Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born (#CCSpin)

"What's good about it?, Vicky thought. He's in love with you and you're in love with somebody who's in love with somebody else--oh, splendid. Perfectly ducky, in fact."

It's that sort of comedy where one generally expects all of those mismatched loves to be resolved in the end. Is that true of this one? Hmm, maybe. The novel a bit leaves us hanging. If you've read it, did you think things were going to work out?

Ethel Carey, Amanda Keeler, and Vicky Havens were three friends at a private girls' school in Ohio. Vicky was the youngest and the pet of the older two. Now Vicky's heart has been broken when her fiancé runs off with her business partner in their small real-estate firm. Can Vicky bear to continue working with Mrs. Turner when she'd hoped to be? Everybody in Lakeville is sniggering behind Vicky's back.

So Ethel, born the wealthiest of the three, goes off to New York City to see her friend Amanda, who's made good. Can Amanda do something for Vicky? 

Since school, Amanda wrote a novel, which got boosted into success when she married Julius Evans, a very wealthy New York publisher. Now she's working on the sequel, writing for Julius' magazines, and since the year is 1941, helping with refugees. Amanda's run far away from Ohio; she'd prefer to forget it. But if Amanda sets up Vicky with a studio apartment, she can use it during the day as a love-nest. She's bored with her husband and thinking about her used-to-be.

Will the US get into the war? Seems likely. It's a serious time.

But the novel is funny: 

"But Lakeville was not hometown to Amanda, it was childhood, and childhood was something to be forgotten, like a long sentence in prison."

"She was so accustomed to only go to those places she was known that this anonymity was a new experience for her. She didn't like it."

[After a family squabble.] "Yet their public manners were charming, even to each other, and probably kept in all the finer condition by not being wasted in private."

[Vicky has been crying.] "...she blew her nose so many times you would have thought she had test the instrument thoroughly before permitting it to leave the factory."

Powell says in her diary she started the novel in January of 1941; on May 18th of 1942, she writes:

"Finished novel at 4:30--p. 402."

She sends it off the next day. But a couple of weeks before on April 25th, she wrote:

"I grow dissatisfied with novel--which is not like me. But it is the longest, most expansive book I've ever attempted and I'm afraid I'll not have the actual capacity for handling this big a theme. I still like it and feel cheated that I can't linger more over it and make it richer, which is what it needs. The title ought to be changed to a more provocative one--'Almond Tree Shall Blossom'--not so bad."

I suspect all writers go through such a phase with whatever they're working on and it doesn't necessarily mean much. It doesn't in this case. It's the third Powell novel I've read, and while I liked the other two well enough, this one amazed me.

Wikipedia tells me Amanda is loosely based on Claire Boothe Luce (Luce-ly?) which would make Julius Evans a stand in for Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life.

My Classics Club spin novel this time, and a rousing success.