Synopses & Reviews
There's a reason this memoir of a 100-year-old woman's sun-soaked rural childhood is not at all what it seems. In Bruno Maddox's warmhearted comic novel it is soon revealed why a young man who knows very little about history and even less about being a woman attempts to improvise an old woman's autobiography in a single frantic night, and why he fails. A love story, a murder mystery, an acclaimed satire, My Little Blue Dress is a hugely entertaining and hilariously audacious fiction debut, "a winsome and vastly entertaining novel" (The New York Times Book Review) by a marvelous new literary talent.
"In his first novel, Maddox concocts a hilariously off-the-wall satire of the memoir. . . . Brilliantly funny . . . Maddox's writing is purposely uppity, but the kitschy, honest overtones communicate a very witty take on love and life." (Publishers Weekly)
"Hilarious . . . fun, full-throttle stuff." (Entertainment Weekly)
Review
"Maddox...makes his debut with a clever satirical love story/murder mystery that spoofs the memoir craze." New York Daily News
Review
"Not since Mailer & Roth has a novelist had the gall to refer to himself so many times in the third person. And not since John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Rile have we had such an extravagantly comic loser as Bruno Maddox's Bruno Maddox" Kurt Anderson, author of Turn Of The Century
Review
There's an elaborate trick going on in the pages of
My Little Blue Dress,
and I'm going to tell you exactly what it is. I can't be accused of single-handedly
spoiling the game, because the book's publisher has decided to reveal all on
the book jacket anyway. I can see why, because I opened this novel without even
glancing at the jacket or publicity material, and if it hadn't been for my sacred
duty as a reviewer I might not have made it past the first 75 pages, after which
it becomes hilariously clear what's going on. What starts out as the life story
of a 100-year-old woman turns out to be written by a guy in his 20s named Bruno
Maddox, who's given himself the task of forging the memoir in one frantic night.
As the night wears on, Bruno interrupts his ersatz memoir to insert pep-talking
notes to himself, such as "fucking only ten hours left so TYPE LIKE THE WIND
and also obviously like an incredibly old woman recalling her life in the
1930s." The woman turns out to be his decrepit, ailing, elderly next-door neighbor,
whose name we never learn, and whom Bruno has been caring for since it became
clear that she was practically immobile and unable to communicate.
At first, Bruno invents events to fill out her life. The result is an extravagantly
silly, anachronism-filled parody of one of those precious "rural childhood"
memoirs, with lots of asides to Reader and ingenious manic plot turns designed
to help him avoid revealing his ignorance about historical events. (The woman
spends World War II, for example, at a "top-secret" job at a remote military
research facility that "insulated me utterly from the war.") It's also suspiciously
full of lesbian frolicking, lolling on beds in "bra and panties" and sudden
trips to Paris. As Bruno's sleep-deprived brain races ahead, he comes up with
an idea that will make the memoir easier to write: "I think the least I can
do is make this autobiography into a tribute to Bruno Maddox," whom the "narrator"
has concluded is suffering from "Caregiver Syndrome."
The memoir-writing marathon has come at the end of a rough period for Bruno,
and piecing together just what has happened to him is half the fun of My
Little Blue Dress. He's clearly struggling with the physical and emotional
burden of caring for his neighbor: "I mean he's definitely going through some
weird stuff lately, for which I am obviously to blame," he has her write. He's
also wrestling with the internal demons brought up by his shallow, frenzied
New York media career. (He is a regular on "Thirty UN!der Thirty," which features
30 opinionated, feisty young people from around the country weighing in on the
day's issues, all inhabiting tiny boxes crowded onto the screen at once.) Then
there's Hayley Iskender, a shockingly down-to-earth, straightforward girl despite
her media job, who seems to be terrifyingly immune to the kinds of games that
have previously allowed Bruno to shy away from relationships.
My Little Blue Dress is one of those "don't try this at home" literary
experiments that could easily have turned into an unreadable, pretentious disaster.
But Maddox, a one-time editor of Spy magazine, pulls it off with a kind
of fearless pizzazz. His satire of the media world's social scene, refracted
through the supposed consciousness of a 100-year-old woman, is priceless. "All
his friends were sort of prominent media people," as Bruno describes one evening
tagging along with his sole remaining pal. "There was some eighteen-year-old
guy who just made a film about cripples. A guy who writes a column for Rogue
magazine. Some actress. And that guy Gordon Gundersson ... a book author who
has his own television commercial." Of course, this information is delivered
to us in the form of the narrator's report of a conversation with Bruno, and
somehow the idea of dishing the vicissitudes of social intercourse in trendy
Manhattan bars with a semicomatose elderly woman is amusing, not offensive.
Strange to say, there's an emotional honesty in this book that no doubt wouldn't
have been possible if Maddox had plunged head first into the serious issues
that form its backdrop caring for elderly people, or finding meaningful relationships
in a back-biting, fame-chasing world. When you finally do figure out the entire
story behind Bruno's decision to forge the memoir (well, almost the entire thing
there are some intriguing holes), you can't help being moved, and even a
little sad that it may not work in the way Bruno hopes. Maria Russo, Salon.com