SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

An early novel by Dawn Powell (1896-1965) casts a satirical eye on small-town Midwestern life.

The long-running revival of Powell kicked off in 1987, when Gore Vidal championed her work in the New York Review of Books. Since then, there’s been a biography by Tim Page, two volumes of her fiction in the Library of America, and publication of her Diaries and Selected Letters. Yet, as critic Ilana Masad laments, “far more people have heard of Powell’s contemporary wit Dorothy Parker.” Masad contributes the introduction to this reissue of the author’s 1928 novel, her second (although she renounced the first). Like Dance Night (1930) and Come Back to Sorrento (1932), it’s set in Ohio; Powell was born and raised there before moving to New York City, the setting for her best-known work. Sisters Linda and Dorrie Shirley live with their grandmother, called Aunt Jule, in a boardinghouse on the wrong side of the tracks in fictional Birchfield. Beautiful blond Linda, with her “resentful blue eyes,” yearns for respectability and looks down on Jule’s lodgers—“riffraff from the trains,” “fast women and gambling men”—while pining for Courtenay Stall, scion of a good Birchfield family. Younger Dorrie, an aspiring poet, romanticizes their world and the people in it, especially old man Wickley, forever reading aloud from his dust-covered books, “that great voice hurling magnificent words at the walls” of his attic room. There’s not much plot to speak of—will Courtenay ever take notice of Linda?—but the lodging house provides a parade of unsentimental character sketches, including a scandalously flirtatious farm girl married to a much older man, a New York transplant surprised she can’t get lobster salad and chocolate éclairs in Birchfield, and a wheelchair-bound gossip who maliciously follows all the comings and goings.

Delightful apprentice work by a great American novelist in the making.