The words “twelve-novel cycle” don’t exactly inspire readerly zeal in most people, but once you catch the rhythm of Powell’s dodecahedral masterpiece it’s hard to put it down. Beginning in the 1920′s, A Dance to the Music of Time follows the lives of a group of English friends and acquaintances as they make their various ways through life: meeting and parting, succeeding and failing, loving and hating, living and dying. There is ample room for both comedy and tragedy in this capacious, large-hearted work, but Powell’s real triumph is the way he catches the rhythm of fate itself, the way it brings people together, only to spin them apart, then reunite them later as near-strangers, transformed in unexpected ways by the intervening years.
Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel takes place mostly at the margins of the movie kingdom, the universe of set painters and extras, frustrated small-timers, hangers-on and oddities. There are prostitutes here, transplanted Eskimos, a failed comic who sells silver polish door to door so that he can force luckless customers to watch his act. No one in this book has found the promise that California was supposed to offer, and at the end their anger and resentments collect into a riot in the streets that is the sum of their individual discontents. “They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment…. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.” This was West’s last novel. He died the following year in a car accident, at age 37, rushing to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald. How he would have loved that last grotesque detail.