I am with Lane on this one. Powell is very much a poor man’s Dorothy Parker. She is similarly acerbic and has a similarly tooth-and-claw attitude towards dating. But, and this is the downfall of many satirical books, every single character in “The Locusts Have No King” is so much of a caricature that it is impossible to care what happens to them. (For all my trash talking about short stories, I think Parker — whom I adore — dodges this bullet by keeping her stories very short. You can only keep up the meanness for so long before it gets boring.)
This book is, however, an interesting slice of life in New York City immediately after World War II. The soldiers come home to a huge housing shortage and to a workforce that’s been filled with women while they were gone. (The attitude towards working women is fascinating, and a little creepy.) And it is definitely a different, and more caustic, view of the 1950s than usual.
In sum, I give this book a C+. Fine if you are on an airplane or something. Not below average, but not really above average, aside from a few above-average witticisms. This book is kind of the Debutante Divorcee of its time.
