Cross the heroine of a Hollywood screwball comedy with JD Salinger's teenage neurotic, Holden Caulfield, and you're only just starting to get close to her qualities: insightful, astringent and bracingly modern. But tell me this: which one would you want to be your pal? Answer: Gorce, of course! It's not only that Sally Jay, with her pink hair and her failed outfits, is by far the more lovable of the two (her clothes, she glumly notes, stubbornly divide themselves into three looks: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian). Both girls are witty, tenacious, ardent, wide-eyed and strangely perceptive. S ally Jay Gorce, the clever, funny, good-looking and mildly disorganised heroine of Elaine Dundy's first and best novel, is most often compared to Truman Capote's Holly Golightly, a character who is her exact contemporary in publication terms ( The Dud Avocado and Breakfast at Tiffany 's appeared, to rave reviews, in 1958).
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