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A thirty-year-old virgin embarks on a quest to find true love in this rediscovered post-modern tragicomedy.
“She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in. . . . the idea of sex had such a grip on her that she tried to avoid, totally, thinking about sex.”
At thirty years old, Fortune Dundy is desperate to relinquish her virginity to the right man—preferably one worthy of her elaborate fantasies. Yet despite her dazzling wardrobe of spangles, rhinestones, and synthetic animal skins, and her persistent appeals to an automated dating service, every suitor seems to evaporate as soon as she says, "How do you do?" Her only confidant is "Bert," named for the real-life host of the televised Miss America pageant, who lives in her head, narrating the dramatic stageplay of her mind. Arriving in Los Angeles from her small Southern hometown, Fortune strives for reinvention, chasing romance through personal ads, costume parties, and trips to the beach at a "swinging singles" apartment complex called Villa Dionysus.Sophisticated, highly stylish, and crackling with wit, Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden, originally published in 1971, should today be as celebrated as the fiction of Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath. A glitter-and-blood tragicomedy of the fantasies of romance, persona, and California, it feels startlingly contemporary—an American literary original and a forebear to Helen DeWitt, Nell Zink, and Patricia Lockwood. Maiden’s Fortune Dundy is one of literature’s most memorable and lovable antiheroines: endlessly charming, painfully deluded, and hell-bent on self-destruction.
PRAISE FOR MAIDEN:
"Cynthia Buchanan is a brilliant satirist. Maiden is The Day of the Locustif Nathanael West had his consciousness raised and a sense of humor." —Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
PREVIOUS PRAISE FOR MAIDEN:
“I love Maiden so much I can’t even do it justice! . . . All generations . . . will find Maiden more universal today than ever. An American classic, it’s wonderful.” —Lily Tomlin
"A delicious, painful book . . . Maiden compares with Play It As It Lays and The Bell Jar; these books form a natural trilogy. In some ways Maiden is the best of the three: less calculated, less mercilessly expert than Joan Didion's book, more sure of being a novel than Sylvia Plath's, more various than either—ranging surely through satire and the gentlest of romances to blood-sacrifice." —The New York Times Book Review
“Fortune Dundy . . . like many a heroine since Emma Bovary . . . [is] artist enough to have made herself, very deftly, out of available trash.” —Life Magazine
“A hilarious first novel.” —The New Yorker
“This fresh, efficient first novel speaks directly [to] the folly of women who define themselves only in terms of men and the tyranny of a culture that penalizes them unless they do so.” —TIME
“A brilliant, hysterically funny book.” —Library Journal
“Dazzling." —Newsweek