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To look and to listen with such sustained attention is an endorsement of the world beneath her immediate gaze. From a writer with such fundamental curiosity, one might expect an affirmative vision of the reality she evokes. But the generosity that initially prompts her gaze usually ends in her acknowledgment of the deficiency of whatever she sees. This tension between curiosity and pessimism is never resolved in her work, as it is for example in Zola's novels, where the sociological sweep of the reportage is subsumed under a generalizing theory of human nature. Nor does her hunger for observation produce an irreducible complexity of character, as it does in later James; instead of suggestive, nuanced portraits, Powell presents a series of depthless sketches in a loose collage of narrative events. Her characters remain stubbornly flat, their limitations anatomized through some telling absurdity or flimsy, self-justifying illusion. In the Ohio books, her characters blend into the raw bleakness of their provincial world, while in the New York novels they provoke wicked laughter. What remains constant in all of her works is an insistence on human weakness and folly.
Powell is a great chronicler of weakness, and in this she is working against a characteristic American optimism about the individual's capacity for change and self-improvement. Take, for example, the musings of Madeleine Greaves in The Story of a Country Boy (1934), when she thinks about "the way human beings change or if it was true that they changed—if it was not truer that each year further unveils the reality, and the final bones are never lovely." Her characters rarely evolve in response to the changes occurring around them. They tend, rather, and with hefty doses of self-deception, to make fragile, barely workable pacts with reality, designed to accommodate their fears and frailties. Their accommodations never last, and the leisurely narrative drive of Powell's best fiction measures the slow deterioration of her characters' illusions. With significant exceptions, like the writer Dennis Orphen in Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), Powell's characters usually meet the onset of change with the desperate hope that what has gotten them this far might last a little longer. This desire for stasis prompts behavior inevitably shrill and distorted—but often savagely funny.
Only a reader of conspicuous numbness would fail to laugh at the barbs in Powell's comic novels and her published diaries. Not all of her contemporaries were comfortable with their laughter. Diana Trilling, writing about the figures in The Locusts Have No King (1948), complains that "not a single individual among them ... suggests any human ideal which justifies a writer bothering with the human race at all." Similar criticisms were leveled at most of Powell's New York novels. Anticipating Trilling's comment, reviewer Edith Walton of the New York Times—who had been disturbed by the "peculiarly sharp and ruthless edge" of Powell's wit in Turn, Magic Wheel—writes that in The Happy Island (1938) "there is hardly a character who seems really human." She goes on to remark disapprovingly of Powell's "stinging contempt," adding that "one has the covert suspicion that [the novel] was not worth her time." Though the judgment here is rather dismissive, it does raise an inevitable issue when evaluating Powell's work. What the reviewer presumably means by "really human characters" are characters in whom she could identify herself. Powell's books usually thwart such efforts, often through their sheer banality. She provides little consolation, except laughter, for the weaknesses she exposes—and they often seem like our own weaknesses.
The razor-sharp social comedy of the New York novels might be taken, then, as an attempt to instruct by negative example. And yet Powell was averse to moralizing in any form, and she can be especially hard on people who spout self-assured moral precepts. Besides, by the time she began writing, didacticism in the novel had pretty well been junked. Powell rejected the traditional authority of the satirist, and the comedy in the New York novels can be called satiric only in a very loose sense. "In Petronius, John Donne, in Aristophanes, Molière and Restoration plays," she wrote in her diary on 1 September 1933, "the vitality of the satire is derived from the completeness of the picture—not one acting part or thought represents the norm, the audience, the critic or the author—there is, in a word, no voice, no pointer to the moral." As is sometimes the case, her sense of literary history is a little fuzzy—it's hard to accept that there is "no pointer to the moral," say, in the elegant entertainments of Molière. That aside, it's important that she means to emphasize the vitality of satire to exceed any claim to moral instruction. Powell was never interested in advocating an explicit system of beliefs through the lampooning of others: "the enjoyment of satire," her entry continues, "is that of ninepins—seeing the ball strike truly and the pins go down." The modest, rather coy metaphor signals that Powell did not want her comedy to teach us anything, or anything very obvious.
Her thoughts on satire raise more questions than they answer. To return, though in a more generous spirit, to the issue raised by the Times's reviewer, we might ask whether Powell created her unsympathetic figures simply out of the writer's peculiar form of arrogance. The stories of Dorothy Parker, a writer to whom Powell has too often been compared, suffer frequently from this authorial patronization. Powell complained to Edmund Wilson that Nabokov displayed a similar haughtiness because he was "motivated by a compulsion to denigrate his heroes and thus strut his own superiority." In diary entries from the 1950s Powell seems puzzled at her inability to create characters that invited sympathy, particularly since her much coveted commercial success might have been more likely had readers found it easier to identify with them.
That Powell was sensitive to the writer's potential high-handedness in the treatment of her own characters suggests that she was not much inclined to the contempt Ms. Walton of the Times attributed to her. The writing, in the novels and diaries, bears this out. One usually gets the sense from her novels that her characters just might become a little better than they first appear to be. As she finished The Wicked Pavilion in February 1954, she wrote that in her last chapter "the truth is not what the beloved failed to do—the hurt, the wound, the betrayal—but the lovely gift he intended to give, the faithfulness he would have wished to give, the nobility he would have liked to show." If the diary entry of March 30, 1958, is to be believed, in which Powell wrote deprecatingly of one of her "deep faults" as a novelist, she often developed her characters through a sustained (if failed) attempt to make them likable: "I frequently choose a hero or heroine I do not like myself purely as a personal exercise in trying to understand that kind of person. I never end up liking them any better." Her characters usually fail to change for the better, but Powell doesn't like to foreclose their possibilities in advance.
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