Customer Reviews

The Happy Island

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4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
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I found this to be one of Dawn Powell's most entertaining books, deliciously dark and vicious. If you liked the cult classic film "The Women" you should find this delightful. This book is of particular interest to Gay readers as many of the main characters are realistically drawn Gays, something very rare in a book from the 1930's.

Resoundingly fresh despite its age; this story of New York's fast set is less a tale of the era of Dawn Powell and her circle than of modernity. These characters are no more dated than Warhol, Jackie O or current cast of post modern successors. Powell includes with a frank and unapologetic intimacy characters and relationships that are straight, homosexual, freakishly over and under-sexed, effette, misers- that is desperate, complicated and flawed people in a mix of transplants and liars.There are no true heroes here, and the louts can become the worshipped with as much predictability as the inevitable pace to the grave. Prudence Bly is a self-made, hard drinking, no talent beauty whose last desperate plea for a soul becomes a renunciation of all her success and stature for a subordinated relationship with a brutally anti-New York playwright, an egoist himself, but of the country-is purer variety.
Prudence, like Powell, one suspects, was not blind to the limitations of her future and her own aged and unheralded part in it, but it is her humor and her going along for the fun, that renders her a well-developed, vulnerable and ob so modern, heroine. This book is one of my favorites in the Powell repetoire- I rate it more highly than other reviewers. Its real, informed and ageless.

This novel captures the time when CAfe Society ruled the Greenwich Village scene. Ms Powell captures the nuances and slang of that time marvelously. As always, her wit and style shine through every sentence.

The novels of Dawn Powell (1896-1965)have an autobigraphical tone. Powell grew up in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, but left this small midwestern town to seek her career in New York City. She wrote "The Wicked City" in 1938, and the novel captures both the allure and the disappointment of fast-paced sophisticated New York. Although the satire is sharp and biting, Powell shows considerable ambivalence for both the small town she left and the cosmopolitanism she adopted.

"The Happy Island" opens with its protagonist, Jefferson Abbott, arriving in the New York City bus terminal from Silver City, Ohio to make his career as a budding playwright. Jefferson is serious, stodgy in character and is taken aback by what he sees as the frivolity and shallowness of the New York cultural and entertainment community on which he hopes to make his mark. In New York, he meets another transplant from Silver City and an old flame, Prudence Bly. Prudence has survived the and mastered New York show business to a degree. She is a successful nightclub singer with many contacts. As adolescents in Silver City, (16 years before the story begins) Jefferson and Prudence had a teenage romance. When the pair was caught necking behind the railroad, Prudence received the sobriquet "Tracks" from the mocking young men of Silver City. In New York, Jefferson remains attracted to Prudence but dismayed by the life she is leading as a nightclub singer and socialite.

The plot of "The Happy Island" centers around the relationship between Jefferson and Prudence and in the contrast between New York City, New York and Silver City, Ohio. But as elsewhere in Powell, the plot of the book is the least of its attractions. The value of the book lies in its depiction of the places and people of New York City, in Powell's writing style, and in her sharp, caustic one-liners. There is an underlying sense of morality lost.

The book features a plethora of characters from the New York entertainment and literary scene. In particular, this book is somewhat unusual because several of the characters in the book are gay or bisexual, and Powell presents these characters without any particular moralizing. The moral tone of the book, though, is sharp and critical. In general, the characters in the book exhibit the morals of the barnyard. Infidelity, promiscuity, and double-crossing are the rules of the day. Together with the sexual double and triple dealing, Powell emphasizes parties and alcohol. She is good at describing party scenes and even better at emphasizing the dependence of her characters on booze. One can sympathize with some of Jefferson Abbott's reaction to this environment.

With all its sharpness, irony and satire, New York City is presented with a certain magic and allure. It is the dream of a new life and of opportunity, for Powell and for many others. Inflated hopes and ideals too often lead to cynicism, as I think this book and other books by Powell suggest. In the introduction to this book, Tim Page concludes that "The Happy Island" is a relatively minor novel of Dawn Powell. That may be, but there is still much in the book to reward the reader.

For every person who comes to New York from a small town or suburb and makes it in their chosen profession, there are a thousand others who don't. What happens to them? What are they like? Dawn Powell describes them all. This book is a wonderful literary read and a fine corrective to the notion that every transplanted provincial is either interesting or deserving of sympathy. Powell's characters are wonderfully drawn and fleshed out with fine prose: here's the business wife "bragging in a dozen beds of her perhaps old-fashioned chastity." Here's the "new society reporter from the largest and worst newspaper in New York." Here's a young playwrite freshly arrived from the sticks mortifying a seedy arty-professional crowd and their "shrill insistence on fun" by exclaiming, "New York, eh? What a dump!" And her is the (not so) young kept woman who "with considerable care placed her head in her hands as if it were a very fine melon." Powell is a treat; there are memorable lines on every page. Her novels came out between the 30's and the 60's and all the New York books are very fine, literary reads. She is considerably more on the mark in terms of wit and irony and quality of prose than her well-meaning editor, Tim Page (actually a music reviwer by profession) seems to realize, and in satire can hold her own with Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, Joan Didion, etc. Check out Vidal's essays on her (they're much better, less aenemic, than Page's comments, I felt, after reading her books). Angels On Toast, The Wicked Pavillion, The Golden Spur, The Locusts Have No King, And A Time to Be Born are all also very fine, sharp witty novels of New York; both its fascinating side and in all the balderdash of its aspiring provincials.

This early Powell satire reveals the author honing her skills for witty dialogue but not yet a talent for character or plot, as she would in later novels like The Locusts Have No King. Island stumbles along with a wide cast of persons loosely connected in separate set pieces that are not as integrated as Locusts' set pieces. The novel eventually settles in the last third on the lounge singer and the bitter playwright as "protagonists" and gives their lives some trajectories. Meanwhile, these and the myriad other thinly-drawn caricatures spew witticisms that reveal that their contempt for each other is exceeded only by the authors' contempt for them. The characters careen from unhappiness to unhappiness, dissatisfied with the companions they insist on keeping, with being alone, with alternative activities they contemplate when sobriety threatens to dawn on them. The book mistakes contemptuousness for sardonic depth. An unsatisfying read that the author herself placed low in her body of work, Island has little of the human insight and novelistic skill her later works contained. Probably suitable only for hardcore Powell fans.