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
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
Next up: Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House