Book Review Roundup

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady
by Anita Loos
A master class in the use of the naive--and utterly hilarious--unreliable narrator, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an underrated American classic.

The Pink Hotel
by Patrick Dennis and Dorothy Erskine
So what's a young author to do, immediately after he's become the first author ever to have three comic novels simultaneously on the best-seller list? Apparently Patrick Dennis chose to switch it up a bit and collaborate with a near-unknown on a Deep, Important Novel about Important Issues in which everyone Lives And Dies Alone And Unloved.

Yeah, it's a bit of a train-wreck.


The Pink Hotel has a cast of hundreds of characters, most of whom make a single appearance and then never peek out of their rooms ever again. Among the grotesques are a sordid pair of alcoholics who alternately soliloquize about how much they love each other, drink whiskey, and blacken each other's eyes; a newlywed couple who have no idea what fits where; a suicide in room 1313 (subtle, right?); an elevator operator with a sexual fetish for collecting snippets of women's hair; a movie star; some mob types; and so many other grotesques that it's difficult to keep track of them all.

What's unfortunate is that none of the stories actually go anywhere. There's a cook who is a knowing typhoid carrier, but nothing ever comes of it. There's a vague attempt at a kidnapping somewhere in between the suicides, strokes, and sordid assignations, but it's forgotten within moments. Dennis attempts to wrap up a few loose ends by having his assortment of characters meet at a cocktail party in the novel's later chapters, but there are simply too many to handle gracefully.

And yes, it's entirely possible to make a fairly plausible argument for which of the two collaborators developed and wrote which chapters and characters—the difference in tone between the two voices can be jarring. Dennis' menagerie contains types we've seen in his works before—pretentious snobs, not-so-genteel Southern gentility, scrappy working-class heroes, vicious nelly queens. When he's parodying two sisters who vie in baby-talk and succulent treats for the affection of a surly cat, he's actually quite amusing. He's also responsible for the book's only sympathetic story line: a romance between the hotel's hardboiled detective/assistant manager and its owner's bafflingly stupid secretary.

Dorothy Erskine, on the other hand, seems responsible for the book's worst-written passages and most sordid characters—the typhoid carrier, for example, and the abortionist who buries a fetus on the beach, the suicide, the drunk and abusive couple. Her one longer-term plot involves a married man and the hotel's cashier, a woman whose life is at an end—at an end, I tell you!—because she is unwed and thirty-one.

If only my heaviest problems were so featherweight.


The Pink Hotel is a curiosity, certainly—a literary advent calendar of sorts with something nasty behind every little door one opens. It's also nigh on unreadable, and an anomaly within the works of Patrick Dennis. As scathing as his books could be, particularly later in his career, they were never unwholesome—and that's the currency in which The Pink Hotel heavily trades.




How Firm A Foundation
by Patrick Dennis
There's a portrait of a butler in Patrick Dennis' 1968 novel, How Firm a Foundation, that sheds a fascinating light into the author's life. Despite a checkered and shady past, the butler, Travis, has managed to insinuate himself into the household of the Fennesseys, a family of self-made billionaires, using forged credentials and by painting his background in purely fictional terms. He's jaded, and cynical, and even contemptuous of his employers, but he does a masterful job of keeping it under wraps.

The little literary portrait is fascinating because within five years, Patrick Dennis decided that his brand of comic fiction was out-of-date and unpopular, and as he was in need of a salary, he decided to retire from writing and become a butler—and he did so by using forged credentials and never letting on to his employers that he had a checkered life as a best-selling author. One of his employers was Ray Kroc, the self-made billionaire. Throughout his mystifying career change, Edwards the Butler never let slip that behind his cool and impassive exterior lay all manner of cynical impertinence.

It's really a shame that Eric Myers, in his biography of Dennis, dismisses How Firm a Foundation as second-rate work. It's not. The author's satire is as sharp as ever, his immense cast of characters is deftly chosen and shaded, and his incredulity of what people would do to to make—or save—a buck creates and abundance of laugh-out-loud funny situations.

True, the book does have a couple of weak points. Its premise of collecting a large cast of zanies and having the U.S. government force them into making an art film seems recycled from Genius. And Dennis seems a little confused about how a non-profit foundation actually works, at some points (taxpayers don't pay for the foundation’s electricity bills, certainly). Minor detractions aside, if one likes the sort of thing Dennis writes, this is the sort of Dennis book that one will like.

