First published 1952 (London: Heinemann); 1953 (New York: Scribner’s)
A Buyer’s Market shows us Nicholas Jenkins in his early days as a young man living in London. His own job, usually referred to only in passing (and dismissively by others) is at a small publisher specializing in art books. Others introduced to us in A Question of Upbringing (Templar, Stringham, Widmerpool) are a step or two further along their career paths, although it’s already clear that Stringham’s will likely be detoured by his love of drink.
Once again, the book is in four chapters, but this time more centered around events than places:
- Chapter 1: A dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons, followed by the dance at the Huntercombe’s, at which Barbara Goring dumps sugar on Widmerpool’s head when the top comes off a sugar castor.
- Chapter 2: Having left the Huntercombes’ and run into Mr. Deacon, a painter and old acquaintance of his parents, and Charles Stringham, Nick (and Widmerpool) accompany them to a party hosted by Mrs. Millie Andriadis. There, we see numerous specimens of the Bright Young Things and other characters of London society.
- Chapter 3: Nick visits the Walpole-Wilsons at Hinton, and the following day, accompanies them to Stourwater, the large country house now owned by the somewhat legendary but mysterious Sir Magnus Donners, employer of Stringham, Widmerpool, and others. Sir Magnus leads a group on a tour of the dungeon underneath the house. Nick meets Jean Templer, now married to (and apparently separated from) Bob Duport.
- Chapter 4: Charles Stringham’s wedding, the funeral of Mr. Deacon, which leads to Nick meeting Barnby, a painter using Deacon’s studio, sleeping with Gypsy Jones, and later the same day, dining with Widmerpool and his mother.
In her guide, Invitation to the Dance, Hilary Spurling only approximately places the book in 1928 or 1929. Either year is plausible, as there is no mention of the impending market crash:
- Chapters 1 and 2 take place on the same night, probably in the early summer, toward the end of the London dance season.
- Chapter 3: Later than summer (August?)
- Chapter 4: The second week of October
The three parties — the dinner party at the Walpole-Wilsons, the dance at the Huntercombes’, and Mrs. Andriadis’s late-night and much more eclectic party — are like set-pieces in which Powell illustrates the growing size and diversity of Nick’s social network. We are introduced to dozens of characters, often merely with a sentence or two, but the majority are likely to reappear later in later volumes. In each there is at least one moment when Jenkins steps back from being a participant in the events to being the older and more reflective Nick, reading a person or an incident through the prism of subsequent history and experience. One could argue that these are the most Proustian passages in the whole novel.
Though A Buyer’s Market does not have a plot as much as a sequence of events, Powell sketches two definite narrative arcs. First, there is the course of Nick’s attraction to Barbara Goring, which goes from fascination at the start of the dinner party to a rapid cooling after the sugar incident with Widmerpool. Nick is no great friend of Widmerpool’s, but throughout the novel we can see that he has a bedrock belief in the importance of preserving personal dignity … and a dislike of those who don’t. And his encounters — with Jean Templer (now Duport) at Stourwater and Gypsy Jones in Deacon’s studio — cure his fixation on Barbara for good.
Second, we see within A Buyer’s Market the history of Nick’s acquaintance with Edgar Deacon, the painter arrived too late to his neoclassical style (“Pre-Raphaelite in influence without being precisely Pre-Raphaelite in style”). It’s a particularly illuminating example of Powell’s complex manipulation of time, since it starts “many years” after Deacon’s death (and hence many years after the rest of the events in A Buyer’s Market), reaches back a few years to Nick’s encountering Deacon while at the Louvre with his parents (i.e., in 1919), then back to his awareness of Deacon as a friend of the family when he was a child, and finally reintroducing Deacon as the painter of Boyhood of Cyrus, now hanging unprominently at the Walpole-Wlisons. Then Nick runs into Deacon and Gypsy Jones at the coffee stand on the edge of Hyde Park after leaving the Huntercombes’ dance, renewing his acquaintance, and leads us through to Deacon’s death and aftermath. This is the first death we see Nick experience as an adult, and it, like his parting with Charles Stringham and the end of his infatuation with Barbara, marks a passage from youth into manhood.