New York Review Books Classics
2 total works
THE DUD AVOCADO gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. It is, as the GUARDIAN observes, 'one of the best novels about growing up fast'.
Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It's the 1950s, she's young, and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he's single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted "citizens of the world"; an entanglement with a charming psychopath; and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador. But an education like this doesn't come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?
There's love, and there's revenge. Betsy Lou Saegessor is bent on revenge. Her father is dead, and to top it off, the vast fortune that should have been hers has ended up, through the second marriage of her now deceased stepmother, in the bank account of the legendary and elusive Englishman, C.D. McKee.
So Betsy sets out from New York to seduce and betray him. C.D. is fat and ugly - but boy is he sexy. Betsy follows him through the night clubs of London, grooving to jazz, smoking hash - and plotting murder.
A wickedly funny novel about falling in love -- with an Old Man and the Old World -- despite the best intentions.