What a beautiful but sad book.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:
Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.
As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?
What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:
We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with The Walking Dead's Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return. ( )

I can see why this little novel by the longtime fiction editor of the New Yorker is so highly praised, yet I have to admit that on a personal level I didn't exactly love it.

Told with impressive empathy in a discursive style, it is a sad tale of adultery, murder and the familial dissolution of neighboring tenant farmers in the early twentieth century. Much of the first half of the book is exploration of the family story of the narrator, who was only tangentially connected to the tragic developments as a teenager. Now an old man, he self-consciously tells the reader that he intends to imaginatively reconstruct this past history, fleshing out old newspaper clippings, as a sort of sympathetic testament. Thus halfway through or so the narrator's personal history is abandoned to this project.

Given the fact that at least 3 of the 4 adult characters in this tragic history clearly behave badly to rather serious degrees, made more reprehensible because of the impact they have on their young children, it is remarkable that Maxwell can nevertheless evoke sympathy for them in so few pages. It is a nice feat of humanist writing.

Yet the selfishness and betrayals must dominate, and in the end there is no redemption for anyone, making for a bleak experience. ( )

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book, but for now it seems to me an uncomfortable attempt at compressing two stories of betrayal into one book - a melancholic story, set in 1920s Illinois farmland, of the early life and 'disasters' of the narrator, and his later adolescent guilt at ignoring a friend in a key moment, with a more dramatic account of marital infidelity and subsequent tragedy involving his friend's parents. That's not to say it isn't well-written stylistically - Maxwell certainly knows how to make interesting sentences and vivid scenes and pack a whole world into few words.

The slender thread with which the two stories are tied is the relationship of the two friends, two boys. It is a relationship that Maxwell leaves underdeveloped and superficially drawn - we know they played together and went to the same school, but little else. This casual childhood relationship comes across as insubstantial and opaque, compared with the relationships - say - between the two husbands, or the husbands and their wives, in the story of sexual betrayal.

This unsatisfying off-kilter combination of two stories comes with a puzzling obsession by the narrator with the second story, in which he plays no part and has to speculate about and imagine, helped along by trawling some old newspapers. Maxwell makes this fabrication clear, and so has his narrator provide a kind of fantasy drama in very realistic terms (so that we barely notice by the end of the book the degree to which almost all of the dialogue, events and motivations are 'made up' by his narrator).

Perhaps there is some playful meta-commentary at work here - lulling the reader into a false 'reality' in a way that may eventually remind us, if we care, that even the first story of the boy and his guilt is equally 'false' (while sounding 'real').

The narrator's unreliable and quixotic positioning by Maxwell is highlighted at moments briefly. The narrator tells us at one point: "Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take." In an aside, he lets us know the other boy's name 'isn't his real name', without further explanation for that choice. He tells us: "If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any." Replaying his own betrayal of his friend, he says "Sometimes I almost remember" passing him in the school corridors.

In all of this there is a kind of authorial teasing - we are offered some unknowable mix of 'facts' only to be reminded that this is - in fact - 'fiction'; we are convinced by the potentially 'unconvincing'; we are left without 'the real' while being fed 'realism'; we accept Maxwell's (and his narrator's) potentially unacceptable 'lies' because they have 'conformed to this end'.

I also wonder about the irony of putting a rich fantasy of adult relationships and infidelity and its consequences within the narrative framing of a brief and ephemeral 'real' childhood relationship. Not to mention the hint of a 'Freudian' projection of the narrator's childhood grief in the form of an adult fixation with his friend's loss.

Maxwell undoubtedly offers some thought-provoking themes of memory and imagination in the context of stories of betrayal and guilt. The writing is for the most part fluent and the characters lifelike, the pace (in a short book) is compelling and the social and cultural context of the story is deftly observed. I'm not sure he quite pulls off whatever he was attempting, however - as if he didn't quite find a good enough recipe for some otherwise flavoursome ingredients. Having said that, perhaps I will remember - or reimagine - this book in a different way over time.

Footnote:
There's some helpful insight too from an interview Maxwell gave the Paris Review, including the reference to a Giacometti sculpture, in two other Goodreads reviews: here and here ( )

So Long, See You Tomorrow written by William Maxwell is a confusing bore even at 100 pages. Written in the late 1970s, the novel doesn't hold up. I thought the fact that Maxwell was gay might offer interesting insights but that wasn't the case. ( )

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It still gets such great reviews considering it was written in 1980. Maybe it just wasn't the right time for me to read this. ( )