Come Back to Sorrento.

My thoughts on the David Price and Chris Young contracts are up for Insiders.

Dawn Powell is one of the most criminally overlooked novelists I’ve come across; moderately popular (more with critics than consumers) during her lifetime, her books all fell out of print after her death, only coming back thanks to the dogged efforts of music critic Tim Page and a seminal 1987 essay by Gore Vidal that reignited some interest in her work. That interest has flagged again, unfortunately, as so many of her devotees are themselves out of the conversation or have passed away (other fans included Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos).

I first encountered her work in 2009 when I read her magnum opus A Time to Be Born, a scathing, witty satire that showed off her sparkling prose and deep understanding of character. Her novels fit into two main categories: Stories of artists and pretenders up to their necks in the life and culture of New York (think of the Algonquin Round Table … and imagine a book about all the people who think they belonged in that circle), and stories of people trying to escape dead-end lives in rural Ohio, usually hoping to get to New York. The former novels tend to be more incisive, while the latter are softer even though Powell doesn’t ease up on the parodic throttle.

Come Back to Sorrento belongs to the second group, a very short novel about two people in small town Ohio who believe they were destined for greatness until Fate intervened, although even here we can simultaneously see Powell’s empathy for these flawed characters while she’s mocking their pretension and self-absorption. Constance “Connie” Benjamin was blessed with a beautiful singing voice and once sang for “the great Morini,” but her grandfather refused to give her any support for lessons or to start a musical career, so she ran away from home and, yata yata yata, ended up married to a cobbler in a small Ohio town, with two daughters, one of whom has no respect for either of her parents. Connie’s life picks up when she meets the new music teacher, the bachelor Blaine Decker, who has his own story of a brush with fame and a belief that he’s a genius whose life is being wasted through no fault of his own. Connie’s situation is foolish, while Blaine’s is tragic, but the two find kindred spirits in each other because each will support the other’s delusions of faded grandeur – even as their lives appear to be going absolutely nowhere.

These two characters swirl gradually towards the drain in the nosy, insular small town that they feel doesn’t deserve their greatness, until an event that Connie in particular should have seen coming a mile away leads her and Blaine on a futile mission to the medium city (you know, the one you have to pass through before you get to the big city) that lays bare before Connie how little substance there is supporting her ego. The trip devastates her and unravels the fragile friendship she had with Decker, whose demons are more tangible and harder to avoid even with the facade he throws up before himself – one which no one but Connie seems to believe in the first place. Decker ends up the one who gets the second chance to live his life, although even as the novel closes it’s unclear whether he has the courage to match his ambition.

Come Back to Sorrento is currently out of print, again, but can be found in the Library of America’s five-novel volumee Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942, which also includes A Time to Be Born. David Mamet has the film rights and wrote a screenplay for the book, with the movie apparently to star Felicity Huffman as Connie and William H. Macy (natch) as Decker, but as far as I can tell it’s been in turnaround since about 2010.

Next up: Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House, winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which has been very engaging for the first 40% of the book.