Suitable Accommodations

An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963

J. F. Powers, Katherine A. Powers

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780374709686
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A wry, moving collection of letters from the late J. F. Powers, "a comic writer of genius" (Mary Gordon)
Best known for his 1963 National Book Award–winning novel, Morte D'Urban, and as a master of the short story, J. F. Powers drew praise from Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, among others. Though Powers's fiction dwelt chiefly on the lives of Catholic priests, he long planned to write a novel of family life, a feat he never accomplished. He did, however, write thousands of letters, which, selected here by his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, become an intimate version of that novel, dynamic with plot and character. They show a dedicated artist, passionate lover, reluctant family man, pained aesthete, sports fan, and appreciative friend. At times wrenching and sad, at others ironic and exuberantly funny, Suitable Accommodations is the story of a man at odds with the world and, despite his faith, with his church. Beginning in prison, where Powers spent more than a year as a conscientious objector, the letters move on to his courtship, marriage, comically unsuccessful attempt to live in the woods, life in the Midwest and in Ireland, an unorthodox view of the Catholic Church, and an increasingly bizarre search for "suitable accommodations," which included three full-scale emigrations to Ireland. Here, too, are encounters with such diverse people as Thomas Merton, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Alfred Kinsey.
An NPR Best Book of 2013

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Introduction by Katherine A. Powers
• A Note on the Text
• 1. Fortunately, I am under no obligation to earn a living wage
• 2. With you it will be like being ten years old again
• 3. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions?
• 4. It would seem you have the well-known business sense
• 5. I am like Daniel Boone cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness
• 6. Something seems to be missing, and you say it’s me
• 7. Camaraderie
• 8. I’ve a few stipulations to read into the rural-life-family-life jive
• 9. The truth about me is that I just don’t qualify as the ideal husband
• 10. If you can’t win with me, stop playing the horses!
• 11. I’m beyond the point where I think the world is waiting for me as for the sunrise
• 12. The water, the green, the vines, stone walls, the pace, all to my taste
• 13. In Ireland, I am an American. Here, I’m nothing
• 14. A place too good to believe we live in
• 15. I had a very fine time—laughing as I hadn’t in years
• 16. There have been times, though not recently, when it has seemed to me that I might escape the doom of man
• 17. Four children now, Jack. And this year, the man said, bock beer is not available in this area
• 18. The Man Downstairs is entertaining tonight. Pansy and Dwight are quiet
• 19. This room is like a dirty bottle, but inside is vintage solitude
• 20. Scabrous Georgian, noble views of the sea, turf in the fireplaces
• 21. The office is in Dublin, on Westland Row
• 22. About Don, I haven’t been the same since I read your letter
• 23. Back and wondering why
• 24. The J. F. Powers Company: “The Old Cum Permissu Superiorum Line”
• 25. No money is the story of my life
• 26. The day was like other days, with the author napping on the floor in the middle of the afternoon
• 27. As a winner, let me say you can’t win, not on this course
• 28. Ireland grey and grey and grey, then seen closer, green, green, green
• Afterword: Growing Up in This Story
• Notes
• Appendix: Cast of Characters
• Source Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright