Books like The Dud Avocado
Sally Jay Gorce’s genius is that she treats a blue evening dress at breakfast as both a declaration of independence and evidence against herself. These novels share her exhilarating mixture of bravado, comic intelligence, and vulnerability.
If you liked The Dud Avocado, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Dud Avocado, and we tell you exactly what.
Dundy’s other great comic novel is sharper, more scheming, and more dangerous. Its American heroine arrives in 1960s London determined to charm an older man for reasons that are anything but romantic, narrating her campaign with the same headlong confidence and immaculate timing that make Sally Jay irresistible.
But this is no repetition of The Dud Avocado. Dundy turns flirtation into strategy and social comedy into a duel, exposing the calculations beneath apparently carefree femininity. Long underappreciated and now restored to print, it confirms that Sally Jay’s voice was not a lucky accident: Dundy was one of the era’s most exact and acid comic novelists.
Cassandra Edwards is as dazzlingly articulate as Sally Jay, but her wit is a weapon pointed in every direction, especially inward. She returns to her family home because her identical twin is getting married—an intolerable disruption to the private world the sisters have shared—and proceeds with virtuoso flair to resist the future.
Baker gives Cassandra the glamour of intelligence without pretending intelligence can save her from jealousy, loneliness, or self-sabotage. The result is funny, feverish, and unexpectedly piercing. Admired by writers including Carson McCullers and later revived as a neglected classic, it inspires the kind of fierce readerly devotion reserved for heroines who are impossible, wounded, and alive on every page.
Lorelei Lee is one of the great comic narrators: serenely practical, triumphantly acquisitive, and never once troubled by the gap between what she says and what the reader understands. Like Sally Jay, she moves through glamorous rooms by improvising a self—and makes female appetite feel not shameful but anarchically funny.
Published in 1925, Loos’s novel became a sensation and helped establish a whole tradition of deceptively light, female-voiced comedy. Its deliberately wayward prose is packed with jokes that arrive almost invisibly, while Lorelei’s supposed naïveté repeatedly proves more effective than male sophistication. Anyone who loves Dundy’s ability to hide ruthless perception inside fizz should read the book that made that trick immortal.