I'm referring to Elizabeth Bowen's To the North, which is strikingly modern (published in 1932, the main characters drive everywhere, sometimes fly, and there are some wonderful meditations on traffic, driving, and roads) and which is also the beneficiary of some excellent postmodern frisson: The novel is set in London's St. John's Wood, just off Abbey Road. Bowen could not have known what the Beatles would do to the tone of her setting; one wonders whether any of the Beatles were alert to artists who had situated themselves on that street before they did.

Bowen was one of those last, languishing Anglo-Irish writers, who sometimes wrote about the decline of the great Irish estates (The Last September) and who had some extraordinarily smart things to say about her literary predecessors (she was, I believe, the first to observe the manner in which Sheridan Le Fanu's gothic Uncle Silas refers obliquely to the Tithe War of the Irish 1830s, despite its resolutely English setting). Her style is a sharp melding of James and Woolf, and while it threatens to become precious, it never really does because she always means something important with her baroque phrases, and because she subordinates her prose to the things she's trying to describe, which, more often that not, are the remote, unarticulated corners of human perception, emotion, and interaction. She makes us see how much more we register than we think, as well as how inadequate our habits of limning our own lives ultimately are.

Here's a passage early on, that captures her precision, her sensitivity, and her humor. It's small talk between the heroine Emmeline, who is a Bloomsbury travel agent (see, I said it was modern), and Julian, the more-or-less boyfriend of her widowed sister-in-law Cecilia, whom she has just met at a party:

"Where do you want to go in Central Europe?"

"I--I hadn't quite thought."

"Then," she said--and for a moment lifted from his white tie the eyes of an ecstatic--"you could really go anywhere?"

"More or less," agreed Julian, elated in spite of himself.

"Come round soon," said Emmeline, "and we'll talk this over. If you're busy all day, come round after hours, we sometimes stay open till half-past six and have sherry for clients. They come in when they're back and give us their impressions: we get thyem tabulated. It keeps us in wider touch. My partner can't move, he gets sea-sick and air-sick and quite often train-sick, and I haven't got time to go everywhere. So we are glad to work with clients."

"You don't deal only with Bloomsbury?"

"No," said Emmeline. A shade of distinct displeasure passed over her face; evidently that kind of thing had been said before. "All round Woburn Place," she said fluently, "there are temperance hotels full of people from Wales and the North, so intoxicated at having left home at all that they are ready to go on anywhere. When they walk round the squares after breakfast they see our posters."

"Do they walk round the squares after breakfast?" said Julian doubtfully.

"Yes," said Emmeline, finishing up her tea.

A couple, having passed up and down several times looking fiercely into the alcove at Julian and Emmeline, sat down at last on the stairs just below the settee. The girl had a backless dress and a mole on one shoulder-blade. She leant up close to her partner in speechless affection, dropped her glass downstairs, giggled resignedly and had a drink out of his. The atmosphere grew less temperate.

"Like one currant in icing," said Julian.

"What, what?"

"That spot on her back."

"Oh dear, I can't see it!" said Emmeline in despair. He glanced at the white roses pinned to her shoulder, the soft curtain of hair falling over her cheek as she leant forward beside him, trying to focus the other girl's back. He remembered what a cool note her name struck in Cecilia's talk. Her thin arms, blue-veined inside the elbow, were crossed on her knee; the fingers curled idly up. He tried to say something to bring back her eyes to his own, to command her mild interest and lovely attentive face.

"I'm so glad," said Juian, "we met at this party."

"So am I," Emmeline said, giving up the mole in despair. "I always like parties; for one thing I often meet clients or people who may be. But I really like dancing."

"Shall we dance," said Julian, discouraged.

"No, I think the floor is too full."

A young man, coming downstairs, said: "Emmeline, you have cut me five times." He showed some disposition to linger.

"I'm so sorry," said Emmeline.

"Perhaps," Julian said quickly, "you ought to be talking to somebody else?"

"No; do you want to? Anyhow, I must be going. I never stay late."

"I think I must have heard your voice on the telephone--"

Emmeline looked so thoughtfully through the young man that he moved away. "You may have," she said. "I say: Hullo? ... all right: hold on!" Her voice trailed off: too considerate to enquire, she wondered how late it might be. She gazed at Julian, wishing he were a clock.