was pleasantly surprised by this book! Or the ending, at least; I really did not see the last 50 pages coming. Perhaps they didn't perfectly align with the rest of the book, but I didn't (and don't) really care. The heroine (Sally Jay) impressed me too! She was not nearly as glibly amoral as I thought she would be. She was charming, amusing, and (at times) relatable.
There were a few boggy scenes to be waded through, but there was always something amusing or interesting waiting on the oth...more
Alyx
I read this one because it was on This Recording's list of the 100 best novels. Since This Recording contributors seem like liberal arts degree holders who fetishize their free time (i.e., like many of my friends), I know they've read more literature than I have and took to their recommendation. Until the last section, this book is mostly champagne bubbles and caviar misadventures as not-too-struggling actress Sally Jay Gorce leads a life of no real consequence filled with boys in Paris that's f...more
Therese
(3.5 stars, really, because it meandered a bit much in part II.) This book was a hoot. Published in 1958 or so, it's full of funny American 50s slang, and in the few days it's taken me to read it, I've started going around calling people buster and saying things are a hoot and you've got my number all right. Anyway, it's an innocents abroad tale about an American girl who gets funded by her rich uncle to spend 2 years traveling wherever she likes. She heads straight to Paris and then gets stuck...more
Stephanie
I admit, I almost gave up on this one. I had high expectations and at first I could not get into it, probably because I was too into my own (mis)adventures to care. I lugged it around on various international flights, train rides and beach outings...bookmark stuck on page eighty-something. I would stuff it deep in my carry-on and cover it up with international fashion magazines as I couldn't bear to admit I might never finish it; Embarrassed that I could not leisurely enjoy this small, iconic b...more
Ben
This is a white-hot fury of a book. Hilarious and infuriating at the same time, how do you not fall in love with Sally Jay Gorce? It's impossible to overstate how fresh and original this story reads, and I found myself laughing at one line after another. It's like discovering that your favorite comic actually lived fifty years ago, and decimated more sacred cows than you'd ever known existed. Why do I always think the 50s were more tame than they actually were?
Joanne
Oh, to be 20-something again! There's something about one's early 20s that really can't be replicated, especially if it involves traveling abroad. This is an age when you're old enough to enjoy the experience but still stupid enough to live with a certain amount of abandon. Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel The Dud Avocado is narrated by a young American, Sally Jay Gorce, who travels abroad searching for an adventure. Set in Paris circa 1950's, Sally wants to experience life, and relishes it to its full...more
Julie Barrett
A while ago I read an article in a magazine in which the author wrote about befriending Dundy at AA meetings in LA and not realizing for the longest time that the sweet little old lady at the meetings was actually an author and the ex-wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan. Dang, I wish I recalled what magazine that was! Anyway, I wrote down the name of Dundy's debut novel The Dud Avacado in my to-read notebook & just the other week decided now was the time to read it.

It's a short book & a qu...more
Very
Elaine Dundy knows how to capture a scene. The parts of the book where something is actually happening work like gangbusters. The dialogue is clever but realistic. The details are pertinent but also hilarious. Most of the first chapter is a really long scene between the narrator and her new crush as they chat at a Paris café. If you are anything like me, this scene will pull you in. And you’ll assume that the rest of the book will continue in this fashion. But the book has other plans.

Every so...more
kasia
I stumbled across this one somewhat randomly, and I was instantly hooked. It is infectiously delightful, riotously funny, and just overall great. Salinger meets Breakfast at Tiffany's. The madcap adventures of a self-absorbed and slightly ridiculous but strangely lovable young woman in Paris who is living life to the max. Hilarious hijinx galore. Though Sally Jay Gorce makes some terrible decisions, sometimes out of naivete, sometimes out of sheer idiocy, she also has a certain steely intelligen...more
Jon
Fab novel from 1958 about an American girl in Paris and her relationship with another American, the mercurial, mysterious Larry, who's her apparent savior or a satanic bastard, depending on which chapter of the book one is reading. Somewhat like THE BELL-JAR, if Plath had had a sense of humor and been less self-absorbed. (Interestingly, Plath and Dundy both had disastrous marriages to English writers, though Dundy, made of sterner stuff, survived her marriage to Kenneth Tynan.) More than mere fr...more
Tamara
Much smarter than the rather chick lit-ish cover suggests, especially given that it was written in 1958. The narrator is hilarious in her stream of consciousness and shameless self-absorption. One of the best lines: "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." A great light read... pick it up in the airport bookstore on...more
Heather
Although it takes place long before my "time," it brought back many memories of my own experience living abroad in Spain, as well as in Mexico. It captures the spirit of a young woman, testing and re-defining her personal limits, values and aspirations, living it up along the way. It particular hit me, as it was passed on to me by a new acquaintance who somehow sensed the appropriateness!
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Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) grew up in New York City and Long Island. After graduating from Sweet Briar College in 1943 she worked as an actress in Paris and, later, London, where she met her future husband, the theater critic Kenneth Tynan. Dundy wrote three novels, The Dud Avocado (1958), The Old Man and Me (1964), and The Injured Party (1974); a play, My Place (produced in 1962); biographies of El...more
More about Elaine Dundy...
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