Afternoon Men – A Novel

Powell s first novel (1931), a satire of London lads getting into romantic trouble, drinking too much and living up to their reputation as a lost generation . Imagine "Bright Lights, Big City "set in London in 1930. Reviewers have compared it to Waugh and Firbank. The conversations are brilliant and disturbing, deftly rendered, revealing many of the young men as sexist, anti-Semitic, and lacking in talent. Names like Undershaft, Atwater, Pringle, Wauchop, and Brisket add to the humor. As Nicholas Birms writes, The charactershave aspirations, both idealistic and self-serving, as well as the mechanisms to cope, through irony and understatement, with the disappointment of these aspirations ."