Curious to know more about Anthony Powell's contribution to English Lit, I came upon Charles McGrath's 2018 New York Times article -- his review of a bio that McGrath describes as a "fond portrayal of a man sometimes called 'the English Proust'."
For a comment described as "both flattering and misleading," McGrath gets out his paring knife, noting Powell's "Proustian credentials mostly consist in writing an immensely long, multi-volume novel with the word 'time' in the title." Moreover, unlike Proust's Marcel, Powell's Nick is "the least ... introspective of narrators, revealing next to nothing of himself," which is certainly the English way, particularly for those who preferred life before the war (WWI), not after it, if you please.
Personally I have no problem with narrators who prefer to reveal themselves through their observations of others. Powell provides a clue that he/his narrator, Nick, is inclined this way too, when, in The Acceptance World (1955), he writes of his friend, the painter Barnby: "Like most men of his temperament, he held, on the whole, rather strict views regarding other people's morals." (156)
But the character who currently has me in his thrall is, like Peter Templar before him, Dicky Umfraville, who "seemed still young, as a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of the war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as 'older people.' Then I found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap." (160)
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