6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From nearly 70 years later..., November 26, 2001
This review is from: The Story of a Country Boy (Paperback)
This novel, set before and into the Depression, covers Christopher Bennett's rise and fall as an executive in the Balding Company of Aviland, the midwestern city he and Joy have inhabited after leaving the farm back in Bennettsville. Also in Aviland from Bennettville is Madeleine Greaves, who completes a love triangle. Madeleine, the one clear-seeing character, is the most tragic, for Chris rises and falls in a fog, barely sensing the truths of his situation.He is a "natural" leader, not given to clear reflection.
As a novel of business, The Story of a Country Boy rejects any
easy Marxian analysis. Chris is deluded about being one of the
workers, but the workers aren't magnanimous or heroic. The bitter
process-server who becomes a radical street speaker says it all:
he's an unpleasant, ungenerous, vindictive creature.
I admired the slowness of the pacing, the way Powell lets big
changes occur so gradually that the characters are caught by
surprise.But can a man in a such a fog really rise to corporate
power? And can a clear-thinking, self-knowing woman really become
overwhelmingly enamored of such a man?
Powell's sentences are deft:
Yes, the dining room as Tannahill had said was a
really charming little room with its blue walls and
Wedgwood medallions, its little ivory balconies filled
with flowers, its softly lit tables, its hush so
compelling that, defiant as she already felt, it was
impossible for her to raise her voice above a whisper.
(54 words). There were only four other diners as they
entered, a gaunt old gentleman with a Van Dyke and
monocle with his elaborately décolleté, jaundiced wife;
she sat, hands folded, her broken bitter face caught to
her body with a rhinestone and velvet neck ribbon, her
sagging bones somehow organized for the evening under a
green brocade gown. (57 words) pp.241-242.
There's wit, too, as in the sentence that follows the two above:
The couple, created out of much-labeled steamer trunks
and exuding a faint aura of camphor balls, gloomily
permitted bouillon to enter into their chill esophageal
caverns and did not speak to each other, having
finished their conversation at least twenty years
ago.(43 words)
Finishing reading this novel, I wanted to discuss it with some
other reader. I went to the Web and found nothing beyond
publishers' blurbs and directives to my edition's own forward by
Powell biographer Tim Page. What did this book mean in its day?
What were the issues that Powell felt showed the keen edge of her
thought? At the distance of nearly 70 years, I want to see the
work as an examination of human nature, of "love," of limitation.
"Only intelligent women get their lives in such messes,"
Madeleine considers at the end. "They get too smart for their own
feelings, they try to control them and perhaps that's why they're
so miserable in love. . .or they want their self-respect and love
both, or security with love, and love doesn't go with anything
but agony and jealousy and humiliation and pain" (299).
In the end Joy, the wife, misses her bottle of Dom;
Madeleine, alone now, sees what everything's cost and who has
paid; and Chris, back at the family farm, clueless given his
Teflon heart, faces the Bennetsville night "free and incredibly
happy."
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