Tender Is the Fulbright

THE DUD AVOCADO (255 pp.)--Elaine Dundy--Dutton ($3.50).

To the American girl, country matters are almost irresistible when the country is foreign, and nowhere is the hay more beckoning than in France. This is the lighter-than-air burden of a carbonated first novel that will set male readers to thinking sheepishly of plain wrappers--if only because its dust jacket bears the subtitle, The Vie Amoureuse of Sally Jay in Paris.

In the most complicated metaphor of this season's hot-weather literature, a randy old Hungarian dandy likens the American girl to the avocado: "A hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing. So green--so eternally green . . . And I will tell you something really extraordinary. Do you know that you can take the stones of these luscious fruits, put them in water--just plain water, mind you . . . and in three months up comes a sturdy little plant full of green leaves? This is their sturdy little souls bursting into bloom."

Change of Bed. Twenty-one years old and squirrelishly pretty, Sally Jay Gorce arrives in Paris determined to burst into bloom. She settles among the Left Bank's blissfully bug-bitten expatriates, embraces the two tenets of their haute couture: 1) hardly anyone washes, and 2) the girls change their beds oftener than their dresses. In no time at all, Sally Jay is blooming like a geranium.

At one point, Sally Jay is told off by a buddy: "Take it easy, Zelda. Scotty's been dead for years." Scotty has, and Author Dundy is no reincarnation of the razzle-dazzled Fitzgerald. But her portrait of the Left Bank expatriates, who raise a decorous kind of hell and live in fear of losing their Fulbrights, is caustically funny. One mustached featherwit, who has been bumming around renting himself to novelists as a readymade literary character, fumes because Somerset Maugham wouldn't see him. "But Somerset Maugham doesn't write novels any more," Sally Jay objects. "That's just it! ... Ran out of characters. That's where I could help him."

Hidden Step. For all her declination toward the horizontal, Sally Jay is not all bed. In her ruefully recounted odyssey among the oddballs, she is often comically appealing. Desperately worried lest she be mistaken for the sort of girl tourist who debarks with a guidebook and a six-month supply of toilet paper, Sally Jay manages a world-weary yawn even when she feels like yipping for joy. She thanks an Italian seducer who wants to marry her to get a nonexistent dowry. Why? "For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it." Only when she falls in love does she allow herself to lapse into disarming sincerity. "And then, as unexpected as a hidden step, I felt myself actually stumble and fall. And there it was, I was in love with him! As simple as that."

The plot, spooned out sparingly at the end like onion soup after a champagne-sodden night, concerns a vice ring, but there is not enough of it to spoil a delightful jag.

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Brown-eyed, lissome Elaine Dundy, "thirtyish," is the daughter of a retired Manhattan businessman, and spent some time as an American girl in Paris. But Sally Jay, she says, "isn't me. She started out that way, but she wasn't moving around. When I asked myself, 'What wouldn't I have done?' and made her do that, she finally got on her feet." Her intention as a writer: "To -fling myself into youth, to say this is how it was, these are my buddies." Currently, Author Dundy's buddies are those of Kenneth Tynan, witty young drama critic of the London Observer and Angry Young Man, who has been her husband since 1951. Tynan contributed the title and some advice: "Take out all the exclamation points." His wife took out most of them.

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