Yeah, there’s some culture around here. A bit.
First, any of you who were scandalized by the cover of Eleanor Dundy’s book on my sidebar can rest easy – it’s read and I’m about to review it: The Dud Avocado.
I was tuned into this book by Terry Teachout, arts critic, biographer and blogger extraordinaire. He penned an introduction to the new NYRB edition, which was just published this year. Here’s the full text of the intro.
It’s a really delightful book, but not quite as madcap as I expected – I mean, it is certainly madcap, but it packs a subtle moral punch as well. The protagonist is a young American woman living in Paris in the 50’s. She’s there..why? Simply because when, as a teen, she attempted to run away, a relative promised that if she would just stay put and finish college, she would have, at the end of it, two years’ worth of money with which she could do what she liked.
So she goes to Paris.
Once there, she gets involved with a married diplomat, who already has not only a wife, but also a mistress. She hangs out with various artists and poseurs, finds some acting work, loses her passport, heads to the south of France with some others, becomes part of a movie about a bullfighter, finds out some very unpleasant truths, witnesses some tragedy, and heads back to the States.
As Terry writes:

Now The Dud Avocado is out again in the United States, and I’ll bet money that some dewy-eyed young critic is going to read it for the first time and write an essay about how Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy’s adorably scatty heroine, was the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones. To which I say… nothing. I actually kind of like poor old Bridget, but if you want to properly place The Dud Avocado in the grand scheme of things, you should look not forward to Chick Lit but backward to Daisy Miller. Sally is Daisy debauched, an innocent ambassador from the new world who crosses the Atlantic, loses her virginity, and learns in the fullness of time that experience, while not all it’s cracked up to be, is nothing if not inevitable — and that Europe, for all its sophisticated ways, is no longer the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. Paris may be “the rich man’s plaything, the craftsman’s tool, the artist’s anguish, and the world’s largest champagne factory,” but you don’t have to live there to live, and once Sally gets to know some of its not-so-nice residents, she has a flash of full-fledged epiphany that is no less believable for having popped up in the middle of a comic novel:

“They are corrupt — corrupt,” I kept saying to myself, over and over again, as I paced around the room. It was the first time I’d ever used that word about people I actually knew, and again the idea that I could take a moral stand — or rather, that I couldn’t avoid taking one — filled me with the same confusion it had that morning.

Observant to a fault, with the kind of writing that paints concise pictures of the exterior world while at the same time letting you know exactly what is going on inside, funny and painful. The ending struck me as a bit odd, but after reading about her life, I wondered if it essentially reflected her sense of the beginnings of her relationship with husband Kenneth Tynan. I don’t know. But nonetheless, you can’t help but love a book filled with sentences like this:

“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

2. Michael and I went to see No Country for Old Men the other night. I’ve not read the book, so I went into it cold, just expecting what one would expect out of a Coen brothers/Cormac McCarthy product – artful violence, terse, edgy maybe even poetic dialogue, good acting and great faces.

Yup.

It was okay. I need to ponder it a bit more, but I did feel the old Coen emptiness at the heart of it, fighting the Tommy Lee Jones character’s moral sensibility for center stage. I am not sure who won.