Philip Toynbee, The Observer, 22 June 1952
A Buyer’s Market is a sequel to A Question of Upbringing, written in the same manner and continuing the impressionistic chronicle into young adult life in London during the year 1928. It gives an opportunity for a more considered and a less interested appreciation of Mr. Powell’s major work.
A few things can be said without hesitation. The old humour, both touching and brilliant, still permeates this later work, although it is now subordinated to a larger purpose. And the narrative technique of the two books is extraordinarily subtle…. In fact, A Buyer’s Market is as good as its predecessor, which makes it a very good novel indeed.
But it has its heavy faults. For one thing the word “Proustian” recurs altogether too insistently to the reader’s mind, and there are passages which read dangerously like pastiche:
I can now, looking back, only suppose that a consciousness of future connexion was thrown forward like a deep shadow in the manner in which such perceptions are sometimes projected out of Time: a process that may well be the explanation, for which no other seems adequate, of what is called ‘love at first sight’: that knowledge that someone who has just entered the room is going to play a part in our life.
But usually Mr. Powell’s style gives the astonishing effect of a Proustian narrative recounted by Jeeves to Bertie Wooster. An immense circumlocutory facetiousness is the usual manner, obviously adopted with a comic intention and sometimes surprisingly successful in achieving it. But there is too much of it for comfort. Phrases like: “My parents’ domestic interior”; “Oppressive climatic conditions”; “The precise location of our meeting” are thick on every page. And what is one to think of this translation into oratio obliqua of a simple and familiar expression in common use:
[He stated] in the most formidable terms at hand … his own ineradicable unwillingness, for that matter suspected actual physical incapacity in face of financial indemnities of the most extravagant order, to be inveigled into any situation that might even threaten approach to intimacy with her.
Mr. Powell can write with such deftness that one must regret this exaggeration of a legitimate comic manner.
John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 1952
The writing is so closely knit that it can only be enjoyed in small doses. Mr. Powell makes little use of incident or plot. Reading his book is like turning over an old album of extremely revealing portraits.
Tangye Lean, The Spectator, 27 June 1952
[Powell’s] prose, which was never without its own independent ambitions, is for the moment so clogged with pretentiousness that his great gift for character presentation is almost strangled. By a similar process, his manoeuvring to demonstrate the transformation of characters as different demands are made on them, or as we see them for different points of view, has become more prominent that his interest in the live person he is handling. These faults, like Mr. Powell’s interest in snobbery, are indeed Proustian, but unless he can recover that overwhelming fascination in people and situations for their own sake, which so enchanted us in A Question of Upbringing, the great promise of the book will have been broken.
Julian Symons, The Times Literary Supplement, 27 June 1952
A Buyer’s Market is written with great distinction, and is marked throughout by a fine comic sense; indeed, in a sense everything Mr. Powell touches turns to ironic comedy; the embarrassments of Widmerpool, the preoccupations of Mr. Deacon, and the continual small shocks administered to the narrator’s own unworldliness. But above and beyond the sureness with which individual characters are drawn is the author’s evident capacity for indicating and commenting with great perception and subtlety on changes in the social structure of English life; a capacity which, it it can be enlarged to deal with events in the thirties, will certainly make this series of books one of the fictional landmarks of our time.
V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman and Nation, 28 June 1952
The poetic is subdued in Mr. Powell. The profound, inexhaustible passion of the English for submitting private life to the minute tyranny of social inspection, the strong disbelief in spoken feeling, the subtle and even malicious pleasure in greyness, the comedy of having the right views about the right people, the brutal appreciation of the disasters of those trying to “get in,” the general air of tolerable self-laceration and conventional secretiveness — all these are threads in the national tweed from which his works are perfectly tailored….
In a world in which standards and values have vanished, to what do we turn? To the attempt to find out a personal patter — that favourite word of unbelieving anthropologists — to the sober technical question as to where we were accurate and where (through immaturity) off the mark in the consideration of ourselves, our friends, and our world.
This pedantry is the basis of Mr. Powell’s comedies….
We have the curious sight, in these novels [A Question of Upbringing and A Buyer’s Market], of the social and emotional acerbity of the English comedy, done in the sensitive rather than slapstick manner. The labyrinth of Proust is connected up with the mock heroic that has run from Fielding to Wodehouse. The impulse is extravert, virile, masculine; the means — they are almost needlework. It is a laborious but an original and enrichening method. The Jazz Age, that high-fed, prosperous, hard-faced period of our recent past, has found what it needed so badly — a straight-faced, muscular historian who works the last drop of irony and alarm out of his documents like some relentless taskmaster, and who will yet remember each separate delicious finger of the loving girl he danced with or the smell of bath salts on old men.
Roger Pippett, The New York Times, 8 February 1953
The narrator, Jenkins, is constantly misunderstanding a situation. But he is not the only one. Most of the characters can hardly discern one another’s real faces: they live behind the narrow grille of their self-absorption, talking at cross-purposes, sometimes out of malice (a shabby painter, meeting a diplomat in Paris during the Peace Conference, inquires: “And what might you be conferring about?”), sometimes for the sheer joy of deceiving (a young man, asked when he is going to get married, replies, “Oh, any moment now. I’m not sure it isn’t this afternoon. To be precise, the second week in October”).