Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Complete Stories
Book Review: Sharp Wit Impales Lives- No Survivors
Summary: 4 Stars
. Dorothy Parker live most of her life in hotel rooms, because she would rather starve than boil an egg, and smell than wash her own clothes. Her reason, also true, was, "I just need a place to lay my hat and a few friends".
. This biography is complete and helpful. It was a slog to get through the names of the many has-beens that populated her world. I gave it only 4 stars because of those many mentioned without explanation of who they were and why they mattered; and because the subject was such a bum. Another example of how brains, money, and arrogance combine to make a ruined life. Dorothy was brilliant, and her sharp wit entertained thousands during her reign. She wrote about her friends, drinking, money, unfaithfulness- the total of the lives of her many moneyed friends in New York City and Hollywood. An elitist by nature and arrogant by choice, she and her group are shown as desperate, lazy, unhappy, unsober; and quick to criticize the sober, happy, and hardworking for the sin of being boring.
. This is an indictment of the entire New York theater scene, and leftists of all stripes for good measure. Yes, I enjoyed it- and I'll never read it again.
Book Review: Solid
Summary: 3 Stars
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was cute, sexy, witty, vivacious, delightfully vicious, and the only member of the infamously bad Algonquin Round Table that had even a modicum of real writing talent, and it's on full display in this collection of her finest short fictions. However, that all being said, Parker's short fictions are just that- fictions; not real `stories' with narratives that anyone can dig their teeth into. They are moments, fugues, scenes with a single purpose to illuminate, and most do those things very well. It is social criticism as art. But, there is not much real depth to much of her prose work- beyond condemning this or that faux pas, and as a consequence of that artistic choice, just as her light verse lacked any heft, this prose corpus stands in direct contrast to the writer who was her most obvious literary forebear- Oscar Wilde. In a sense, though, this is an unfair comparison, for Wilde simply was the greatest published witticist in human history, but there is the gnawing feeling, when reading Parker's `scenes', that she could have been so much more had she been less the bon vivant. Still, compared to what passes for comic commentary today, she is a genius. The New York that she details might best be described as the wordly equivalent to the paintings of Edward Hopper, for under all the goofiness there are extremely lonely and desperate characters. Her heroes, but mostly heroines, all struggle with capital L Loneliness primarily- in the gray beglittered nights of Manhattan neon life in the Jazz Age. They are ordinary folk with extraordinary dreams. Yet, their dreams are all that is extraordinary about them. They are divorcees, wannabe divorcees, boozers, whores, womanizers, palookas, and others from that lot, but that's all they are. The tales are too short to tell us much else. The basic problem facing Parker, in this collection of her Complete Stories, though, is that there is a rote quality that infects each `scene'. They are all about the four D's: drinks, dames, dilemmas, and dinners....Book Review: fascinating stories
Summary: 5 Stars
i loved the whole book; one fascinating story after the other. i could visualize them; that's how distinct parker's writing is. she cuts through the unnecessary and brings you right into the character's lives.
More Complete Stories reviews:
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