Customer Reviews

The Locusts Have No King

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fine, funny satire of New York literary life, and of the thousands of "real New Yorkers" who arrive from their small town or boring suburb and don't write that great novel, or make it big in the theatre, but live the literary lifestyle and are, in fact, "pretentiously bohemian, loudly literary" - in fact, not very likable. You've met people like this, and thanks to the talent of Dawn Powell you can laugh your head off about them.

Here's the guy who tells you "The reason I never went in for painting is I'd want to do it so much better than anyone else." Here's the woman whose "voice showed such cautiously refined diction as to hint at some fatal native coarseness." Here's the folks at a party "generously happy in the pleasure their company was surely giving." And here's the stranger who bends your ear with: "My great ambition has always prevented me from doing anything."

A great piece of description comes during Powell's depiction of a night school for recently-arrived "real" New Yorkers afraid of revealing their ignorance: "There were courses in Radio Appreciation," and such like, leaving the narrator "marvelling afresh that so many grown up, self-supporting people should be eagre to spend money studying not a subject itself but methods to conceal their ignorance of it."

The whole novel is a vast canvas of such scenes and throughout Powell is painting a absorbing picture of 1940's New York (and the New York of today!). One thing Powell is excellent at, in a way Eugene O'neill is, too, is in stripping away the pipe dreams that people veil their lives with, and showing the reader the real, stark truth. Her satire is worthy of Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal; indeed of Aristophanes and Petronius - the latter two writers she loved (she was friends with Vidal, too, in the New York of the 40's and 50's). If you like this one, try her Happy Island, and indeed, all her New York novels.

The novel explores a world the movies managed to miss -- the working bohemian class of the late 1940s. The narrator is extremely chatty, and there's a lot of telling instead of showing. But the effort is worth it. The two main characters -- an itinerant scholar and a playwright who props up her physically challenged husband -- are not too sympathetic, but at the end you're glad that they end up the way they do. Intertwined into the plot are some great observations on a world long plowed under by the Donald and the Rudy.

The title of Dawn Powell's 1948 novel is derived from the Book of Proverbs: "The locusts have no king, yet they go forth all of them by bands." The title suggests a certain degree of smallness, conformity, and crowd (swarm) mentality -- a lack of vision and a falling off of what creative life could be. I thought invariably of Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust" set in Hollywood, besides New York City that other center of American dreams. West's novel is a novel of irony which depicts conformity, crassness, and lovelessness in a manner that does resemble Powell's novel. There are parallels in Powell's book with many other novels as well.

"The Locusts have no King" is set in New York City between the period of the end of WW II and the first test nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll in 1947. The novel is a story of fallen ideals and of the difficult effort required to keep and recover at least some sense of one's ideals. The ideals in question are primarily those of true love and passion and also those of following and remaining faithful to one's dream -- in the case of this book, the dream of writing

The story is told in Powell's sharply ironical voice. Some readers find her voice cool, brittle and impresonal. But I got involved with the main characters and found it moving.

The central character of the book is Frederick, a serious writer and scholar (not attached to any university) who studies medieval history and writes books and articles which few people read. For many years, he has been carrying on an affair with a woman named Lyle, who writes plays together with her crippled husband. Frederick's head is termed by what we today would call a bimbo appropriately named Dodo. ("Pooh on you"!, she says, througout the book) At the same time, Frederick's financial fortune turns when his publisher prevails upon him to edit a periodical appropriately named "Haw" which becomes a commercial success.

The main plot of the story involves Frederick's attempt to understand and put his love life and his writing life back together.

Powell develops this basically serious story is an atmosphere of superficiality. The story moves forward in the bars and pubs of New York City and in party scenes among those on the make. Powell is a master at describing the bars and the streets of New York and in depicting party chatter. The book is full of tart, cutting one-liners and of aphorisms. The theme of fallen ideals in love and thinking is carried through in the settings of the story. Powell has a deeply ambivalent attitude, I think, towards these settings. She clearly knows them well.

