We used to live in DC, and whenever the new political tell-all book came out--and I'm guessing we're about to enter a new golden era of these--the joke was that DC types always read such books starting with the index. Who's mentioned? Who's absent?

My edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas doesn't have an index of names, but if it did, it might run as long as the book itself: Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, Cezanne, Apollinaire -- to say nothing of Hélène, Gertrude Stein's cook, who did not care for Matisse at all:

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these thing but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of effs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.

The sly wink of the book's cover--that this autobiography is not, in fact, written by Alice Toklas but her longtime partner Gertrude Stein, still causes me to do a double take, even though I've long come around to the opinion that this really IS an autobiography, if channeled through another writer. Every so often Stein's voice and thoughts does break into the text--and I think Alice would have been apt and able to punctuate all the words that needed punctuating--but otherwise, one of the marvels of this text, Stein's most readable, is that Toklas really does come alive on the page, voice and all.

On the plaque outside their famed salon at 27, rue de Fleurus, in the 6th, Stein's name is several sizes larger than the rest of the text. But even to the speediest person walking by--because what painters and poets still ring the bell here?--Alice's name, embedded in the brief caption beneath Stein, still shines through--much as she does in this surprisingly giddy book.