Critical Consensus for 12/17: Dominick Dunne’s Too Much Money
No, this is not #219 of the "Gossip Girl" series.
The late author Dominick Dunne earned his reputation critiquing the rich and famous for Vanity Fair, and his journalistic endeavors then informed his fiction. His 1988 novel People Like Us satirized New York’s wealthy, and now the characters are back in Dunne’s final novel, Too Much Money, released earlier this week. AP writer Mark Kennedy says the returning characters are “grayer-yet apparently no more wiser or less status obsessed” than they were twenty-one years ago, which makes for the type of scandalous, high-society drama readers have come to expect from Dunne. What stands out about this novel, according to critics, are the thinly-veiled caricatures of real people and the allusions Dunne makes to his own mortality (the author died of cancer in August, while making final edits to the novel). Dunne’s fictional alter-ego, Gus Bailey, returns here from People Like Us, and Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times writes, “Both Gus Bailey and Mr. Dunne were saying goodbye. The book is full of quietly heartbreaking evidence of that.” While some critics find the novel’s high-society world a bit outdated, most find Dunne’s satire sharp and entertaining, recommending the book as a gripping holiday read.
“It is this book’s style to obfuscate ever so slightly [...] while still allowing — no, insisting — that readers’ noses stay pressed to the glass of New York’s whirl of bold-face names.” - Janet Maslin, New York Times
“[Too Much Money] proves to be a compulsively readable diversion, showcasing Dunne’s razor wit and furious disdain for those who believe that laws apply to everyone but themselves.” - Publishers Weekly
“The writing lacks the wit that Dunne was known for. Instead, it reads like an episode of ‘Knot’s Landing,’ repeating information for readers who might have not been paying enough attention between paragraphs.” - Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“Dunne’s genius is how he puts this designer-clad, jewel-dripping world under a microscope.” - Mark Kennedy, The Associated Press
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