Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado and other works, has died at the age of 86.

The critic Terry Teachout writes: It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon … but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.

Here is Elaine Dundy:

Some days afterward — or maybe it was only two or three — I can’t remember exactly any more — I got out of bed one morning and found myself all alone in the empty house. I put on my bathing suit and went down to the untidy kitchen and made myself some coffee. Then I went out on the terrace and looked at the night sky. It was a morning full of clouds; the sun shining brightly one moment and hiding under pearly grayness the next. It felt doom-ridden from the very beginning, out there among the ruins — very fin de siecle, fin du monde, fin de line. Bugs were climbing all over the roses, the chaotic breezes seemed wild and unfriendly, and the grass had burned brown. It was hard to believe that it was the beginning of July, not the end of summer. I thought: is summer only a state of mind? Is it always only two months long from whenever you start it? My arms would get no browner; my skin had reached saturation point, and the sun only succeeded now in bleaching them lighter — grayer. I shivered. I might have been something washed up against the River Styx. Or maybe I was waiting to be ferried across. I put on a sweater and went down to the sea.

– The Dud Avocado