This is not a book to be read for the author's skill in plotting. The book is cluttered with many characters and incidents. Powell is a wondeful prose stylist in this book as in her other novels that I have read. In this book I found places where the prose as well as the characters were cluttered and laid on too thick. The strength of the book lies in its description of New York and in Powell's description of how ideals and visions can come short. I found this poignantly displayed.

Powell's own description of "The Locusts have no King" offers valuable insight into what the book has to offer. She wrote:

"The theme ... deals with the disease of destruction sweeping though our times... each person out to destroy whatever valuable or beautiful thing life has... The moral is ... one must cling to whatever remnants of love, friendship, or hope above and beyond reason that one has, for the enemy is all around ready to snatch it."

This is an excellent novel by a deservedly rediscovered American writer.

Like Kurt Anderson's recent novel, this gem satirizes the New York media scene, but it takes place during the post-WWII years. The author's story holds up and does not feel dated, and her characterizations are dead on (especially good for laughs is the aptly-named airhead Dodo).

The late Dawn Powell deserves the praise reaped with the rediscovery of her novels. I am already considering which one I will read next.

This satire of the New York publishing scene is full of stunning insights, to wit: publishers can be crassly commercial; the success of a book can depend more on who's pushing it than on its quality; book people can be snobbish, etc. Powell can write amusingly, but she has such distaste for her own characters that they never come to life. Her prose should have gone on a low-cholesterol diet: some of her sentences get clotted up with their own cleverness. This is the only book of Powell's that I've read; a friend told me that her books set in the midwest are better (i.e., *Dance Night*).

This novel is one of the reasons Powell is lamented as a "lost great." The skill of the dialogue is matched by the delicate threading of the chapters-- individual set pieces that could stand alone-- into a forward-moving, compelling plot, and matched as well by the psychological insights pertaining to conflicting desires, unspoken wishes, and misunderstandings. The bravado witticisms and verbal duelling are virtuoso, but the multi-layered characterizations provide depth and reveal Powell's strong grasp of human nature. In this example of her writing, a wide cast serves to reveal aspects of the protagonists' natures rather than distract from any thinness of plot, as it did in The Happy Island. Satire here serves a higher purpose than to vent nasty ideas. A great example of writing from the dawn of the mid-century.

This was another book from Michael Dirda's list of 100 Best Humorous Books in the English Language, and another one that I enjoyed reading, but not so much for any comedy. I'd chalk it up to a difference of definition of what humor is, except so many of the books on Dirda's list that I had read I totally agreed with in regards to comedic intent and result. If anything, the list has got me trying books and authors that I had never heard of before.

What I did like about Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King was its portrait of literary life in New York City in the middle of last century, with its strange mixture of social and economic classes. The novel centers on the love affair of Frederick Olliver, an academically inclined writer of histories, and Lyle Gaynor, one-half of a married pair of playwrights with some recent success on Broadway. Lyle refuses to leave her husband, an invalid who depends on her partnership, and Frederick is too besmitten to insist on it. When a strange girl called Dodo attaches her social-climbing self on to Frederick just as he is heading to a society party that Lyle has insisted he attend, this delicate cocktail is upset, and the lives of Frederick, Lyle and everyone around them is changed.

This is a character-driven story, as the plot is easily summarized. Powell switches her point-of-view between the two main characters easily, and some of the frisson of this novel is how Lyle or Frederick so easily misunderstand the actions of the other (a staple of many comedies). I felt these situations, however, generated more pathos than bathos, as I felt sorry for these characters rather than bemused by their stubbornness. Maybe that's because I empathized too much with these two social-crossed lovers. Dodo, the "pooh" girl (called so for her tendency to call her beaus sticks-in-the-mud with the cry of "oh, pooh on you"), is almost as annoying as Fran Drescher's Nanny character, as you can almost hear that nasal voice in every piece of dialogue, and as Frederick becomes in turn besotted, obsessed, and disgusted with her, so does the reader.

Overall, an interesting novel, but not enough that I want to immediately check out more of Powell's writing.

This book is a really fun look, a slice of life in NYC and its publishing world in post-war America. I can't think of anybody who wouldn't thoroughly enjoy not only this story, this satire, but the writing as a whole. This, among other Dawn Powell books, is what I recommend to people looking for something to read that won't bore them to tears!