And watch out for that butler. They're a tricky breed, as Dennis would himself prove.




Love and Mrs. Sargent
by Virginia Rowans, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis
I wasn't surprised to discover, when I checked Eric Myers' biography of Patrick Dennis, Uncle Mame, that the story of Love and Mrs. Sargent had originally intended for the stage. The book reads very much like a novelization of a stage play, with—unusual for Dennis—an extremely limited cast, distinct acts, and dialogue that reads like a script.


Love and Mrs. Sargent, the last of the four books Dennis wrote under his female pseudonym of Virginia Rowans, works best if it's imagined in the context of the film director Douglas Sirk. The novel has all the elements of a Sirk midcentury melodrama; I suspect it's no coincidence that it was imagined and written a year after the release of Imitation of Life. Like that film, it features a mother who gives her all in order to provide the best for her children, only to have them turn against her. As in All that Heaven Allows, it features a torrid and maybe even inappropriate romance between a socialite and a much younger man. Despite its comic secondary characters—Mrs. Flood manages to be both batty and touching at the same time—it's definitely a melodrama, with the glummest ending ever featured in a Patrick Dennis novel.

And perhaps the melodrama that drives the novel would have worked better on the stage, or in a filmed version; the last half of the novel, in which Mrs. Sargent's faults are laid bare, reads less like a Patrick Dennis novel and more like rant against Mom and apple pie. It's a screed in which everything Mrs. Sargent has done is shown to be hypocritical and blindly self-serving. If it weren't so readable, I'd swear the author was working out some of his own mommy issues.

But the book is compulsively readable, even more so than some of his more widely-known and easily-available works. It's fun to see some of the touches here that appear in later Dennis books. The terrible novels that Mrs. Sargent's son, Dicky, writes here—one novel that hints at the character's latent homosexuality, and another set in France with funny bidet stories—are both explicitly mocked in Dennis' much superior Tony, several years on. Dennis' real-life chum Christine Jorgenson, the first widely-known recipient of gender-reassignment surgery, makes a cameo appearance—and perhaps even exists as a sly commentary on the author's moonlighting with a female pseudonym as he continued to write books under his more masculine pseudonym of Patrick Dennis.


Love and Mrs. Sargent would prove to be the last of Dennis' four Virginia Rowans novels; it proved to be an acerbic amuse-bouche for a decade of acid satire that was to come.




The Sugarman Bootlegs
by Robert Rodi
I'd originally wanted to start my review of The Sugarman Bootlegs pointing out the thinness of probabilities in its conceit—that a grainy Betamax video of an unknown lounge singer could go viral on YouTube and propel an elderly woman into the entertainment limelight. But then I thought about the rest of Robert Rodi's oeuvre (maniac fag hags, vengeful comic book fans, body-swap comedies, twin-brotherly switcharoos) and decided that they weren't exactly Chekovian slices of gritty realism, either.
There is one element of Rodi's latest novel that was so jarringly unbelievable, however, that I feel it has to be noted. In one of the early chapters of The Sugarman Bootlegs two male characters make out in the kitchen of a Fire Island cottage. The author intends it as shocking; I merely said, "Wait, what?", because apparently I was supposed to have picked up that one of the characters was straight. I had not. He seemed pretty darned gay to me.

What makes me divided about The Sugarman Bootlegs that it's an unwieldy grafting of two different styles of novels, a Frankenstein's monster in which the novel's first half is a swiftly-moving farce in which two naïfs hatch a scam that quickly and comically gets out of control—the literary equivalent of the Mel Brooks classic The Producers. I really enjoyed this half of the novel, and thought it a return to form after Rodi's dreadful When You Were Me. The book abruptly shifts tone, and point of view, however and becomes a B-movie horror plot—the sort of thing for which a late-career Bette Davis might have picked up her trowel and plastered on her worst eye makeup, for audiences who found Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte too subtle and under-acted.

It's not very good, sadly, and I'm sorry to say that the one-star Grand Guignol theatrics betray the four-star comic potential of the book's first half. If Rodi wanted to make points about how the quest for celebrity brings out the worst in people, he's chosen the most heavy-handed—and ironic—way to do so.

Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain's First Railway Murder
by Kate Colquhoun
The murder of Mr. Thomas Briggs in a locked first-class railway carriage might have been the London trial everyone talked about in 1864, but Kate Coquhoun's account is not as sensational as the title implies. It's a sturdy and dutiful piece of research, to be sure, with an abundance of hats in evidence. Missing hats. Bloodied hats. Crushed hats. Hats with new lining. Hats that had been sewn and not glued. It's a Victorian shell game, with a murderer hidden beneath Colquhoun's avalanche of hats.

Sadly, there's really just not much of substance here in the end, however. The author hints strongly that man convicted and hung for the crime might have been blameless—but introduces no contemporary evidence to support the suggestion, and provides no alternative interpretation of what the police detectives at the time concluded. There's not even much in the way of examining the aftermath of a case that Colquhoun tries repeatedly to claim was game-changing; once the accused meets the hangman, the book's pretty much over.

As a glimpse into detective procedural of the time, Mr Briggs' Hat offers plenty of material. As supposed sensation, though, it's easy to say that the book runs off the tracks.

3D
by Patrick Dennis
Over the course of twenty years, Edward Everett Tanner III (under that more commonly-known pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, and under his other alter ego of Virginia Rowans) produced sixteen sharp and satiric novels. 3D would be his last; disheartened by feeling out-of-step with the publishing industry and the post free-love era of the early nineteen-seventies, 3D had scarcely hit the shelves than its author had withdrawn from friends and family, changed his identity yet again, and spent the rest of his days as a butler to the extremely wealthy.

It's a shame that 3D was the last Patrick Dennis book—it's a fun novel. It's only old-fashioned in a very classic sense; it bases its story of a happily-wed couple both falling blindly in love with a beautiful (but deeply stupid) young man on the same trope as A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a lord of mischief (here, the couple's unambiguously sexual uncle stands in for Puck) temporarily blinds its lovers with temptation and folly, which after a time of topsy-turvy vanishes and is forgotten like a confusing and bad dream. The theme's updated in the context of the swinging seventies, and although the novel is a little less frenetic than many of other Dennis works, it's surprisingly insightful. Like Paradise before it, with its uncanny foresight into the future of American television, 3D anticipates more vividly a vision of human sexuality that's more amorphous and free-flowing than most accepted at the time, but which seems positively at home in today's society.

Dennis was a gay man who married traditionally and fought the demons of his own sexuality and of subsequent through traditional psychiatry. Buried within 3D's many sharp comic portraits is one of a Hungarian psychologist, a vile and craven charlatan who studied with (and was hated by) both Freud and Jung, whose attempts to cure a confused husband of his feelings for another man are ludicrously unhelpful. It's comforting to think that the late-in-life Dennis used his satiric skills to get a little back at a profession that not only had institutionalized him but had forced him into shock treatment therapy for depression related to his sexuality. Certainly the novel sports most of its teeth there.

But the book is sweetly funny from beginning to end, and Dennis is obviously having fun. The pretty, dumb, unreflective character of Davey is particularly well-done, and once again Dennis employs the streets and sounds of his beloved Mexico to enliven the book's proceedings. It's probably the subtlest of all his offerings, and for that reason alone shouldn't be skipped.




The Joyous Season
by Patrick Dennis
The divorce of popular author Pat Tanner and his wife Louise in the early nineteen-sixties was something of a surprise to their friends; though it was no secret (least of all to Louise) that he was gay and had been in extensive psychiatric care because of the stress of it, the pair were amicable and naturally suited to each other's idiosyncrasies.

It was very much a disappointment to the pair's young son and daughter, however. It was for them that Tanner, under his pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, dedicated and wrote The Joyous Season. A hilarious, sharp, and beautiful jewelry-box of a novel, it addresses the follies of adulthood and divorced from a child's point of view.

Structurally, The Joyous Season shares much in common with Tanner's The Loving Couple, one of his Virginia Rowans novels—a husband and wife quarrel over trivial matters, find themselves railroaded by close-minded in-laws into divorce, take up with social climbers, and (barely) escape with their sanities intact. Along the way, in a fireworks scene in a summer home, there are echoes the climax of another Rowans novel, House Party. And as in Little Me, The Joyous Season features a naive and somewhat unreliable narrator.

