Mysterious, ambiguous, sensational, ridiculous

[sovay]

The fantasy-prone heroine of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) is an aspiring novelist and not very successful proprietor of a small bookshop which is lately out of copies of the best-selling bodice-ripper Always Opal, an obvious riff on Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber: "I was appreciating Opal's hot affair with Monseigneur de Montrouget and you interrupted me just as they were about to—" Alternatives proposed to a disappointed customer do not meet with success. The new Russian novel The Dniepier Goes Rolling Along is equally kidding Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows Home to the Sea, but I have no idea what My Heart Is Like a Trumpet is riffing on. "Mary Myrtle Miven's latest . . . a sort of idyllic love story about two horses. Very tender and poetic." I feel I should be able to detect the joke from the available information, but I got nothing. When the love interest entered the scene with an armload of unwanted ARCs, I was faintly surprised I had never encountered a copy of Fun with a Chafing Dish at a library sale myself.

Comments

[ethelmay]

Miven, not Mivens, sorry. I was thinking she might actually have been called Niven, but Google gives me a whole lot of David Niven and Bring On the Empty Horses (which I remember greatly enjoying when I was in middle school - it came out when I was around twelve or thirteen).

[sovay]

David Niven and Bring On the Empty Horses (which I remember greatly enjoying when I was in middle school - it came out when I was around twelve or thirteen).

Ten years ago I picked up at a copy at, actually, a library sale and gave it to spatch. (I have since read it myself, of course.)