Dear readers, Are we really getting dumber? Recent reports on something called the reverse Flynn effect and the algorithmic frazzling of our frontal lobes have had me wishing to exit the internet, stage left. Happily, books are full of glorious fools: a confederacy of windmill tilters and uppity dunces whose obtuseness has the double benefit of keeping my addled brain offline and reminding me that, in terms of idiocy, it has ever been so. I would argue that the dippy protagonists in this week’s picks — one an ingénue in the 1920s, the other entering middle age in the early 1980s, both delightfully immune to teachable moments or maturity — aren’t dim so much as they are driven by pure instinct and diversion in whatever form (friendship, diamonds, erstwhile gay porn stars) they can find. —Leah “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” by Anita LoosFiction, 1925
No less a canonical mind than Edith Wharton called “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” “the great American novel” (emphasis on the definite article mine); William Faulkner was apparently also a fan. If you only know the 1953 movie, a spangled song-and-dance extravaganza built mostly around Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle, I promise the book is a different animal — divergent in almost every way except for the character names and the color of their hair. Our preferred blonde is Lorelei Lee, a girl from not quite the right side of Little Rock, Ark., who has found her milieu as a Jazz Age bauble for rich and often much older men in Manhattan: minor royals, senators and captains of industry who compete for her time and attention, primarily via the offering of small luxury goods and champagne-forward evenings at the Trocadero and the Ritz. One of these gentlemen, a Mr. Gus Eisman, Button King of Chicago, has taken a particularly friendly interest in, as Lorelei puts it, “educating a girl” by sending her on her first trip to Europe, hopefully to correct her impression that Australia is a part of England and Vienna is in France. To keep Lorelei company until he can join her there, Mr. Eisman also secures her friend and fellow decorative object Dorothy to chaperone. Dorothy is not so couth and has a weakness for handsome men of little to no means, which confounds Lorelei; what’s the point of romance without “little presents”? But Dorothy turns out to have her uses as a companion and a foil for the stream of suitors and charlatans who pursue the girls across the Continent as they in turn pursue what Lorelei likes best: to be bejeweled, adored and never (at least not for longer than it takes to find a Cartier store) bored. Loos, a non-blonde who also wrote the screenplay for the 1939 George Cukor film “The Women” and the Broadway adaptation of Collette’s “Gigi,” gives her first-person heroine a sort of daffy showgirl vernacular, with all her misspellings and malaprops intact. Dorothy’s assessment of Lorelei maybe captures her best: “She said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.” Read if you like: Tiaras, bootleggers, making new friends in hotel lobbies. “Love Junkie,” by Robert PlunketFiction, 1992
Is there anything more dangerous than a bored housewife? Mimi Smithers, a 41-year-old redhead from Texas with an encyclopedic knowledge of fashion and home décor and a large black hole where almost everything else would be, has followed her chemical engineer husband to Bronxville, N.Y., where her aspirations as a local society hostess meet a quick, ignominious end in the opening pages of “Love Junkie.” Redemption from suburban exile comes in the form of Tom, a party-guest acquaintance she spots at an upscale safari store while shopping in the city. Tom has charm and flair and knows how to pronounce “Rizzoli,” and soon Mimi has taken an unpaid job at his small arts funding agency. Even though it’s the dawn of the 1980s, post Stonewall and post disco, it takes Mimi about seven clicks too long to realize that Tom is gay, as are most of his friends. When an aborted attempt to glom on to the boys’ good time in Fire Island leads her to a beautiful bohunk named Joe, a sometime star of gay pornography, Mimi finds new purpose as his Girl Friday — running errands, mailing out packets of used jockey shorts and autographed nudes to the lovelorn orthodontists and aspiring toe-lickers who adore him from afar. Joe’s sexuality primarily seems to involve being desired; he’s like Michaelangelo’s David, if David wore stonewashed jeans and wanted to open a fitness club. And though Mimi defines her own orientation as “sexually polite,” she develops a consuming crush that leads to various misadventures on a cruise ship, at a dank fetish club called Hellfire and several other set pieces that Plunket unreels with blithe, skittering comic energy. Hints of bleaker realities occasionally break through: a tattered community billboard notice about “that new gay cancer,” lesions on Tom’s neck that he covers with pancake makeup. Mimi is far too fluttery and self-absorbed to fully clock the meaning of this or any other bad news; her account of the memorial service for a major character in the novel’s final pages reads like a combined dispatch from Page Six and Town & Country. But I inhaled “Love Junkie” in a gulp, and missed this perfect nitwit when she was gone. Read if you like: Salmon paté, chorus boys, phone calls from Ronald Reagan. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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