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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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Astonishingly and annoyingly, "Sex and the City" is being taken for the last word in metropolitan sophistication, when it is at best a slickly packaged exercise in screwing cute. Other avatars of the comedy of unmarriage are so ubiquitous that, as Stacy D'Erasmo writes in the New York Times Magazine, "the marital quest of the fashionable, sexually well-traveled, 30-something woman has become so popular as to seem like the dominant narrative of life on earth right now." As diverting as some of these books and shows are, it's not hard to detect the bitterness beneath the brittleness and faux ennui of the heroines, the deep sense of betrayal -- by men, by feminism, by the whole vexed enterprise of sex and love.

It is time for the culture to evolve to the next level -- to the Dawn Powell level -- on this matter. Even today her novels can startle with their frank, matter-of-fact acceptance of the carnal imperative and the ease with which sex and lying shack up. The randy executives of "Angels on Toast" expend more time and energy cavorting with their various mistresses and cooling off their miserable and suspicious wives than on their business affairs -- rich fodder for the all-men-are-dogs school of gender relations. Yet the biggest dog, the entrepreneur Lou Donovan, is left howling with sexual jealousy and need by his shrewd inamorata Tina Kameray and peeved when his heartbroken and neglected wife takes up with a Spanish nightclub dancer. The whole business is too richly ironic for Powell to reduce to a set of grievances -- it takes two (or three or four) to tango. Rather, on the subject of love and sex, she is to the novel what Lorenz Hart was to the lyric. "When love congeals/it soon reveals/the faint aroma of performing seals/the double crossing of a pair of heels/I wish I were in love again" -- in its wry and rueful romanticism, it reads like a condensed Dawn Powell novel.

How to stop whining.

Dawn Powell's literary career was one long quest for some modest measure of commercial success and critical understanding -- neither of which arrived in her lifetime. She was taken on by the best publishers (including the legendary Maxwell Perkins), but they never quite caught the trick of presenting her cheerfully amoral novels to a public in constant search of uplift. She paid tribute to none of the reigning pieties, and for this, Gore Vidal believes, she had to be punished: "Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final down payment on Love and the Family." (As my "Dictionary of Literary Terms" informs me, "Women satirists are very rare ...") The high-toned critics of the Lionel Trilling persuasion were put off by the evident absence of any "moral center" in her novels, and no one else materialized to teach an audience how to read her. Her private life was marked by ill health, financial difficulties, an alcoholic husband with a failing advertising career and an autistic son who eventually required expensive institutionalization. In spite of all that she is remembered by everyone who knew her as a fast friend and the best and funniest of company -- and she produced superior novel after superior novel across the decades, without flagging or public complaint.

The inner Dawn Powell was even more impressive. Her novels imply no correspondence whatsoever between artistic and literary abilities and any other admirable qualities (if anything, they suggest the opposite). Yet the absolutely remarkable book "The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965" reveal her to be a tenacious and tough-minded artist and quite simply a courageous human being. In American literature only Flannery O'Connor's indelible collection of letters, "The Habit of Being," is its equal for bracing intelligence and resilience. Like O'Connor, Powell knew her worth without a scintilla of either arrogance or false modesty; she suffered fools not at all and dealt with ill health and adversity with no self-pity whatsoever. In the diaries, she notes one day, at low ebb, "Again facing hopeless years of good work never properly presented so that the best years seem a riotous waste." A week later she rebounds with "Did a great deal of work on a novel with a feeling of confidence and pleasure in it that I hope sustains itself." The true artist must learn to accommodate such mood swings. (Many do not and are destroyed.) In a well-ordered literary universe, every student of creative writing -- and everyone else, frankly -- would be required to read this book, to learn from a master the high costs and quiet exaltations of the literary vocation. The "Diaries" are Powell's real and final masterpiece, one that contains lessons for living on every page.

If the Dawn Powell revival continues, especially among younger readers and writers, it augurs well for the urban comedies of the future, which will be smart and stylish and penetrating, addressed to an audience schooled in the complexities of true wit. Her heirs will appear and so-called "Gal Lit" will evolve into real literature. "Here is the real outrage," she once wrote: "that there are mysteriously privileged people who find inexplicable delight in books -- consolation, laughter, comprehension, beauty -- and the Censor or Proctor does not." Join the party of mysterious privilege and begin reading Dawn Powell right away.
salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999

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