siria 's review for:

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

3.0

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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 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.