Novel: What's Become of Waring?

Overview
Anthony Powell's What's Become of Waring? (1939) is a satirical mystery that turns a missing-person plot into a study of literary fame, social ambition, and the slipperiness of identity. The novel centers on the disappearance of Waring, a celebrated travel writer whose public persona has been carefully manufactured and widely admired. Rather than building suspense through detective procedure, the narrative examines how others construct meaning around absence and success.
Powell balances light comic observation with a cool, analytical eye. The story moves through drawing-room conversations, newspaper columns, and private reminiscences, letting rumor and conjecture take the place of verified fact. The result is less a whodunit than a portrait of a society that needs its idols and a meditation on the stories people tell about themselves and others.

Plot
When Waring vanishes, the immediate reaction is confusion followed by profitable speculation. Publishers, journalists, acquaintances, and hangers-on attempt to explain or exploit the disappearance, proposing everything from suicide to voluntary flight. Each explanation reveals more about the explainer than about Waring. The narrator, an observer embedded in Waring's circle, pieces together anecdotes and impressions, creating a collage of the missing man rather than a single definitive account.
As the campaign to decode Waring gathers momentum, the investigation becomes a vehicle for social satire. Parties and press commentaries amplify partial truths into reputations. The narrative traces the ripple effects of absence: broken engagements, opportunistic memoirs, the revaluation of past kindnesses and slights. Occasional revelations about Waring's private life complicate the public image, but the novel resists tidy resolution, emphasizing ambiguity over certainty.

Characters and Perspective
Waring himself remains curiously elusive, a figure known more by the palimpsest of other people's memories than by direct description. That elusiveness is the point: fame is largely a construction, assembled from fragments and repurposed by those who stand to gain. The people around him, publishers eager for copy, journalists hungry for scandal, social climbers seeking cachet, are fully drawn and often more telling than the absent man whose name anchors the plot.
The narrator's voice is quietly ironic, attentive to details of posture, phrase, and motive. Rather than asserting omniscience, this perspective collects impressions, tolerates contradictions, and highlights the ease with which narrative authority can be manufactured. The point of view emphasizes observation over judgment, inviting readers to notice how reputations are fabricated and to enjoy Powell's sharp eye for social comedy.

Themes and Tone
The novel interrogates the nature of literary celebrity, asking what remains when the author is no longer available to manage his image. Identity is shown as performative and porous; those closest to Waring can't agree on who he was, and the public's appetite for an emblem of cosmopolitan success distorts memory. The book also skewers the literary marketplace, where personality often substitutes for craft and rumor can be as marketable as a bestseller.
Tone shifts between genial comedy and mordant observation. Powell's humor comes from precise social portraiture and the gentle deflation of pretension. Even when material grows serious, when loss and loneliness surface, the satire never feels gratuitously cruel; it remains an intelligent probe into how people construct narratives to suit their needs.

Significance
What's Become of Waring? occupies an important place in Powell's prewar oeuvre, anticipating the social attentiveness and narrative subtlety that would culminate in A Dance to the Music of Time. It showcases an early mastery of perspective and the use of a social mystery to reveal deeper cultural anxieties about authorship and authenticity. The novel remains a witty, perceptive exploration of how absence can illuminate character and how stories about a person can become more influential than the person himself.