The Joyous Season (1964) by Patrick Dennis. If you haven’t read this, or any of the late Mr. Dennis’s work, drop what you’re doing and get something from his catalog. The most famous tale is “Auntie Mame” but anything he wrote is good.
This is a story that evokes the New York of the early 960s. You can almost see Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall wining and dining in the background. While he may not have set out to create a time capsule of the era, Mr. Dennis did so with a vengeance.
The book is set over the course of a divorce between the parents of 10 year-old Kerry (our narrator) and his six year old going on forty sister, Missy. They live n a splendid suite of apartments in a tony section of the city. Mom and dad are both from money and he is also an architect, and they do love each other. But they have family and those interlopers manage to get in the way of happiness. His mother, Ga-Ga, is a clone of Auntie Mame with far less time, or knowledge, of children. Her mother, Gran, acts like a Victorian dowager who is on the precipice of complete finical ruin (far from the truth) and still has time to manage her daughter’s life.
Hilarious, satirical, reflecting on the past of Mr. Dennis’s own life and that of those close to him, this is a wonderful book that will have tears running and sides aching from laughter. Missy’s insights are so to the bone they take more than a moment or two to regroup from.
And yes, the character H.A., Kerry’s uncle that still lives with Gran, is a Horses A—,
Everyone gets what they deserve despite the train wreck of the weddings that cap the story. Do yourself a favor, read this book and then pass it on to your friends. Sure to please. ( )

Not at all PC- but hilarious. I first read it as a kid on vacation-and was relieved to know that not all the nut cases were related to me. Sill hilarious! ( )

http://leavesandpages.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/review-the-joyous-season-by-patri...

Ignore the candy cane on the dust jacket, and the internet references you may find to this being a “holiday book.” No, no, no. It is not. Christmas features, but only incidentally. The scope is much broader than that!

“Patrick Dennis,” you’ll possibly be saying to yourself. “Sounds familiar, but ???”

Auntie Mame, darlings!

Ten years after penning his highly successful social satire starring the exuberant Mame and her sedate nephew Patrick, author Edward Tanner - writing under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis – came up with this little comedic gem. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having only ever previously experienced Mame, but The Joyous Season was absolutely marvelous, and better than I had anticipated. Such a treat!

10-year-old Kerrington - Kerry – is our narrator. He lives in a posh New York apartment with his 6-year-old sister Melissa – Missy – and his parents, both members of the New York “aristocracy”, though his mother’s family is higher up in the strata, and his maternal grandmother never lets his father forget that for a moment. Dad’s a successful architect, and Mom is most definitely one of the ladies-who-lunch, leaving much of the care of her two children to the fifth member of the menage, Lulu.


"Lulu’s our nurse. We need a nurse like we need a case of mumps. I mean, hell, I’m ten and eleven twelfths years old and I’ve already smoked over two packs of Tareytons. (They’ve got that extra charcoal filter, you know, for cancer.) Even old Missy can take a bath and get dressed and wipe herself without any help, which is pretty good for six, I guess. But like Mom always said, we can’t go around New York alone because of kidnappers and Dirty Old Men (especially on East Eighty-sixth Street) and types like that. So Lulu drags us across town every day, me to St. Barnaby’s – although she turns me loose at the stationery store so the kids won’t think I’m being hauled around by a nurse at my age – and Missy two blocks further (or farther, whichever it is) to Miss Farthingale’s. Except for that, Lulu hasn’t got much to do except see we go to bed and get up and eat and don’t fight.

"Lulu’s quite a character. She’s colored and elderly and has been with us ever since I was born. She’s kind of old fashioned and hates the N.A.A.C.P. and says she doesn’t want to integrate with any white people except Missy and me and that’s only because she gets paid to. Lulu says that after us she needs a rest, if we don’t kill her first, and she wants to retire and move back down South. Gadzeeks, South! I mean I don’t even like Palm Beach, which is supposed to be the next thing to heaven… Give me New York City and keep the rest. Crazy! Anyhow, Lulu tells us real interesting stories and knows every kind of poker there is – except strip – and always lets us have some of her beer and hates Gran’s place in East Haddock almost worse than we do. I mean Lulu is great, even if we don’t need a nurse."

Oh – I forgot one more family member. There’s also Maxl, the incontinent, prone-to-carsickness, full-of-mild-vice dachshund. His escapades run in harmony to the ups and downs of Kerry’s and Missy’s lives, providing a kind of sub fusc harmony to the human drama of this gloriously dramatic tale.

