On the occasion of their republication by the University of Chicago Press, two of Anthony Powell’s novels are reviewed on a website called The Millions. One of these (Venusberg) was originally published before and the other (Oh How the Wheel Becomes It) after Powell’s best known work, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time. Both books contain introductions by Levi Stahl, the publisher’s promotions director. This is cited by the reviewer (Gerald Russello) where Powell’s works are compared to those of Waugh:
Both wrote about the educated upper classes and had enormous skill at skewering their pretensions and obsessions. But where Waugh was highly self-conscious of his status as an outsider and desperately wanted to be included among his subjects even as he savaged them, Powell developed a different style. He writes more as an insider but one removed from the social whirl by almost incomprehensibly sensitive social antennae. “Waugh’s books are arguably funnier (though some sections of Dance hold their own), but they also have an angry, cruel, even nihilistic strain. Waugh’s satire is scorching, leaving little behind but blasted ground. Powell, on the other hand, while refusing novelistic happy endings, presents a more hopeful outlook: his early novels tend to include at least one character who yearns, if fitfully, to live a life with meaning.”
