The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy

There is a time for asterisks and a time for speaking out. I don't know--will all this morbid introspection into my terrible itch for that randy old man reveal itself merely as an exercise in self-indulgence, a senseless waste of time? Or will it be that, having put down clearly and to my own satisfaction once and for all what it was like sleeping with foxy grampa, I may finally come to understand what was going on in me? Maybe not. We must hope for the best. But it's so hard. I write three words and at the fourth memory seizes me. I waste hours mooning over a situation that play it as I may could only have been resolved by disaster.

A young American turns up in one of London's seediest and hippest Soho bars. She is waiting for a man of minor renown named C.D. McKee, once a poet, then an academic, then a Brigadier General during World War II, and now one of those people who is mostly famous for being famous, and of course, independently wealthy. She tells people her name is Honey Flood, but this is a lie--we know because she's the narrator, and she tells us that she's nicked it off her old roommate back in the States, a roommate whose mental breakdown of which she may have been the cause. We get the sense that we are in the presence of a psychopath, or at least a determined young woman with ulterior motives, but it's not until well into the book that we learn the truth: McKee's money is inherited from his dead wife, who inherited it from her husband, who was "Honey Flood's" father. Believing McKee's money to be rightfully hers, she plans to extract it from via seduction, and possibly murder.

What The Old Man and Me has in common with Dundy's equally terrific novel The Dud Avocado is a riotous voice: though the narrator here is cunning and manipulative where Avocado was naive, they share a blazing verbal wit and the powerful fanfare of common speech. C.D.--she calls him Seedy--praises not-Honey for her mockingbird-like reproduction of the mannerisms of the stuffy English manor house set to which he subjects her, and the praise could just as well be directed at Dundy herself. The Old Man and Me is, among other things, a culture clash novel: the priggish Brit vs. the faddish American. It explores dense layers of snobbery, lying along axes of nationality, age, wealth and class, and all this is reflected in the freewheeling precision of language.

What happens is, well, what you might expect to happen: Despite her intentions, not-Honey begins to fall for the old man. She begins to feel parallel emotions, love and anger, attachment and revulsion, tenderness and spite. She wheels unpredictably between wanting to murder him in various extremely literal ways and desiring him intensely, and the instability of her feelings forces her to confront the instability of her identity:

I really love him, I thought. I really love this bad old man, though of course, I checked myself, remembering the money, I wish him dead as well. For there it was: C.D. stood in the way of my getting my money but--and here was the catch--my money stood eternally in the way of my getting C.D. For sooner or later he must find out who I was and then--And then what?

Dundy plays this really well; the problem is convincing because the character is so convincing. We even feel, as she feels, a growing empathy toward C.D., an irascible and essentially unhappy man whose better qualities have languished simply because they have not been lately requested. The pair are terrible for each other, needy and mendacious and injurious to the other's health, but it's not hard to see how they are perfect for each other, too. I have no doubt a male writer could never have pulled it off so well: distracted by the banal kind of attraction the C.D.s of the world have for the "Honeys," they could not have understood the attraction the "Honeys" have for the C.D.s. The novel, as the narrator says it must, hurtles toward a crisis that will put things to a kind of rights, but somehow it manages to wrest a sweet and happy conclusion, of a kind, from the wreckage.