Satire, as playwright George S. Kaufman once famously declared, is what closes on Saturday night. He might have said much the same thing about satiric novels. Portraiture confined to too small a social space and containing too much acerbic wit generally rings up disappointing sales, excites scant academic interest, and then slides down the memory hole a decade later. This is particularly true in America, where the tradition that makes possible British writers such as Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark never quite caught on.

Dawn Powell (1887–1965) is an instructive case in point. Although she churned out short stories, plays, magazine articles, and book reviews to keep a difficult domestic situation afloat (she was doubly saddled with an alcoholic husband and a mentally retarded son), Powell thought of herself principally as a novelist and, moreover, as a novelist of a very particular sort: “In my satire … I merely add a dimension to a character, a dimension which gives the person substance and life but which readers often mistake for malice.” Readers, in short, got her wrong—not only failing to see the uncompromising realism that went into her depictions of Manhattan café life, but also resisting Powell’s efforts to capture people as they actually are. If she had been content to poke good-natured fun at the antics of the very rich or the very poor, her work might have fared better, but she could not resist the impulse to point out that “the pleasures of the