Click here for an excerpt |
This is because Powell takes as
her subject the war
as experienced not over there, but over here.
[Here being New York, prior to Pearl Harbor]
More
specifically, A Time to Be Born is populated
by the type of
people who plotted the war
from the safety of oak-paneled conference
rooms,
wrote searching essays about military strategy
in the nation’s
popular magazines and newspapers,
and debated its finer points in the
most exclusive
Manhattan restaurants and hotel bars,
over the best
martinis.
In Powell’s novel, the war serves
as a brilliant excuse
to throw a party...
as a brilliant excuse
to throw a party...
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Nathaniel Rich is the author of the 2013 novel, Odds Against Tomorrow,
the 2008 novel, The Mayor's Tongue and the 2005 nonfiction book,
San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present.
Rich has written essays and criticism for The New York Review of Books,
Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine,
Rolling Stone, and Slate.
The complete hyperlinked essay
originally appeared in what
can only be described as
the skeletal remains
of NEWSWEEK.
The next Dawn Powell page is here.
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