Product Description

Not since The Gingerman has J.P. Donleavy succeeded in both delighting and irking his readers as he has with The Lady Who Like Clean Restrooms. This stylish novella tells the tale of Jocelyn Guenevere Marchantiere Jones, whose Scarsdale life comes to an abrupt end when her husband goes in search of a bit of "fresh flesh." Soon she is fending for herself in New York City, where finding a clean restroom will prove to be the least of her concerns.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #865615 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Library Journal
This novella by the author of the classic The Ginger Man bills itself as a humorous fairy tale, but it's hard to sustain irony with a 19th-century prose style and a sophomoric plot. The life of Jocelyn Guenevere Marchantiere Jones has taken a dive. She is divorced and has lost all her money to bad investments. Her children no longer come to see her; her friends avoid her on the street. After losing her house, her upscale car, her downscale car, her job as a gift-wrapper, and her job as a waitress (as well as a few bullets to obnoxious guests and one recalcitrant TV), the elegant Mrs. Jones must resort to high-class whoring. Menopause and the geriatric scrap heap are next. The nicest things about Donleavy's book are the original illustrations by Elliott Banfield and the old-fashioned design. Not recommended.?Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, Ind.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Readers of Donleavy's best-seller of 40 years ago, The Ginger Man, may be clamoring for this work; they'll find a moderately effective satire on an insipid, absurd, money-driven world. The story is told in first and third person from the point of view of the ironically named Jocelyn "Joy" Jones. After her husband leaves for a younger woman, she becomes increasingly isolated and angry at the world, and, of course, her fate worsens: her college kids want no part of her; bills mount; she sells her large Scarsdale house, but her financial investor loses all the proceeds. Then her appreciation for clean rest rooms, the great legacy of her grandmother, lands her in a funeral home on one of her day trips to Manhattan museums, where her casual signing of a ledger leads to a multimillion-dollar inheritance from a total stranger, an absurd reversal that cannot undo her suicidal fatigue with the emptiness money had once concealed from her. Jim O'Laughlin

From Kirkus Reviews
The famed author of The Gingerman shows--in this angst-and-arsenic-laced little bonbon- -that there's plenty of wit and heart in the writer yet. At 42, beautiful Mrs. Steve Jones lives a splendid life indeed in her fine mansion at number 17 Winnapoopoo Road in Scarsdale--or does, that is, until husband Steve leaves her for a bimbo: at which time Mrs. Jones, who's been born, bred (in a southern state), and educated always and only to be the finest and most tasteful and discriminating of ladies, washes her hands of him for keeps in exchange for the mansion itself and a cool hundred-sixty-five thousand. And? Well, a downward spiral follows, sadly, as inept and dishonest brokers lose huge gobs of Jocelyn's money (full name, if needed for reference: Jocelyn Guenevere Machantiere Jones), as classy neighbors begin to snub her, as she starts to drink more, and as she feels increasingly like the mad girl across the road who appears at the window from time to time, in handcuffs. Selling the mansion (after first shooting her TV set with a priceless shotgun) gives her money enough to survive by moving to an apartment in a lesser neighborhood--then to another in a still lesser neighborhood--and to continue doing the only thing she really wants, which is to make train trips into the city to visit the art museums and find clean bathrooms to pee in. One clean bathroom she knows of happens to be in a funeral parlor and--by now she's falling into true, suicidal despair--her chancing to use it at just a certain moment will have a huge effect (and at the same time none at all) on her fate. A brilliantly brief, gloriously irreverent, perfectly raunchy, wonderfully hilarious--and sad, melancholy, tearful look at one woman's life. (Eight illustrations by Elliot Banfield are just as good as the book.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Very thought-provoking
My book group read this and though it was certainly the shortest book we have read, it led to the longest discussion we've ever had. The protagonist is a women whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Because of this and some bad decisions on her part she loses her house, country club membership, friends, kids...status in her community and ends up living in a small room in New York, working at a store for minimum wage. She is miserable. Through a very unusual series of events, she regains her wealth only to realize that it's not the money that made her happy, it was her former life and she can not have that back. The ending leaves you thinking for a long, long time. This book is written as the woman thinks and Donleavy's writing style is hard to get used to at first. It is almost as if you are inside her head. This is a book to pass along to friends so that you can talk about it for hours.

Haunting
This is the only novel written in the 20th centuary that can compare to the Great Gatsby in its story of the infinite sadness and subtlety of lost love. Here we have a tale so poignant and devastatingly memorable - a tale of a still beautiful woman of only 42 years, divorced, bereft and lonely in her mansion of equisite taste and infinite emptiness - her children ignoring her in their quest for their new lives and her former husband moving on to a younger woman - whose only wish is to sit her ass on a clean surface. who would have thought that her lonely search for meaning through art could have led her to a funeral home and to a surprising and haunting ending to her tale?

Donleavy's pithy chronicle of the downward spiral brilliant
The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Room is Donleavy's second Novella, the first since The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. A marked departure from his earlier works, it features a female protagonist and employs a much more conventional writing style. Few contemporary authors can meld humor and sadness as can Donleavy at his best, and this work ranks among the author's finest work in that regard. Donleavy has long suffered from a fate similar to that of Henry Miller: having first published a huge and controversial best-seller, fresh, shocking, and unforgetable (Miller's Tropic of Cancer; Donleavy's The Ginger Man), too many critics tend to weigh all subsequent works by that achievement. Besides the fact that it's arguable that The Ginger Man outshines any later Donleavy work, those who use his classic first novel as a yard stick for books such as The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms are comparing single malt Isley scotch to vintage champagne. Both fine in of themselves thank you very much.