Dawn Powell at Her Best

Nostalgic as a vintage movie, though often marred by a plotless drift and trivializing portrayals of women and ethnic minorities, these two reissued novels and nine stories recall Powell (1897-1965) from critical oblivion. Powell creates evocative scenes. In dead-end, working-class Lampton (Dance Night, 1930), ``behind the honeysuckle vines on the boarding-house porches the girls sat in their kimonos eating ice-cream.'' This novel's hub is a popular dance academy, which prim milliner Elsinore attends and where she develops a crush on the teacher. Discontent drives Elsinore to crime and a new life as a chic streetwalker. Turn, Magic Wheel (1936) derides in gushy prose the New York literary scene, where vapid writers and publishers gossip, booze and name-drop. The novel's protagonist, redhead novelist Dennis Orphen, uses lovers-staunch Effie and flirty Corinne-as grist for stories, wielding power with his ``shiny little pen.'' Meanwhile, Effie tends her ex-husband's (another writer) current wife, who is painfully dying of cancer-an incident treated with clumsy satire. In two stories, girlfriends scheme to escape their men. Powell seems to sum up her artistic position in the short story ``What Are You Doing in My Dreams?'' whose narrator feels she ``left Ohio... split in two at the crossroads,'' with one half in New York, the other ``by night with the dead in long-ago Ohio.'' (Oct.)