Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life in Britain, in the vision of Novelist Anthony Powell, is a dense forest of decayed and intertwined family trees. This fourth novel of a series he calls The Music of Time explores the latest area of Powell's private park land to be railed...
...Widmerpool, a figure of fun reappearing in this novel as the "new man" of modern Britain. In the course of the plot he is taught that marriage is not an exact science but, as Foch said of war, "a terrible and passionate drama." Widmerpool is a bouncing, uncivilized young City type whose political sagacity is expressed in his plan for averting World War II, then looming. The plan: give the Order of the Garter to Hermann Göring ("After all, it is what such things...
...Nicholas Jenkins, the novel's narrator and a movie scriptwriter (as Powell himself once was), whose humor is a soft blackjack. When Widmerpool asks him what would be a suitable name under which to register for a "clandestine weekend" at a country hotel, Jenkins replies: "Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Smith...
...great beast of a city" that crouches like a "blue-black panther" in the slum area beyond Chicago's North Clark Street. His socialite wife, Wanda, watches him go: "She smiled, knowing him so well. Prowling. For the story . . . She liked him that way. He should do a novel...
Grant never quite gets around to it, but his creator and prototype, Novelist Willard Motley, regrettably has. In his first, bestselling novel, Knock On Any Door (1947), Motley set out to demonstrate that the path from tenement to electric chair is paved with society's inattentions. The logic was sometimes shaky, but Motley's hoarse bellow of rage was convincing enough to make the indictment stick. In the current novel, his third, Motley stacks his evidence even higher, but he protests too much, and the bellow of rage has cracked to a querulous whimper...