The blurb on the inner cover of the dust jacket describes this book as 'a conversation, apparently on a porch, by two men who may be difficult to grasp'. Which is odd because having now finished the book, I don't recall a porch being mentioned in the text. Perhaps that's why the blurb-writer wrote 'apparently'. But why mention a porch at all?

Two guesses: because it locates Powell's writing within a Southern tradition of which the author himself is not unaware ('You sound like William Faulkner.' / 'Mr. Bill? Why thank you.'); and because it gives us a context in which to visualise what follows, as if it were something as familiar as a dramatic dialogue where a pair of old codgers look out upon society and pronounce judgement upon the world while sipping bourbon and chewing tobacco.

It isn’t quite that simple. For one thing, there are no speech marks, and there are no words in the book other than what we assume these men are saying. Why do we assume they’re speaking to one another? Because of the style. One asks a question and the other responds. But sometimes they are responding to one another and sometimes not. Perhaps it is better to assume that they are talking across one another.

There is a loose structure to the book. Each sequence of dialogue begins with a statement or a prompt, or sometimes a question reminiscent of ‘The Interrogative Mood’. For the most part they have a pleasant weight and good humour to them reminiscent of Gertrude Stein:

‘I have lost my mind, I am comfortable with having lost my mind, and I plan on having my mind stay lost.’

‘I’m just a mouthful of pyjama air’

‘Do you see a problem with my outfit?’

‘A dark thing.’

‘I need a saddle pommel. To steer me through the house.’

These men – and I think we can assume they are men – don’t really talk like people actually talk. Occasionally there are attempts to mimic the rhythm of ‘real’ speech, but for the most part their voices switch between written and spoken registers in mid-conversation. You could do it on stage like Beckett, but if people spoke like this in real life you would think them mad. But it is very nice to read them aloud.

It doesn’t really have a plot. There is no action as such. I suspect that your enjoyment of the book may be tempered by these issues. Certainly there may be questions from the back of the class as to whether we should or should not really consider this A Novel.

But who really cares about that anyway. It is a very pleasant thing to read. The writing is clear and concise and rhythmic, musical. It’s often quite funny. And it is reflective, in its way: one has the sense while reading it that the book is thinking through things for you. It is a kind of crystalline dialectic. And it is also angry, in its way: angry about the war, angry about sugar, angry about physical and moral decrepitude, and the ways in which we have been cowards. Above all, its vision of contentment is encapsulated in a dream of peace, isolation and inward solitude:

‘I would like to go to a place where there are orange fields and sweet young dogs to walk in them with. There is a small wind at all times, large wind at night. Things bud and decay in equilibrium, light and shade play together nicely. If things are named, the names are not known but not used overmuch. Forgetting and remembering have shaken hands.’