The second novel is as enjoyable as the first, I would say. Like the first, it’s a comic novel, in an old fashioned or traditional sense. Not a satire or humorous novel, but gently comic. Nothing disastrous, at least not so far in the series, has happened.

It opens en media res and it took me a few minutes to get up to speed. A Question of Upbringing finished during Nicholas Jenkins’ first year at Oxford. A Buyers’ Market opens after finishing his undergraduate, with the narrator now working at an art book publisher. This is learned through the action and I was caught off guard, expecting him to still be in school and was a bit confused until I caught on.

It’s not deep novel. Not Dostoyevsky. Not a roman a philosophe. But one bit struck me. The context is Jenkins learning that a long ago crush, who he had hardly thought about, married someone he considers to be a bit of an ass. But the jogging of his memories of that old crush is powerful.

Such emotions, sudden bursts of sexual jealousy that pursue us through life, sometimes without the smallest justification that memory or affection might provide, are like wounds, unknown and quiescent, that suddenly break out to give pain, or at least irritation at a later season of the year, or in an unfamiliar climate.

God help me, I know the feeling. I am happy in my relationship and don’t feel any need nor desire to stray. But I know the feeling. Jenkins notes that the feeling is usually associated with people from one’s college age days. Not necessarily an ex, but that girl (or boy) you knew, who was, though perhaps only tangentially, in your social circle. You might not have liked her (or him) that much, in a larger sense, but sometimes you are painfully reminded of the raw and simple fact that you never f–ked her. And it irks you. Not that you aren’t right now, but that you didn’t then. This is the feeling that ordinary folks like myself feel instead of the related injury (to continue with the wound metaphor) of Humbert Humbert’s more insidious poisoned wound.

There is a sense of the narrator feeling a bit left behind. He is clearly moving towards becoming a writer, but is ‘in-between’ in a way that his three friends from school are not (Widmerpool, Templer, and Stringham), who are already on their way to career success or marriage or both.

The object of his, shall we say, sexual nostalgia (who happens to be the sister of his school friend, Templer – the object of desire is Jean Templer) is married, too, and Jenkins notes that he automatically treats a married person as being older than they are. Also, as older than him. He feels younger because he has not settled on his future, the more so because it feels like everyone else has.

He is between two worlds in another way, being part of upper class society through family and school connections, but in this book, he is also making connections in a sort of bohemian underworld, where the upper class and disreputable class meet in a sort of neutral zone (yes, that was a Star Trek reference, though not really an accurate metaphor).

I’m considering taking a break and finishing up another Wheel of Time novel (I think I just have two more left; less, really, since I’m already halfway through the penultimate novel) before starting on the next book in Dance to the Music of Time.

Am I keeping up with my New Year’s resolution obligations? I’m not sure. Maybe someone with a head for math and calendars can help.

I might be cheating a bit here. The volume I purchased is actually entitled, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement. It contains the first three of twelve books in total. I just read the first book in the volume, rather than the entire volume.

Back in 2002, I was in a used bookstore in a downtown-ish neighborhood near the Iowa capitol building in Des Moines. It was next to a decent Greek restaurant whose owner was suitably impressed that I knew, without being told, the pronunciation of moussaka. Rather than explain about my Greek aunt and the large Greek population where I grew up, I let him think I was just exceptionally well learned and sophisticated. Anyway, the bookstore had a copy of Powell, this copy, I think (though with a different cover, I believe). I lost that copy over the course of the intervening eleven years and never got very far, despite enjoying what I read.

So while I was in Barnes & Noble, with a gift card and a coupon, searching for a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar that did not have an absurd amount of pink on the cover, I saw Powell on the shelf below and knew that this was the book I must purchase.

That’s a lot of words and I haven’t even gotten to the content of the book itself yet. A lot of words and a lot of excuses.

The book itself is a bit of Remembrance of Things Past meets Brideshead Revisted. And a bit of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, too, for good measure. Public school (which, this taking place in England, means a private school) takes the place that university held in Waugh’s novel, being where the major protagonists meet each other. The book lacks the melancholy of Waugh’s chronicle of the impact of a wealthy Catholic family on a budding artist and the interiority of Proust’s roman a clef’esque narration. Jenkins, the narrator of A Question of Upbringing is as much an observer as Marcel (the character in Proust’s novel, not necessarily Proust himself) and also has a tendency to miss certain things because of his (in this book, at least) youth, but doesn’t have that deep introspection. This book, unlike Remembrance, is not, ultimately, all about him.

Powell captures the forces that divide old friends, writing especially well about the way we watch a group pull away from each other. Jenkins remains friends with two characters, Templer and Stringham, but watches somewhat sadly as Templer and Stringham cease to be friends. Not unfriendly, mind you. Just seeming to permanently leave each other’s orbits.

It was a speedy read. Not just in that the first book in the volume was just 230 pages, but in being a good, compulsive read. I sat down with it in the cafe section of the bookstore, opposite my father-in-law, and prepared to read a few pages and found myself seventy pages through (or nearly a third done) when we left. It is not a magisterial accomplishment like the aforementioned books by Proust and Waugh, respectfully, but it is a very good achievement.

James Baldwin would have turned 89 today.