The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms: The Chronicle Of One Of The Strangest Stories Ever To Be Rumoured About Around New York (Paperback)

by J. P. Donleavy (Author) "WITH EVERYONE REACTING to and following trends and fashions you never know what's going to happen next in and around New York and especially in..." (more)
Key Phrases: boy gardener, condolence book, New York, Bryn Mawr, Fifth Avenue (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (June 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312187343
• ISBN-13: 978-0312187347
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #894,801 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very thought-provoking, April 24, 2000

By	Roz Levine (Virginia) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, February 6, 2004

By A Customer

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?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Donleavy's pithy chronicle of the downward spiral brilliant, January 5, 1999

By A Customer

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.