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\u2019s 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, \u201cfar more people have heard of Powell\u2019s contemporary wit Dorothy Parker.\u201d Masad contributes the introduction to this reissue of the author\u2019s 1928 novel, her second (although she renounced the first). Like Dance Night (1930) and Come Back to Sorrento (1932), it\u2019s 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 \u201cresentful blue eyes,\u201d yearns for respectability and looks down on Jule\u2019s lodgers\u2014\u201criffraff from the trains,\u201d \u201cfast women and gambling men\u201d\u2014while 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, \u201cthat great voice hurling magnificent words at the walls\u201d of his attic room. There\u2019s not much plot to speak of\u2014will Courtenay ever take notice of Linda?\u2014but 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\u2019t get lobster salad and chocolate \u00e9clairs in Birchfield, and a wheelchair-bound gossip who maliciously follows all the comings and goings.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}