TT: Elaine Dundy, R.I.P. |
| Published: May 5, 2008, 11:57 am |
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Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, died four days ago. No obituaries as of this hour, but the news is up on her Web site. It was my privilege to be asked to write an introduction to last year's new edition of The Dud Avocado, published by New York Review Books, and Dundy made it known to me in due course that she liked what I wrote, a fact of which I am very proud. Here's how it starts: 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 [ Full article ] |
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