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J.F. Powers
I've been enjoying the ongoing series of National Book Award fiction winner tributes, and J.F. Powers' Morte D'Urban grabbed my attention on several levels. First the story itself, which based on Joshua Ferris' vivid description (which reminds me of Sinclair Lewis) sounds like one I'd really like to read. Second, that Powers is an Illinois-born writer (from downstate Jacksonville) that I've never read. And third, for that remarkable cover design:
+ The author's last name is the same font and size as the title, thus blurring the distinction between the two.
+ The wonderfully bold "J.F.", which is given a prominence one wouldn't usually associate with a debut novelist.
+ The addition of "...A Novel", which is so common these days that I assumed the practice was a fairly recent development. But this book was published in 1962, so it's been going on for quite some time now.
July 20, 2009 in Books | Permalink
Comments
J. F. Powers is a big favorite of mine: I loveMorte D'Urban immensely, and his other novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, though lesser, is well worth reading. His short stories, which are available in one big volume from NYRB Classics, are splendid, too: one of them, "A Losing Game," causes me to laugh uncontrollably every time I read its opening pages.
Posted by: Levi Stahl at Jul 20, 2009 2:23:59 PM
I've read some Powers, but I never got around to that one. Let me know how you like it.
Posted by: Paul Lamb at Jul 20, 2009 6:37:52 PM
I'm of the opinion that J.F. Powers was the greatest writer of his generation. I count him greater than Salinger or Bellow, or Agee, Vidal, Capote, or even Flannery O'Connor -- and that's saying something, because I bow to nobody in my admiration for this group. (Powers was often equated with O'Connor by critics when both were alive, as they had a steady Roman Catholic faith in common.) His people are so alive, so dimensional-- we see them whole, yet in their mysteries, with breathtaking ease. Their behaviors and attitudes may be grotesque, but they themselves never are. Nobody in his pages, no matter how nuts or incompetent, is ever condescended to, or melodramatized.
He was the least flashy of great writers, and yet the most profound. His genius was for seeing a universe in workaday religious life -- an off-putting topic in a civilization dominated by noise. He refused to trivialize his people and their conflicts by sensationalizing them -- as the thick mediocre "priesthood" bestsellers inevitably do.
That said, once you begin to read him, the humor and stealthy drama -- a distilled drama of the everyday -- takes over. He has a great cult among readers, spread far and wide. He's not just a "writer's writer." He's extremely accessible -- for one thing his dry cool sense of comedy is ever-fresh and first rate; he'll be making people laugh when we're all dead, and centuries have passed -- but one particularly cruel trick of the gods is that he waits there like a patch of forest in a ravine few (as yet) know to visit.
That may well change, with time. I'm confident it will. (It took the world several centuries to recognize the kindred genius of the painter Vermeer.) The main thing that sets Powers above every other great writer I've named (with the possible exception of Salinger) is that he is a delight to REread. There is always more there than you first thought -- and what was there the first time round was pretty dazzling.
An earlier comment in this blog ruminated about the graphics of his first novel jacket. It is worth noting that Powers was nationally famous (although not yet a bestseller) given the high popularity of his short stories, which usually emerged at the rate of several a year in THE NEW YORKER, between 1950 and 1965. He was as well liked & revered as, say, Cormac McCarthy was by discerning readers for the several decades prior to ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, or as Richard Ford was before THE SPORTSWRITER.
That JF had produced a NOVEL was news for a publisher to crow about. Small wonder it won the National Book Award.
Posted by: F.X. Feeney at Sep 3, 2009 8:59:31 PM
