Dawn Powell + "The Happy Island"

Powell has 9 of her 15 novels currently available in 2 Library of America editions:

Vol 1 (1930 - 1942):
Dance Night
Come Back to Sorrento (first issued as "The Tenth Moon")
Turn, Magic Wheel
Angels on Toast
A Time to Be Born

Vol 2 (1944 - 1962):
My Home is Far Away
The Locusts Have No King
The Wicked Pavilion
The Golden Spur

After reading her bio by Tim Page, and the letters and diary edited by same, I've also been making my way through the novels. Have finished all of Vol. 1, and am halfway through the 1938 novel The Happy Island, which was not included in a LofA edition.

Having not yet started on it, I don't yet know about Vol. 2, but Vol. 1 plus The Happy Island are---despite their ostensibly "satirical" peeks into both small-town and big-city life---actually pretty heart-breakingly in-depth re the psychological nuances of all of the characters as they navigate their situations, whether small- or big-town.

In the first volume: I'd recommend ALL of them. But Dance Night, Sorrento, and Magic Wheel are, to me, the most acute and touching. In all, Powell makes clear the characters' (and society's) foibles but also has great compassion, and understanding, for them.

After being described by reviewers as "satirical," she gave her own definition of the term: "Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."

While currently reading 1938's The Happy Island, this passage (about a former Big Woman on Campus at Smith, now married to successful playwright Neal, and her weekly "Girls' Night Out" with her sorority sisters, the "Cosies") funnily stood out:
In the fifteen years these ladies had been in constant touch with each other, they had never ceased to be amazed at meeting each other of all people, and their ecstasy over each other's hats, gloves, complexions, wit, and general perfection had never waned. ... Two of the five Cosies had husbands, and the group ecstasy flung itself on the associative-Cosy as ebulliently as if he were a new fudge cake. All of the girls were simply crazy about Neal, and they attended matinees of every one of his plays and loved them, I really mean that. ... [Neal] would never discuss the points in his works with them, which was hardly fair since four out of five had majored in English and were especially crazy about the Dramas...

Throughout the book, Powell is equally cogent of the peccadilloes of Neal and other artists, as well as the various gay males and older-female socialites hanging around the "arts scene" of NYC circa 1938. A cafe singing star (one of the main characters), for example, has lost her radio-star boyfriend to another woman. The singer then seduces the other woman herself for revenge, then becomes incredibly bored with her inanity, while her closest gay male friend (a low-level museum employee) then reports on their goings-on at parties, including their matching platinum toenail polish and their annoying mutual phraseology of "divoon" et al. (And all of this in 1938! And not written pruriently but just matter-of-factly and brilliantly!) 

Oh, and the gossipy "gay friend" has just acquired a boy toy whom he hopes to inspire to write a cookbook (since the pasty-faced kid seems to have no other talents). When the mentor sneaks a peek at the work in progress after 6 weeks, he finds only a single paragraph:
VEGETABLES: Vegetables ought to be fresh. Vegetables ought not to cook to death. They ought to only have a little water put on them as this makes them a little mushy.

Which dismay is more palpable, the reader's or the would-be mentor's?  Powell makes all of these characters both interesting and great, despite their actual non-greatness.