Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos
1925
Rating: 5

I found this book to be readable and occasionally amusing. I also am not quite sure what to make of it. It was a significant commercial success when it was published, and it was praised by greater writers of the era, which is puzzling to me. The writers and readers who liked it must have connected with the author’s wit and eye for social satire, but to the extent that that’s the case, the book has maybe not aged that well. The critical reviews were mixed.

There is not much going on in terms of plot or character development or language or descriptions of place. There is only a vista into the lives of the Roaring 20s’ financial and creative elite, and the machinations of the gold-digging protagonist.

Some of this was attributable to the circumstances of its writing, it was serialized in Harper’s Bazaar, so Loos would write a chapter, send it off, and then start plotting out the next chapter, with no eye to an overarching story. It’s episodic and picaresque. Which is not to say it’s dull, particularly if you are curious about that decade.

Its fans call it a send-up or a lampooning of society’s pillars, and maybe that’s fair. The introduction to my edition says that it fell out of favor in the 70s, and most of the friends I’ve mentioned it to did not know that the film was based on a novel. (Now I want to see the film.) The introduction also calls it “an examplar of literary modernism and a withering attack modernism itself.” Not sure I see that.

Loos made it pretty clear that she had contempt for her protagonist who, in the novel, is a gold-digging rube and a crook. The intentional misspellings wore a bit thin after a while. In short, the novel violates many modern tenets of modern fiction writing.

Loos claims that the inspiration for the book was a train trip with some film honchos from New York to L.A. There was a blonde actress in their party who apparently got a lot of attention from the dudes. So, in the book, blondes are stupid and treacherous, and so are the men who like them. It’s pretty bleak.