His Words, My Format

______________________________________________________________________________________

Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born is one of the most 

enjoyable novels written about World War II 

despite the fact—or is it  thanks to the fact?— 

that not a single battlefield appears anywhere in it,

nor any weapon more deadly than an ice pick.

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...

Nathaniel Rich

__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________

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.
______________________________________________________________________________________