Dawn Powell and I would have gotten nowhere had this been my first introduction to the legendary author. The Wicked Pavillion, read first, sent me into a state of celebration. The letdown following the Locusts Have no King was considerable. The latter is a tedious experience that, (excuse the psychobabble,) conscribes readers to a state of anhedonia. I certainly did not wish to tarnish the reputation of this author who'd already been cheated of earthly honors, but hey, the book is a flat out bore!
Locusts' characters evoke no reader sympathy, no one from the hero and heroine to the callous adventurer, with a Waugh-like name of Dodo, were capable of eliciting a spark of affection or even hatred. What is left, in this, flattening love story, and 'satire' of the publishing industry, consists of drinking, self destructive sex and varieties of mistreatment. (But don't get your hopes up.) By pushing through in a completely unsympathetic exercise, the progression of chronically drunk, tortured and meanspirited I could not separate one good person from the bunch. The most fitting conclusion would have been that they would all go off like a bunch of lemmings. My Powell praising, drum thumping, hurrahs that followed The Wicked Pavillion, became self-conscious murmers. At the final page, I still could not figure out if it was a good or bad ending. No kidding! These are lackluster,bloodless characters whose collective destinies and abuses are about as compelling as a guy taking your change in a toll booth during rush hour. If there were some of those dry zingers, they couldn't provide relief. Folks, this is a complete dud! So, if you too are determined to be a part of the hoopla around this author, so wrongly overlooked during her lifetime and belatedly annointed as pretender to the American comic throne, the Yank's Waugh, and all of the rest- by all means, do not start with this [book]. Indeed, I suggest that you don't go there at all, for you run the risk of being so turned off that you may miss the best party of the era!

The title of Dawn Powell's 1948 novel is derived from the Book of Proverbs: "The locusts have no king, yet they go forth all of them by bands." The title suggests a certain degree of smallness, conformity, and crowd (swarm) mentality -- a lack of vision and a falling off of what creative life could be. I thought invariably of Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust" set in Hollywood, besides New York City that other center of American dreams. West's novel is a novel of irony which depicts conformity, crassness, and lovelessness in a manner that does resemble Powell's novel. There are parallels in Powell's book with many other novels as well.

"The Locusts have no King" is set in New York City between the period of the end of WW II and the first test nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll in 1947. The novel is a story of fallen ideals and of the difficult effort required to keep and recover at least some sense of one's ideals. The ideals in question are primarily those of true love and passion and also those of following and remaining faithful to one's dream -- in the case of this book, the dream of writing

The story is told in Powell's sharply ironical voice. Some readers find her voice cool, brittle and impresonal. But I got involved with the main characters and found it moving.

The central character of the book is Frederick, a serious writer and scholar (not attached to any university) who studies medieval history and writes books and articles which few people read. For many years, he has been carrying on an affair with a woman named Lyle, who writes plays together with her crippled husband. Frederick's head is termed by what we today would call a bimbo appropriately named Dodo. ("Pooh on you"!, she says, througout the book) At the same time, Frederick's financial fortune turns when his publisher prevails upon him to edit a periodical appropriately named "Haw" which becomes a commercial success.

The main plot of the story involves Frederick's attempt to understand and put his love life and his writing life back together.

Powell develops this basically serious story is an atmosphere of superficiality. The story moves forward in the bars and pubs of New York City and in party scenes among those on the make. Powell is a master at describing the bars and the streets of New York and in depicting party chatter. The book is full of tart, cutting one-liners and of aphorisms. The theme of fallen ideals in love and thinking is carried through in the settings of the story. Powell has a deeply ambivalent attitude, I think, towards these settings. She clearly knows them well.

This is not a book to be read for the author's skill in plotting. The book is cluttered with many characters and incidents. Powell is a wondeful prose stylist in this book as in her other novels that I have read. In this book I found places where the prose as well as the characters were cluttered and laid on too thick. The strength of the book lies in its description of New York and in Powell's description of how ideals and visions can come short. I found this poignantly displayed.

Powell's own description of "The Locusts have no King" offers valuable insight into what the book has to offer. She wrote:

"The theme ... deals with the disease of destruction sweeping though our times... each person out to destroy whatever valuable or beautiful thing life has... The moral is ... one must cling to whatever remnants of love, friendship, or hope above and beyond reason that one has, for the enemy is all around ready to snatch it."

This is an excellent novel by a deservedly rediscovered American writer.

This is a fine, funny satire of New York literary life, and of the thousands of "real New Yorkers" who arrive from their small town or boring suburb and don't write that great novel, or make it big in the theatre, but live the literary lifestyle and are, in fact, "pretentiously bohemian, loudly literary" - in fact, not very likable. You've met people like this, and thanks to the talent of Dawn Powell you can laugh your head off about them.

Here's the guy who tells you "The reason I never went in for painting is I'd want to do it so much better than anyone else." Here's the woman whose "voice showed such cautiously refined diction as to hint at some fatal native coarseness." Here's the folks at a party "generously happy in the pleasure their company was surely giving." And here's the stranger who bends your ear with: "My great ambition has always prevented me from doing anything."

A great piece of description comes during Powell's depiction of a night school for recently-arrived "real" New Yorkers afraid of revealing their ignorance: "There were courses in Radio Appreciation," and such like, leaving the narrator "marvelling afresh that so many grown up, self-supporting people should be eagre to spend money studying not a subject itself but methods to conceal their ignorance of it."

The whole novel is a vast canvas of such scenes and throughout Powell is painting a absorbing picture of 1940's New York (and the New York of today!). One thing Powell is excellent at, in a way Eugene O'neill is, too, is in stripping away the pipe dreams that people veil their lives with, and showing the reader the real, stark truth. Her satire is worthy of Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal; indeed of Aristophanes and Petronius - the latter two writers she loved (she was friends with Vidal, too, in the New York of the 40's and 50's). If you like this one, try her Happy Island, and indeed, all her New York novels.