A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell (1952)

Among this residue stood an enormous sugar castor topped with a heavy silver nozzle. Barbara must have suddenly conceived the idea of sprinkling a few grains of this sugar over Widmerpool, as if in literal application of her theory that "he needed sweetening", because she picked up this receptacle and shook it over him. For some reason, perhaps because it was so full, no sugar at first sprayed out.  Barbara now tipped the castor so that it was poised vertically over Widmerpool's head, holding it there like the sword of Damocles above the tyrant.  However, unlike the merely minatory quiescence  of the normally inactive weapon, a state of dispensation was not in this case maintained, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the massive silver apex of the castor dropped from its base, as if severed by the slash of some invisible machinery, and crashed heavily to the floor: the sugar pouring out on to Widmerpool's head in a dense and overwhelming cascade.
--Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market (The University of Chicago Press).

A Buyer's Market, the second volume of Powell's twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, takes place in the twenties, as narrator Nicholas Jenkins finishes at university, moves to London to work for a publisher and gets caught up in various social circles, attending dances and spending week-ends at estates in the country.  He is love with Barbara Goring but their relationship goes nowhere and Jenkins sleeps with the sluttish Gypsy Jones after the death of family friend Richard Deacon, at whose antique shop he meets Jones and painter Ralph Barnby.  This sometimes funny and sometimes downbeat, but always stylish and elegant, volume ends with Jenkins having dinner with Widmerpool, Widmerpool's mother and spinster Janet Walpole-Wilson, after which Jenkins reflects on where his life is going:
For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.