The Story of a Country Boy

This novel, set before and into the Depression, covers Christopher Bennett's rise and fall as an executive in the Balding Company of Aviland, the midwestern city he and Joy have inhabited after leaving the farm back in Bennettsville. Also in Aviland from Bennettville is Madeleine Greaves, who completes a love triangle. Madeleine, the one clear-seeing character, is the most tragic, for Chris rises and falls in a fog, barely sensing the truths of his situation.He is a "natural" leader, not given to clear reflection.As a novel of business, The Story of a Country Boy rejects anyeasy Marxian analysis. Chris is deluded about being one of theworkers, but the workers aren't magnanimous or heroic. The bitterprocess-server who becomes a radical street speaker says it all:he's an unpleasant, ungenerous, vindictive creature.I admired the slowness of the pacing, the way Powell lets bigchanges occur so gradually that the characters are caught bysurprise.But can a man in a such a fog really rise to corporatepower? And can a clear-thinking, self-knowing woman really becomeoverwhelmingly enamored of such a man? Powell's sentences are deft: Yes, the dining room as Tannahill had said was areally charming little room with its blue walls andWedgwood medallions, its little ivory balconies filledwith flowers, its softly lit tables, its hush socompelling that, defiant as she already felt, it wasimpossible for her to raise her voice above a whisper.(54 words). There were only four other diners as theyentered, a gaunt old gentleman with a Van Dyke andmonocle with his elaborately décolleté, jaundiced wife;she sat, hands folded, her broken bitter face caught toher body with a rhinestone and velvet neck ribbon, hersagging bones somehow organized for the evening under agreen brocade gown. (57 words) pp.241-242.There's wit, too, as in the sentence that follows the two above:The couple, created out of much-labeled steamer trunksand exuding a faint aura of camphor balls, gloomilypermitted bouillon to enter into their chill esophagealcaverns and did not speak to each other, havingfinished their conversation at least twenty yearsago.(43 words)Finishing reading this novel, I wanted to discuss it with someother reader. I went to the Web and found nothing beyondpublishers' blurbs and directives to my edition's own forward byPowell biographer Tim Page. What did this book mean in its day?What were the issues that Powell felt showed the keen edge of herthought? At the distance of nearly 70 years, I want to see thework as an examination of human nature, of "love," of limitation."Only intelligent women get their lives in such messes,"Madeleine considers at the end. "They get too smart for their ownfeelings, they try to control them and perhaps that's why they'reso miserable in love. . .or they want their self-respect and loveboth, or security with love, and love doesn't go with anythingbut agony and jealousy and humiliation and pain" (299). In the end Joy, the wife, misses her bottl