A Journey Into Dorothy Parker's New York--Kevin Fitzpatrick (Book review)

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was a theater critic who also published short stories and poetry during her New York years (she later moved to California and became a screenwriter), and was a founding member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and critics who, for ten years, had a standing lunch date at the Algonquin Hotel. She was also quite the partier. She's credited with quite a few pithy remarks, such as:

Men seldom make passes

At girls who wear glasses.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force, and,

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

But this isn't just a book about Dorothy Parker and her writing. It's also about the history and architecture, the politics and social history of the early- to mid-twentieth century New York City in which Parker lived and wrote. Scattered with photos, maps, and the occasional excerpt from Parker's work, this is a very readable slice of history.

It's a book about the growth of Manhattan in the early twentieth century, the beginnings of Broadway theater, the anti-communism crusade of the 1950s and its effects on American culture (Parker and others in the Hollywood scene were blacklisted during the McCarthy era). One sidebar relates how the Titanic disaster affected Dorothy's extended family when she was eighteen.

Added bonus for theater lovers: a nice twelve-paged section in the middle that details the history of various theaters, their dates, and the famous shows and events that were performed in them.

Occasionally, the connections between events and Parker's life are a bit of a stretch. A large picture of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller graces one page, on which Fitzpatrick mentions that Parker met the couple at an event where she and Miller both received awards. On the other hand, Lillian Hellman, executrix of Parker's estate upon her death, is never pictured and is mentioned so casually that it's somewhat of a surprise to learn, in the final pages of the book, that she was "one of the few people [Dorothy] trusted" in her later years. It's as if text was written to match the available pictures, rather than the other way around.

Author Kevin Fitzpatrick is president of the Dorothy Parker Society of New York. On their site you can listen to Parker reading some of her poems.

The soundtrack: Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin in 1924, during the peak of the Algonquin Round Table years.

Traveling Thursday

I didn't have a chance to post a Sunday Salon post this week, and I've been on the road ever since, which leaves me with not enough concentration to post an actual book review, so I've decided to post a sort of salon-ish post here in my motel room.

Our dear David Copperfield wasn't invited to come along to southern Oregon because, frankly, he is too fat. I wanted paperbacks that could be tucked easily into a backpack along with my writing folder and my knitting.

So, here's what I brought along:


At our rented beach cottage, I read Kevin Fitzpatrick's A Journey Into Dorothy Parker's New York. This is one of several of the ArtPlace series by Roaring Forties Press I'll be reviewing in the months to come, and I can't wait to get my thoughts together and tell you all about it--both good and bad. I learned so much from this book! Which wasn't hard to accomplish, since I knew very little about Dorothy Parker to begin with--but I also learned about a lot of other people and places I hadn't expected.

Once I'd finished Dorothy Parker, I moved on to Something Like Beautiful, by Asha Bandele. The first few chapters were kind of frustrating for me, because Asha tends to repeat herself. A lot. She repeats herself quite a bit, in fact, (Get it? Like that.) writing in circles around ideas or events to the point where an entire paragraph or two seem to be devoted to a single thought. On page 72 I put it down to go to bed, and at our hotel between the coast and southern Oregon the next night when I went to pick it back up . . . I didn't.

Instead, I picked up Philipp Meyer's debut novel, American Rust. I'm on page 40 right now, and I'm definitely into it. It's not a quick read--a little Faulkner-esque, in its third person stream-of-consciousness style. Meyer switches points of view in each chapter and I'm loving the way the third-person narrative voice changes with each new point-of-view character. Lots of early action, too, for those who like a good dose of plot with their cool narrative effects.

And here's what the whole family is reading together on our trip:

Both of these have been great family reads, in that they're entertaining to all of us. On the curvy roads we're listening to an mp3 of Pictures of Hollis Woods, that I downloaded from the library--my first time doing this successfully. The story of a girl who has bounced from foster home to foster home. We're about a third of the way through it. When we're not in the car, and during the straight parts of the drive, I'm reading the first Ranger's Apprentice book aloud. It's great! I hope they'll want to read the rest of the series with me--even though it's impossible to do the voices the same way Ben heard them in his head when he was reading Book 1 to himself!

The books, the weather, the people who've attended the presentations I'm here to give, and the people I get to hang out with every day (who've been keeping the bickering in the car to a bare minimum) have all conspired to make for some lovely time away from home. And now, my blogging hour is done--time to get back to my book and help the kiddos settle down for the night.