Great portrayals of loathesome characters: Dance to the Music of Time

No one can write as devastating portrait of a loathesome character with such a deft hand and with such efficiency as Anthony Powell - this most notable in his narrator's many, many encounters with the obsequious Widmerpool, and the topper is Widmerpool's meddlesome and narcissistic mother: the descriptions in The Kindly Ones of W's mother advancing with her big mouth locked in a rictus grin showing her big teeth is a classic - as is the scene in which Jenkins (narrator) visits W. in his cramped and stuffy office, seeking to be advanced on the list of call-ups for active duty (eve of WWII), and W. is so self-important about his position, when it's obvious he's just a flunky, so concerned about revealing state secrets to J., such as the fact, horrors!, that he's going off on maneuvers soon - and then the walk over to Lady Molly's house (she's the aunt of Jenkins's rarely seen wife, Isobel) they pass a soapbox orator ranting against the state and - of course as we know by now from Powell's design - the orator will be someone we know - a young leftist woman who'd had some kind of relationship, no doubt unconsummated, with W. and gotten him to pay for her "operation" - of course he's horrified to be anywhere near this woman, ostensibly because he thinks he could lose his job if seen among enemies of the state - extremely unlikely, he's not that important - but more likely out of some kind of guilt (toward her) and shame (in front of Jenkins). At Lady Molly's - an eccentric who harbors stray cats and dogs and people - we're told she met someone at the vet's who was temporarily homeless so she just had to take him in - and we know it's got to be another friend of J's in this world made up of 20 people - and it's Moreland, his musician/composer friend, now abandoned by his actress wife, Matilda, who's gone back to the wealthy industrialist and war profiteer, Donners - host of the 7 deadly sins dinner party earlier in the book. That relation won't last, obviously - he's too louche and she's just cruel. M. and J. go off to dinner and commiserate - and of course run into more old acquaintances, even in an out-of-the-way restaurant that's better than would be expected. This volume ends with Jenkins finally catching a break - meeting Lady Molly's brother-in-law, who can pull the strings to get him called up from the reserves - and on to volume 7, which I've already read so will skip over when I pick up this series again.