The Edge of the Precipice

“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story,” Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, and he might have been speaking for all of America’s best storytellers, before and since. The edge of the moral precipice is peculiarly American territory, seldom frequented by English novelists; give an Englishman Hester Prynne and he will lose no time in marrying her off to a widowered Salem apothecary, not a brilliant match, but secure, and a distinctly good catch for a proposition of such pronounced eccentricity. Although this unshakable English predilection for social realism has been responsible in recent years for some monumentally uninteresting fiction (consider any novel by C. P. Snow, or for that matter by E. M. Forster), it has during the past ten years produced at least one brilliant, nervously engaging work: that private recherche du temps perdu, Anthony Powell’s The Music of Time.

The Music of Time is, so far, five novels. The first, A Question of Upbringing, appeared in 1951; the fifth, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (Little, Brown, $4.00), this autumn. The ambiance in this latest novel is London in the mid-thirties, when everything was a little dislocated and everybody talked about the Abdication and the Spanish Civil War:

JD

About the Author

Joan Didion

Featured Tags

“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story,” Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, and he might have been speaking for all of America’s best storytellers, before and since. The edge of the moral precipice is peculiarly American territory, seldom frequented by English novelists; give an Englishman Hester Prynne and he will lose no time in marrying her off to a widowered Salem apothecary, not a brilliant match, but secure, and a distinctly good catch for a proposition of such pronounced eccentricity. Although this unshakable English predilection for social realism has been responsible in recent years for some monumentally uninteresting fiction (consider any novel by C. P. Snow, or for that matter by E. M. Forster), it has during the past ten years produced at least one brilliant, nervously engaging work: that private recherche du temps perdu, Anthony Powell’s The Music of Time.

The Music of Time is, so far, five novels. The first, A Question of Upbringing, appeared in 1951; the fifth, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (Little, Brown, $4.00), this autumn. The ambiance in this latest novel is London in the mid-thirties, when everything was a little dislocated and everybody talked about the Abdication and the Spanish Civil War: