The Locusts Have No King

Dawn Powell writes of New York City at its very peak, post-WWII, mid-20th century. Skyscrapers, badass automobiles, Radio City Music Hall, cafeterias. I swear that when you read this book, you'll hear the loud honking of the yellow taxicabs, you'll see the bright flashing neon lights of Broadway, you'll feel the surge of humanity walking with you on an overflowing sidewalk.

Isn't that what a well-written book accomplishes? The feat of placing you in a time and place you were born too late to experience, yet factors into your memory, as though you really were there. When I worked in a bookstore as a teenager, customers would purchase this title about once a week. This was long after she was dead, yet she still had a following. One day, I show more finally sat down and read this book, and I understood why.

New York, New York. The innocence has faded away, but the Metropolis Myth lives on.

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Book Circle Reads 75

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: No one has satirized New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection."

Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.

"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on show more the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion." -- Gore Vidal

My Review: My mother loved Dawn Powell, I think in part because Powell was tart-tongued and in part because no woman in Powell's books gets away with anything...but none of them seems to have any regrets about it.

We had old editions of her novels around, and when I found them and read them, I was surprised by the fact that my religious nut Fascist mama had time for this New York socialite world. When questioned, Mama said, "I grew up, daaaaaaahhhhhliiiin. You might, too. Your books won't, though."

They haven't. I wonder what makes someone hold onto a past they don't like anymore...gosh, can't think why anyone would do that....

So I read this book in the 1990s when Gore Vidal had started making noise about Powell and how very good she was. Steerforth Press, does it even exist now?, put several of the books out (this was after their big success with Mister Sandman, a seriously creepy book that I quite liked) for our book circle. A lot of people found it pretty dated then, what with adultery being gasp-worthy and playwrights being famous for non-musicals and men writing history books getting major publishing contracts.

I found Lyle and Frederick fresh as Vermont cream: She's bored by her life because she's never found a reason not to be, takes up with a man she doesn't much like because he's *completely* unlike the men she's around all the time, and when he becomes like those men, the usual thing happens. Bikini Atoll blows up. I mean, don't hydrogen bombs blow island paradises to kingdom come when you reject your adulterous lovers?

Powell is one witty broad, with a tongue so sharp Dorothy Parker was jealous and afraid. Her writing is **STILL** not yodeled about and caroled over, and I do not for the life of me understand why. It's caustically funny, it's well-constructed in the plot department, and it revels in its wickedness. It's what David Lodge and Christopher Buckley can only aspire to: Good and humorous.

Try this book, see if you agree. show less

Full of loathsome, selfish, shallow, attention-seeking characters, this "New York novel" of Dawn Powell is difficult to like. The writing, description and development of character is her usual fine work, but if you don't like New York and you seek the opposite in life of what the majority of the characters in this novel are seeking, you will often find your lip curling as you read about their shenanigans.
Top of the lip-curling list: Dodo. A 20-year-old woman who seeks to be the center of every male's attention, particularly those who have a big enough wallet. Baby-talking, baby-voiced, non-stop blabber, every time she showed up i mentally rolled my eyes. Next, the protagonist, Frederick Olliver, a 37-year-old history writer, who first show more is having an affair with a married playwright, then dumps her because she can't give him enough time and he doesn't fit in with her crowd, for the sickening Dodo, who plays him like a pack of cards. Ugh.
There's scenes of sexual harassment, a recalling of a rape by the playwright's husband, and plenty of bar scenes.

" 'how do you like our little schoolgirl, olliver?" Tyson asked, lightly spanking dodo. 'pretty sharp looking, I think. One of these days I'm going to keep her after school....' "

"There was the penthouse hardly a block away (he was sure he recognized the lattice wall and garden) which the woman wanted to sublet because 'her husband left her alone so much at nights.' Lyle had not liked the place, but that very night Allan had been impelled go back to see the blonde polish woman who was too pretty to be left alone. Call it rape, if you like, for she did struggle, but afterwards she was only ominously silent. baffled by the tacit scorn he had defensively said that she was not a virgin, after all. the woman had frostily replied, 'certainly not, but I like to choose.' " show less

Like with most of the books i read, i had no idea what this was going in. Although set in the 1940’s rather than ‘20s it has the same sort of empty, contemptible, worthless characters as the Great Gatsby, a novel i absolutely loathe.

Although in Gatsby defence i was force to study it at school which was never going to endear it to me even if it wasn’t terrible. This book however does have a much larger cast and the main two characters do at least have some talents.

Still, i prepared myself to actively hate this one. However the multiple character perspectives and weaving of thread upon thread of this tapestry of life drew me in kicking and screaming.
By the 3/4 mark this one was actually 4-stars, it did keep going though a bit more show more than i felt it needed to given the effect it was trying to achieve.

Overall, very well plotted, with a remarkably even handed approach to both its male and female characters. Very much not my preferred genre, time period or aesthetics but compelling even for me for a time. show less