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In the grand literary tradition of making struggling young writers feel like worthless
rejects who will never achieve the notoriety their rapier wordsmithery so clearly deserves
because all the good ideas are being used up at an alarming rate, yet another
20/30-something who, if asked to affiliate themselves with a particular religion would
quite likely offer "Postmodernism," has won entrance to the Land of the Young
and the Published. And in the even grander literary tradition of adding insult to injury,
the bitter and unpublished can't even find solace in deriding Bruno Maddox's debut novel
for its mediocrity. Highly inventive, MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS offers a hilarious satire of
modern society's twin evils --- memoir writing and pop culture trivia in lieu of textbook
history.
Even for the highly neurotic reader who bypasses all jacket copy, it takes little more
than the first 10 pages to realize this memoir --- supposedly written by a century old
woman (born January 1, 1900) --- is a big, fat fraud. Was duct tape around in 1905? Do
adolescent girls (and by this I mean actual girls, not those hatched from the pornographic
minds of Nabokovian men) really talk about their own breasts in erotic and graphic detail?
The thing is, Maddox's strangely perverted, slang-savvy old lady is pretty damn funny. And
because you are bursting with existential ennui and in no position to refuse
entertainment, you laugh at her moronic misconception of womanhood and egregious
historical inaccuracies and happily follow along as she waxes nostalgic about snorting
coke with Henry Miller and drinking absinthe with whores and hermaphrodites in 1920s
Paris.
You continue to laugh all the way through her fond remembrances of the '30s and '40s,
except this time yours is a knowing laugh. Thanks to several interspersed "notes to
self" --- 45 years done in 6 hours…ahead of schedule, going very well ---
the narrator's dirty little secret is finally exposed: Our 100-year-old memoirist is
actually a pathetic 20-something named --- gasp! --- Bruno Maddox, who, for reasons I
shall not divulge, needs to falsify the memoir of the elderly woman he's been caring for
in a single night. A ridiculously complicated scenario befitting Maddox's equally
ridiculous Bruno Maddox.
And so begins phase II of MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS…
"From this point forward, as well as being my autobiography, this book is going to be
my diary…I've decided to make this change because I'm ruining the life of my
caregiver…I've watched the strain of looking after me make Bruno Maddox depressed and
listless, then rob him of his sense of purpose…"
With Bruno Maddox now openly at the helm of this insane literary project, the once breezy,
albeit spotty, coming-of-age tale quickly gives way to a portrait of the artist (or, more
appropriately, the wannabe artist) as a disenfranchised, hyper-self-aware, ironic yet
irony loathing, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, lovelorn young man. Now, normally a
character profile such as this would elicit big, dramatic eye-rolling and deep, guttural
groans of pained irritation --- why do authors under the age of 40 persist in creating
their characters in this exact image and likeness when, more often times than not, their
stories become quagmired in vapidity and cliché? But Maddox pulls it off with not a drop
of vapidity and just enough cliché to turn Bruno Maddox into a brilliantly conceived
comic loser.
As we hear less and less about our narrator's adorably bucolic upbringing and latter-day
world-weariness, we hear more and more and more about Bruno Maddox. We get an earful about
his numerous inadequacies when it comes to girls and socialization --- when asked what he
wanted to do with his life by said girlfriend on their first date he blurted out: to live
in an undersea dome and interact with the world only by computer. This pretty much set the
tone for the rest of their highly dysfunctional relationship. We are treated to several
lengthy diatribes regarding Bruno's incredulousness over being an undiscovered literary
genius and the loathing he feels toward all those talentless, posturing dolts scribbling
away in cafes about NYC stealing all the good ideas. Oh, and how can we forget our
narrator's particularly hilarious and insightful pontifications on the ironic state of
fashionable trends today:
"Take Bruno's Housing Department T-shirt. I don't know if I mentioned this but the
boy doesn't actually work for the Housing Department…Does anyone ever stop him in the
street and demand that he come provide shelter for them…No…History has ended and
we don't need people to have fixed identities…We're going to design bars and
nightclubs that look like toasters or golf courses just to acknowledge the fact that this
is no longer the past and nobody and nothing, is under any obligation to actually be how
they seem…"
For all its smoke and mirrors, the strength of MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS really lies in its
sharp, witty, surprisingly perceptive satirical edge...from which we take two things. (1)
Young people today know crap about history that is not of the pop trivia variety. To them,
the past is nothing more than the place from whence their vintage clothes and ironic
sensibilities were sprung --- hence the reason Bruno Maddox is limited to vague
recollections of Henry Miller and Parisian debauchery in the 1920s, draws a complete blank
on the '30s, makes a few mentions of the Nazis when blazing through the 1940s, imagines a
life of suburban sprawl and dandy new appliances for the old lady in the '50s and has her
hanging out and smoking dope with Warhol in The Factory throughout the '60s. (2) Memoir
writing is the new opiate of the masses. A self-absorbed practice unlike any other,
writing a memoir is like having an audience look attentively on as you undergo many hours
of intensive therapy, then having that same audience sing your praises for being so
courageous and introspective not to mention eloquent in the articulation of your most deep
seeded fears and insecurities. Indeed, it has become such a craze that, ludicrous and
slipshod and high school journal-esque as Bruno Maddox's memoir is, it is not out of the
realm of possibilities that it could have been written or, worse, published.
Is MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS so flawless a first work that Maddox can now quit the book racket
and rest on his literary laurels? Of course not. Sometimes you just want Bruno Maddox to
shut up and stop, dear reader, addressing you, gentle reader, like this, my good and just
reader. And on more than one occasion the tenuous-at-best storyline smacks of desperate
contrivance. Nor should we overlook the fact that the narrative's periphery characters are
ill conceived, while Bruno Maddox pays himself, his love interest, and their sophomoric
romance far too much attention. Ultimately, though, what really annoys you about this book
is that the aforementioned grievances can all too easily be explained away as being part
of the whole memoir of a century old lady written in a night by a self-analytical young
man teetering on the edge of lunacy armed with only a TV-taught knowledge of world events
and a retarded understanding of women. Sure, you could argue that it's all pretty clever
and part of the whole memoir/modernity satire, but that would be taking the easy way out.
Or perhaps, fair reviewer, you are just a wee bit green over Bruno Maddox's rather
impressive debut.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Brennan
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