The Old Man and Me - New York Review Books Classics | Literary Fiction Novel | Perfect for Book Clubs & Classic Literature Lovers

Edmund Wilson once said of his good friend, Dawn Powell, that the reason her books were not more popular was because she insisted on making fun of all those very serious women who bought and read novels. If anyone deserves to wear the mantle of Powell, it is Dundy. Now almost forgotten, and unjustifiably so, Dundy's first two brilliant novels cast a cold-eye on the American girl abroad with her voracious appetite for culture, sex, culture and sex, plus an occasional bit of social climbing. If Henry James had a sense of humor he might have written as she does. In the introduction to this edition, Dundy states that she wanted to do what the Angry Young Men of England of the 1960s were doing, and, in that fashion, she surely succeeded in being one of the first of the Angry Young Women--hellbent at exposing all the smug bourgeois hypocrisies, follies, pretensions, and corruptions around her. One can easily be brutal about foreigners, and Dundy certainly demolishes the English, but she is just as critical about the sort of over-educated and over-sexed young American woman she must have been herself. It is all very funny. The language just rolls and rolls, dazzling us with her insight and wit. A first-rate talent, sadly neglected when the names of the best and brightest of her generation are named.