Books: Feast of Peanut Brittle

A TIME To BE BORN—Dawn Powell —Scribner ($2.75).

This latest of popular Novelist Powell's brittle, flashy novels turns the eternal triangle into a polygon in 334 pages. It is the story of cold, glittery Amanda, an ambitious historical novelist, and Julian, the cold, glittery millionaire publisher whom she lures to a marriage bed with no more than "her usual annoyance at the damage to her permanent." It is also the story of ever-maudlin Ken, a kind of tame Venus's-flytrap, whom Amanda keeps around less for biological than for decorative reasons. Ken might have...