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Apparently, a novel to be serious must be about very serious—even solemn—people rendered in a very solemn—even serious-manner. Wit? What is that? But then we all know that power of mind and intelligence count for as little in the American novel as they do in American life. Fortunately neither appears with sufficient regularity to distress our solemn middle-class middlebrows as they trudge ever onward to some Scarsdale of the mind, where the red light blinks and blinks at pier's end and the fields of the republic rush forward ever faster like a rug rolling up.
Powell herself occasionally betrays bewilderment at the misreading of her work. She is aware, of course, that the American novel is a middlebrow middle-class affair and that the reader/writer must be as one in pompous self-regard. "There is so great a premium on dullness," she wrote sadly (Robert Van Gelder, Writers and Writing, New York: Scribner's, 1946), "that it seems stupid to pass it up." She also remarks that
it is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. The frailties of millionaires or garbage collectors can be made to seem amusing to persons who are not millionaires or garbage collectors. Their ways of speech, their personal habits, the peculiarities of their thinking are considered fair game. I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can't help believing that the middle class is funny, too.
Well, she was warned by four decades of bookchatterers.
My favorite was the considered judgment of one Frederic Morton (The New York Times, September 12, 1954):
But what appears most fundamentally lacking is the sense of outrage which serves as an engine to even the most sophisticated [sic] satirist. Miss Powell does not possess the pure indignation that moves Evelyn Waugh to his absurdities and forced Orwell into his haunting contortions. Her verbal equipment is probably unsurpassed among writers of her genre—but she views the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm.
It should be noted that Mr. Morton was the author of the powerful, purely indignant, and phenomenally compassionate novel, Asphalt and Desire. In general, Powell's books usually excited this sort of commentary. (Waugh indignant? Orwell hauntingly contorted?) The fact is that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit gives away the scam. Wit blows the cool of those who are forever expressing a sense of hoked-up outrage. Wit, deployed by a woman with surgical calm, is a brutal assault upon nature—that is, Man. Attis, take arms!
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