So as the story opens, Kerry, Missy, Lulu and Maxl are reluctantly heading out the door to Gran’s place in East Haddock. Gran is Mom’s mother, and oh boy, is she ever a snooty piece of work! And she’s more or less the reason for the whole darned situation Kerry and Missy are in. To condense greatly, on Christmas morning there was a bit of a situation with Mom and Daddy which saw several kinds of shots fired, much broken glass, some physical violence and some exceedingly blunt words spoken. As a result, Kerr and Missy are poised to become Children of Divorce, much to the delight of meddling Gran. Everyone (except Gran, who openly gloats about the come-uppance of her despised soon-to-be-ex son-in-law) has decided to be Very Civilized About It All, and Not To Make The Children Suffer, but suffering they are indeed, though not perhaps in the way one would expect.

Kerry and Missy, despite all of the adult antics going on in their world, are the epitome of well-adjusted, though no one but Lulu seems to quite get that, and Kerry’s knowing-naive narrative exposes the follies of the grown ups, and New York upper crust society at large, to our appreciative eyes.

Mom is suddenly being courted by her own divorce lawyer, the social-climbing Sam Reynolds, while Daddy (a successful and well-heeled architect) is pounced on by the predatory Dorian Glen, a self-invented fashion magazine editor. This gives much glorious scope for satirical commentary, and Kerry is well up to it. His descriptive passages are true works of art, and I found myself wearing a perpetual smile as I willingly gave myself up to the contrivances of the complicated plot.

For example, as this is New York in the 1960s, psychoanalysis is all the rage, and Kerry finds himself saddled with three hours a week with Dr. Epston. The adults in his life just want to ensure that he is coping well, and they are sure that he needs “fixing”, which if nothing else gives Patrick Dennis via Kerry an opportunity to get in some juicy digs at the world of the well-paid New York shrinks.


"Dr. Epston’s consulting room is small and dim with a couch to lie on; two easy chairs; Kleenex, for crying into, I guess; a desk and a bookshelf with about a million copies of Tensions in the Metropolitan Adolescent by I. Lorenz Epston. I guess it wasn’t exactly what they call a best seller, but he’s getting rid of the supply bit by bit by making each patient’s family buy a copy (at ten bucks a throw). There are also some pictures on the wall that look like Missy painted them and a framed photograph of Dr. Epston’s three daughters. One is in the upper school at Dalton, one goes to Rudolf Steiner and the littlest one is in the School for Nursery Years – if that gives you some idea of what kind of kids he’s got. They also look like Eskimos. In fact, Dr. Epston’s first question was always, “What are you thinking about right now?” And my answer was always “Eskimos.” But when he’d ask me why, I just couldn’t tell him, because even if he is kind of a boob, I didn’t want to hurt the poor guy’s feelings. So I’d hem and haw and talk about igloos and blubber and wasn’t it interesting that the French spelled Eskimos Esquimaux and like that. So I always got kind of a demerit for being what Dr. Epston called “evasive” (when I was only trying to be polite) and at the end of the first week Mom sent off to Wakefield-Young Books for copies of Nanook of the North and Inyuk and some other suitable reading about the North Pole, when I didn’t care much one way or another.

"The first day Dr. Epston made me lie down on the couch and darned if I didn’t drop right off to sleep while he was droning away about trusting him and telling him everything that came into my mind, no matter what. After he woke me up he kept asking me what I was trying to escape from and he wouldn’t believe me when I told him I’d stayed up late the night before watching “The Nurses” (it was all about this dope fiend) and it would have rude to say that also he was kind of a bore. But after that he let me sit up straight in a chair."

And so on, and so on. Kerry certainly does not suffer from lack of things to say; his self-confessed verbosity is what makes this satire such a delight. He’s a truly nice kid, for all the knowingness and the cynical tone he tries to maintain, and his relationship with the volatile Missy is just plain sweet, though they swap sibling-appropriate verbal digs and occasional blows.

Missy is a glorious character in her own right, and it would take me pages and pages to do her proper justice, so I’m not going to even try.

If you liked Auntie Mame, I’ll guarantee that you’ll love The Joyous Season. Highly recommended. ( )

This was a little disappointing. I had been hoping for a fun Christmas read, and although the Christmas chapter was pretty amusing, most of the story took place at other times of the year. Kerry tells the story of his life when his parents decide to divorce--including the times the children are sent to stay with both of their difficult grandmothers. Kerry reminds me of a young Holden Caulfield--he observes closely what's going on around him, but doesn't always understand what he's seeing. The best part of this book is Kerry's precocious little sister, Missy, and his admiration for her. Pretty cute! ( )

http://www.lonelymountain.net/books/favorites.html#dennistjs ( )