Elaine Dundy's first novel was published in the year I was born (1958). The NYRB Classics reissue features a rather risqué cover (by their standards) that might have caught your eye in your favorite bookstore. It is a very good book, a coming-of-age dramedy narrated in the first person by our hero, Sally Jay Gorce, who tells of her misadventures as a curious young American woman in Paris in the 1950s. To describe it as "proto-feminist" would be too strong, but the book is matter-of-fact and sympathetic about the inequities, double standards, and serious hazards a sexually active and free-willed young woman might face in Paris at that time, or in any city at any time. The plot is great, Sally Jay is great, and the prose has a way with vernacular that will sometimes whack you upside the head... the sure sign of a great writer:
... some pretty fancy women came by, and yet I couldn't figure out what he specifically liked about them. Variety seemed to be the only rule. There was something impersonal in the way he treated them. I could see he didn't love any of them, that he didn't even particularly like them; he—I don't know what he them'd.
"I don't know what he them'd." Whack!
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