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"Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist"
An expert offers a sweeping (and unconvincing) theory of violence.
By JoAnn Gutin
[09/28/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Poetry slam
She sent my husband laughable love poems and talked trash about me. He says the affair is finished, but how do I get over it?
By Garrison Keillor
[09/28/99]

Book Bag
Primal loss
The author of "Black Tickets" picks six powerful books on the first wounds of childhood.
By Jayne Anne Phillips
[09/27/99]

Ivory Tower
The reeducation of a queer theorist
Battling cancer, a nice male psychoanalyst and her own sexual demons, the diva of queer theory learned a new way of living.
By Maria Russo
[09/27/99]

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"Lucky"
A memoir of rape that's just about everything you'd expect it not to be
By Sally Eckhoff
[09/27/99]

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The NASDAQ may be slipping, but not the boom market in vanity. As I am sure you have noticed, there is a carnival of unbridled self-regard, self-interest and self-promotion out there. Financial gurus, with a straight face, prescribe techniques to couple monetary increase with spiritual perfection. Love and lust align themselves with social and pecuniary advantage in uncanny fashion. No work of art or entertainment or its maker is allowed to face the public without exquisitely devised campaigns of hype, buzz and spin. If you are neither rich nor famous, our whole culture implies, chances are you are a chump. (Not invited to the Talk party, were you?) How, amid this dispiriting spectacle, is a thinking, feeling human being supposed to avoid the counsels of despair and the lure of cheap cynicism?

May I suggest a massive inoculation of the works of the late, great American novelist Dawn Powell? Although she published her last novel, "The Golden Spur," in 1962, at the tail end of the Beat era, and died in l965 as little known as she was through her entire career, I believe no other writer, living or dead, speaks more directly to our cheesy, gaudy, unsettling moment. As natural and skillful a satirist as American literature has ever produced, she is the equal, as Edmund Wilson averred (rather too late in the game to do her much good) of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell as a fashioner of devastatingly funny social comedies.

The novels of Manhattan's beau and demi-mondes, on which Powell's current reputation rests -- "The Locusts Have No King," "A Time to Be Born," "The Wicked Pavilion," "Angels on Toast" and "Turn, Magic Wheel" among them -- rival Ring Lardner's fiction in their drollery and ear for American lingo, and they match the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges in speed and sophistication. To all of this they add a bracing sexual realism that would have made the Hays Office apoplectic. Informing her work, above and beyond its surface delights, was an exquisitely evolved view of human nature that allowed Powell to crack wise and be wise at the same time.

Just the simple fact of a Dawn Powell revival is immensely cheering. You can't say that she'd been eclipsed because -- a small circle of admirers aside -- she labored for decades in a long commercial twilight. Then it was Team Powell to the rescue: her close friend Gore Vidal, whose landmark 1987 essay "Dawn Powell: The American Writer" sparked the first flames of interest; music critic Tim Page, her biographer, the editor of her diaries and a tireless proselytizer, whose selflessness in this potentially quixotic cause is truly astonishing; and the noble Steerforth Press of Vermont, which has made the bulk of her work available in handsome editions. A literary revival undertaken purely on the basis of taste and devotion, with no obvious ideological constituency for it nor profit in it? It's not a scenario that could be found in any Dawn Powell novel -- yet her work has gradually found a passionate coterie, even among writers and editors in their 20s and 30s who might have been expected to find her books rather antique.

Next page | Clare Booth Luce, a monster you can identify with