Billie Dyer And Other Stories

William Maxwell’s superb book of carefully honed stories, Billie Dyer and Other Stories, is a slim volume told in the same calm, wise voice as that of his novel, So Long See You Tomorrow. All the stories are interrelated - a mature narrator reminiscing about his boyhood days in Lincoln, Illinois, some of which lead gently to epiphanies worthy of Joyce. I guess the best way to describe Maxwell’s writing in this volume is quiet restraint, gently guiding the reader back and forth between past and present. Maxwell does not prettify his childhood in these stories, or luxuriate in a vague longing of nostalgia, a danger lurking in any effort to interweave remembrance and storytelling. A grand mixture of autobiography and fiction, and I get the feeling that Maxwell was testing each mode to find the one that tells him something like “yes, this is the way it was, or could have been,” in striving to achieve a personal understanding of his past. Maxwell’s stories speak to me on a personal level, as I am currently setting down on paper my early childhood memories of Ireland and growing up in an Irish Catholic environment in the U.S. for my six year old daughter. I was only six years old when we left Clare, and in sorting the few memories I have of Ireland, I have become increasingly aware of the wily process in which the shreds of recollection are transformed by the imagination, that strange mutation of memory and fiction. ( )