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Reviews
"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]

Reviews
"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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How to be a romantic realist.

Powell's signature novels were dizzying comedies of Manhattanites on the make. As culturally and geographically specific as they were, however, they manage to be timeless and universal. These same social, sexual and career shenanigans can be observed in dozens of other hyper-prosperous urban settings where life has been transformed into a theater of the self. Now we are all out there on a shoeshine and a smile. Arthur Miller thought this was tragic. Dawn Powell thought it was funny -- and wonderful to observe.

A permanently transplanted Midwesterner, Powell had a feeling for the city -- and the possibilities it offered escapees from elsewhere -- that was genuinely romantic, even if her characterizations were anything but. She plants her cast of urban types -- the writers and artists on the skids or on the rise, the publishers and gallery owners who feed on their talent, the gold-digging sexual opportunists and the mistress-juggling businessmen, the social-climbing salonistes and the slumming tycoons -- on her stage with perfect economy and for a couple of hundred pages watches them mingle and angle, collide and connect and carom off each other with an amused and nonjudgmental eye. Love blooms and dies, luck smiles and frowns, virtue goes unrewarded and venality unpunished exactly after the fashion of life itself. Dawn Powell is utterly onto her characters, but they rarely get wise to themselves. She has a peerless understanding of the endless varieties of self-deception, locating her comedy in the spaces between what her characters think of themselves and how others see (or see through) them. Yet one never feels that she finds their dreams, desires and ambitions small or corrupt or unworthy.

How to avoid hypocrisy.

There is a censoriousness abroad in the land that coexists oddly with our prosperity and its related license. The gaming industry funds anti-gambling campaigns, tobacco companies anti-smoking campaigns, distillers sobriety campaigns. The message: Indulge your vices, but have the decency to feel guilty about them.

The novels of Dawn Powell have no truck with such hypocrisies. She does not judge, excuse or sentimentalize, viewing her characters with a fine indifference to their manifold failings. Her almost Flaubertian aesthetic morality was often misread as sour detachment, but it was anything but. As she noted in her diary, "The satirist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are that he sees no need to disguise their characteristics -- he loves the whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism.'" The Powell Effect is strikingly evident in her handling of the Clare Booth Luce character in her roman à clef "A Time to Be Born." The character is, in every conventional sense, a monster of sexual and literary deception, and a consummate liar and user, yet seen through Powell's clarifying lens her actions become understandable -- one even comes to accord her energies a respect akin to that we have for Becky Sharp. To feel, really feel, the heartbreak of an objectively contemptible character is an exquisitely mixed literary experience, and Powell was peerless in keeping her readers off stride.

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