What I've been reading this week

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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it

I finished A Time To Be Born by Dawn Powell (1942), which was gifted by Pushkin Press and is out with them next week I think. I absolutely loved this and implore you to pick up a copy, it’s just so fun and good. It put me in mind of a few things, namely Gore Vidal’s writing (I wasn’t surprised to learn that he was a fan of hers), Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), Edith Wharton’s writing, and a lot of British nineteenth-century fiction, especially Anthony Trollope and Dickens’ more gossipy stuff. It’s definitely a New York novel, which might be why I was thinking of McCarthy and Wharton, but it also has the same detached wryness about society people that they have. It’s quite a grand novel that focuses in on the domestic, which is why I think there’s something so nineteenth century about it -- but this is very much a war novel, and a condition-of-America novel, which is where the Vidal came in.

It’s about two women, both from Lakeville, Ohio, who have moved to New York at different times and for different ends. Amanda has clawed her way up through society by writing a historical novel that became a national success after she also clawed her husband away from someone else -- Julian is the owner of multiple newspapers and his favourable reviews and coverage have launched her into a career of political commentary that she largely outsources to her secretary and researchers. Vicky has lived most of her life in Lakeville, but finds herself needing a new start after her on-off again boyfriend marries her business partner behind her back. Amanda sees an opportunity in Vicky’s arrival into the city, placing her in an apartment that she would like to use in order to conduct an affair with her former lover Ken. Julian gets Vicky a job at a lifestyle magazine, and within this new life she meets a host of opportunistic people and other oddballs -- as well as Ken himself.

Powell’s assessment of human behaviour and its intricacies in social settings is really quite unbelievable. As an example:

‘“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way; taken into a handsome mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her.’

The novel is full of assessments like this, but Powell does this in such a way that it doesn’t seem as though she only has written a novel in order to get them across to the reader. (This happens quite a lot I think; writers become preoccupied with the impressions they want to cause and so their analysis becomes pointed to the extent that they would have probably benefitted from just writing an essay collection -- I’m thinking of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You? (2021) as an example of this, even though I am a Rooney lover). Powell cares about her narrative and characters as much as she cares about her social commentary, so it doesn’t become an overbearing critique of New York society in the American pre-war era. Vicky acts very much as a grounding mechanism because she has lived outside of this culture for most of her life, but she becomes embroiled in it through Amanda’s conniving and through her own emotions, as she becomes invested in individuals within it whether she wants to or not.

Amanda is a real piece of work, and I feel as though Powell was satirising a few people in her. She believes herself to be cleverer than everyone around her but, of course, she isn’t; she simply isn’t used to the games that are played and wherewithal that the wealthy have. Powell shows us how she will always be a smalltown woman from Ohio to lots of people in society, even if they want to get close to her because of her current influence. She’s a hard woman to like, especially as she treats Vicky so poorly, but we are invited to sympathise with the bulk of her actions so she doesn’t become cartoonishly villainous. It is the more established people in New York’s social settings that are shown to be the most manipulative and duplicitous, with a few exceptions.

A Time to Be Born feels very fun and gossipy but it is also deeply serious. It’s a book about how unpleasant and false writers can be, while also being about an America on the brink of crisis as it enters World War II. Even the unpleasantness has a serious edge; you are left to wonder how many other major speakers of previous and current eras had significant help from a dedicated group of people around them telling them which opinion it would be beneficial to have.

I’m now reading another Willy Vlautin novel (my third this year), this time The Free (2014). By page 6 I was welling up, so it looks as though it’ll be another devastating tale of rural Americana, this time with a focus on healthcare and PTSD.

More next week!