Books: 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...