The Wicked Pavilion of the title is the Caf Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture one anothers reputation. Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powells Turn, Magic Wheel, makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powells thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of this mercilessly funny novel comes with a party which, remarked Gore Vidal, resembles Prousts last roundup, and where one of the partygoers observes, There are some people here who have been dead twenty years.For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. -- Gore VidalFrom the Trade Paperback edition.