But by telling the tale with the voice of ten-year-old Kerrington, whose understanding of the adult world is both untested while often startlingly on point, the book achieves a true sweetness unparalleled by any other Patrick Dennis novel, while still remaining sharp, incisive, and devastatingly critical of adult absurdity—including the author's own.


The Joyous Season is definitely among the very best of the Patrick Dennis canon.




The Plague and I
by Betty MacDonald
Let's be honest: Betty MacDonald's chronicle of a year spent in a sanatorium recuperating from tuberculosis in the days before antibiotics sounds like an unlikely candidate for a humorous memoir.
The Plague and I proves, however, the author's gift of weaving homestyle insight with her funny upbringing and her cock-eyed view of the craziness around her. MacDonald has a genuine gift of interjecting a highly personal and relatable touch into the quite literally antiseptic environment of 'The Pines'—in reality, the former Firlands Sanitarium of Shoreline, Washington—and making the story of her illness and recovery as funny, if not funnier, than her other three books for adults.


The Plague and I provides not only an interesting look into a type of medicine no longer practiced, but gives a startlingly vivid glimpse into the racial tensions of pre-World War II Seattle. MacDonald's sanatorium friend, Kimi, wrote under her real name of Monica Sone a memoir (Nisei Daughter) of growing up torn between American culture and her Japanese-American upbringing, and of her family's internment during the subsequent war. It's a credit to MacDonald that she's able to confront these issues and not let them sidetrack her main intent. Namely, to show that in a life-threatening illness, a positive (and realistic) outlook and a dose of humor can be as important medicines as anything dispensed by a pharmacist.




Anybody Can Do Anything
by Betty MacDonald
Of all Betty MacDonald's comic memoirs, Anybody Can Do Anything is perhaps the most unfocused. The book takes on the years after those chronicled in The Egg and I, as MacDonald fled that unhappy marriage to make a life for herself in the bosom of her family with two young daughters in tow. It focuses primarily on the primal force of Mary Bard, MacDonald's older sister, whose can-do anything propelled MacDonald into unsuitable job after job. Therefore it's tough not to be a touch cynical about the book's concluding chapters, which read very much like promotional material for her older sister's first memoir, which came out roughly at the same time, and from the same publisher.

Still, scattershot as some of the material is, Anybody Can Do Anything is still an engaging delight. MacDonald skillfully weaves personal memoir and hilarious anecdote with sharp-eyed observations about nineteen-thirties Seattle and the insidious reach of the Depression. Frequently reflective and even melancholy—but never mopey—it's just as much a treasure as MacDonald's other adult works.




The Doctor Wears Three Faces
by Mary Bard
Mary Bard is, of course, the older sister of beloved humorist Betty MacDonald, whose The Egg and I was a three-year sensation on the best-seller lists at the end of the nineteen-forties. Apparently spurred by a gentle sisterly competitiveness and a sense that "Anybody Can Do Anything"—the title of MacDonald's third memoir, which focused mainly upon Bard's resourcefulness in the face of the Great Depression—Bard wrote a children's series and trio of humorous memoirs of her own.


The Doctor Wears Three Faces is the first of these, and like The Egg and I, it covers the early years of the author's marriage. To a physician, as the title gently suggests—not a chicken farmer. None of the incidents Bard covers, whether her attempts to mingle with the big boys of medicine instead of the doctors' wives, or her battle with cockroaches, or even her own first pregnancy, are exactly earth-shaking in their depth or content, but Bard relates them with a Betty MacDonald-ish sense of humor and a wry, crackling briskness that carries most of the chapters through in a swift manner.

It's true that there doesn't seem to have been an em dash that Bard didn't like, appropriate, and use in her book, and her writing doesn't have the indefinable sparkle of her younger sister's. There's also some not-so-veiled racism toward a Japanese servant in the book's early chapters that modern readers might find uncomfortable. It's racism of a sort that Betty MacDonald actually protested in dozens of subtle ways in her own books, so it's a little surprising to see it so blatantly on display in Bard's work.

For diehard MacDonald fans, though, the Mary Bard books are tough to put down; their sense of time, place, and humor can be uncannily similar. And like the similarly-structured The Egg and I, The Doctor Wears Three Faces was made into a movie of its own—the Dorothy McGuire vehicle Mother Didn't Tell Me.