GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

I’m a huge fan/wannabe collector of semi-obscure early-twentieth-century comic novels (c.f. The Pursuit of Love/Love in a Cold Climate, Cold Comfort Farm, The Enchanted April, Christopher and Columbus, Three Men in a Boat, Lucky Jim, I Capture the Castle, Parnasssus on Wheels/The Haunted Bookshop, all of P.G. Wodehouse), and this one came recommended by my top authorcrush Connie Willis, not to mention that no less a luminary than Edith Wharton called it “the great American novel.” But I gotta say, I was disappointed. It seemed like pretty much a one-joke pony (“Look! This narrator is dumb! And a gold digger!”), and I think if it had been written by a man, I would have found it downright mean-spirited. The funniest bits were the sarcastic cracks from Dorothy—a better demonstration of Anita Loos’s wit than the broad satire of Lorelai. It wasn’t a bad book; I had just been expecting to love it and it left me rather cold. I rewatched the movie afterward and actually prefer it—Jane Russell is even funnier than the book version of Dorothy, and Marilyn Monroe makes Lorelei more than a bimbo. To me, the book is sadly skippable, though I might check out a biography of Loos sometime.