A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell

So with that, let's dive into Anthony Powell's A Buyer's Market.

Now, if you remember from our discussion of A Question of Upbringing, that first book was all about Nick's school friendships, childhood and school friendships with Peter Templer, and in particular, Charles Stringham.

And as I mentioned, the structuring mechanism of that first book was, was really the disillusion of those two key early friendships.

And they provided the emotional up and down of that novel's narrative structure.

In this novel, the primary drive, the primary narrative structure, centers instead no longer on Nick's school friends, but on Nick's romantic life.

Because now Nick has graduated from Oxford, he's working a job, and he is presumably somewhere in his 20s.

And his friends are starting to get engaged and get married.

Questions around love are coming up.

Now, A Dance to the Music of Time, I think in general, is a pretty cynical look at England at this time and this particular social class.

Nick himself is quite acerbic, ironic, and pretty judgmental of a lot of the people he meets.

That's where a lot of the series humor comes from, is Nick's judgments, the ironic, comedic way that Powell diminishes the characters.

And we're going to see examples of that in this novel.

I think the irony and the kind of the savage irony comes through most prominently in the title, A Buyer's Market.

This is a novel about Nick's first inklings of romantic interest in women.

And by the end of it, he comes out pretty cynical about marriage and about women.

And we're going to see the way in which the structure of the novel kind of climaxes with this type of cynicism.

But also, as we're going to see, this question of money is intricately linked with this question of marriage.

And thus, I think we have our title, A Buyer's Market.

As one of the characters, Widmerpool, remarks at one point, he doesn't have enough money to seriously consider marriage.

It's a pretty blunt assessment, but it speaks to, I think, the social world that these characters inhabit, the kind of upper class and upper middle class social world of England at this time, in which marriage cannot be a consideration based purely on love, in which money is a very important aspect of that choice for a lot of the women and for a lot of the men.

Now, in this world, we are also introduced to a bohemian subculture.

And in this bohemian subculture, the characters are pretty sexually open.

At the same time, that in and of itself is not glamorized either.

These sexual liaisons, as we'll discuss... are also not looked at in a romantic or positive light.

They are also viewed with the same cynical, judgmental eye that Nick brings to so many things that he observes and experiences and witnesses in these novels.