Dance Night Book

What a brilliant book!
Dawn Powell's novel of stifled lives in 1930's Ohio is set in the same hopeless ugly small railroad towns that Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis wrote about. Her characters are naive, romantic, and deluded, nearly obsessed with future glory in a larger shop or a grander city down the line, but they are never ridiculous. Powell takes them and their dreams seriously, even as she shows how fragile some dreams are.
Her style is the great revelation ' character, setting, and emotion are quickly and beautifully drawn and then nailed firmly to the page in a single sentence. Point of view changes often, stewing her characters in the same sour broth of yearning, bitter resignation, fury, and above all loneliness.
There's hope, though. Characters are connected but not identical. Several women (women and girls get most of Powell's sympathy) do achieve financial success and some real control in their lives, but not without cost.
Dance Night is kept from the depths of despair by characters' small victories, and also by Powell's tone, which can move convincingly from bitter to sardonic to affectionate. I loved it.
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Rage swept over her at being young, young and little, as if some evil fairy had put that spell on her. Why must you be locked up in this dreadful cage of childhood for twenty or a hundred years? Nothing in life was possible unless you were old and rich, until then you were only small and futile before your tormentors, desperately waiting for the release that only years could bring.
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"I'll never forget one day he called me stupid," Hulda's fat moonface became ruddy with sentiment[...] "I was hurt ' you know how a young bride is ' and then lo and behold! That afternoon a wagon came to the door with a present from Hermann to make it up to me. Two bushels of the finest peaches you ever laid your eyes on. [...]"
"But what could you do with two bushels of peaches?"
"Can them, dear. Hermann always loved preserved peaches. I put cloves in them and English walnuts. I was up till long after midnight putting them up. [...] He was a good husband, always. If he had to go away on a trip he always said, 'Enjoy yourself, Hulda. Let things go. You can do them all when I get back.' That's your good husband, let me tell you, girls."
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At the end of the drive was a huge old brick house.... A flagstone terrace sloped into rosebushes and flowerbeds and overgrown grass. An iron deer lifted its antlered head in perpetual fright in the middle of the great shaded lawn, and near the driveway a pair of stone Cupids gazed into a cracked stone fountain bowl and saw that their noses were broken off.
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"I'm going to clear out of here one of these days," she grumbled, dumping some powder down her neck, powder that would daintily shower some customer's soup later on as she bent over.