William Maxwell (1) (1908–2000)

Regret is a capricious instinct, like a devilish fairy sprinkling her dust where you’d least expect it, or want it. The big failings, the ones that would apparently change life’s course, are easy to spot, even at the moment of their unfolding. But the small ones, the routine and seemingly trivial, are the ones that reach out from the past with a haunting vengeance.

William Maxwell, in [So Long, See You Tomorrow] dives headlong into such a shameful memory, looking at it from fifty years show more gone. The seminal event is a murder. But the story doesn’t study the bloody, jealous act. Instead, the narrator excavates his guilt over how he treated the murderer’s son, Cletus, a year and a half later. He had moved with his family to the big city by that time, having forgotten befriending the awkward outsider. When he sees Cletus in the halls of his new big-city high school, he doesn’t speak to him, doesn’t mention that he knows what happened or that he won’t tell anyone about the scandal. Fifty years later, he is left to wonder what Cletus took from the snub. Did the boy assume he was marked with the guilt of what his father had done? Or that his burden was a dangerous contagion?

As these things are, it’s difficult to explain. And Maxwell puts the story into the proper context, exhuming all the baggage, not the least of which is the narrator’s own grief over the death of his mother at about the same time. The result is a tart slice of small-town Midwestern angst. Maxwell’s spare, elegiac tone is masterful.

First appearing in The New Yorker in two parts, the story was published in book form in 1980. Maxwell had long been the fiction editor for The New Yorker, working with the likes of J.D. Salinger, John O’Hara, and John Cheever. But he had also distinguished himself with his own short stories and novels. This final book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the year it was published, likely a recognition of Maxwell’s body of work as well as the power of the book itself

Bottom Line: Spare and elegiac; a tart slice of Midwestern angst.

5 bones!!!!! show less

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 show more 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. show less

I wish every book I read was as moving and thoughtful as this one. Beyond it being a memoir (of sorts), it is told by one who has lived and observed and been immersed in words for a long time. (Maxwell was in his 70s when he wrote this.) From the first pages I felt at ease, being in well aged hands.

The structure is unique. Written part as memoir in first person about his own life; part, for lack of a better word, as investigation; and then a long switch to third person when Maxwell imagines show more the lives affected by this incident, including all the slow tragedies that led up to it. (Even Trixie, the dog, is effected and my heart ached for her.) Remarkably, this mishmash we are warned about in school, worked.

And the writing, oh the writing. I could live for the rest of my life on this kind of lyrical, dead-eye accurate, evocative writing. I wanted to find a few sentences to share the feeling here, but that wouldn't work. It is passages that flow, build, and then crescendo, ending with an intake of breath, "Oh yes. Life is like that," (to paraphrase a bit from poet Elizabeth Bishop).

This book has prompted a new bookshelf tag: to re-read. show less

Maxwell è uno scrittore, giornalista, editor famosissimo in USA, molto meno in Europa. In questo libro, in parte di fantasia, in parte probabilmente autobiografico nel personaggio di Bunny, racconta la vita della famiglia Morison subito prima e subito dopo la morte della madre a causa dell'epidemia di spagnola del 1918. Nella prima parte si segue il pensiero di Bunny, figlio di 8 anni, nella seconda parla il primogenito Robert, nella terza il padre James. Il punto di vista delle donne viene show more riportato sempre dagli uomini. La prosa è ottima, il contenuto straziante. Non che ci siano descrizioni strappalacrime o truculente, forse sarò io che sento particolarmente certi temi, ma fin dall'inizio l'atmosfera è tendente al cupo. Gli uomini, piccoli e grandi che siano, si trovano completamente incapaci di far fronte alle proprie sensazioni e insicurezze, e deve essere sempre una figura femminile (inizialmente la stessa madre, poi interviene la zia Irene, sorella di lei) a tirare le fila dei rapporti, a dare speranza, a notare la luce nel buio. Intorno, una sfilza di parenti che a volte fanno male con i loro comportamenti egoistici, ma non è che i protagonisti si salvino. Bunny forse è quello più scusabile per la giovane età, ancora molto bambino e tremendamente insicuro; Robert ha avuto un incidente e risente della menomazione conseguente; il padre è un uomo molto vecchio stile e si nota, leggendo oggi, una sorta di educazione leggermente oppressiva che solo la madre con il suo amore riesce a rendere gestibile, e anche la sua incapacità a relazionarsi coi figli, al punto da desiderare di affidarli a qualcun altro pur di togliersi il peso. Pur comprendendo che l'angoscia derivante dal libro è fin troppo vera, e che il ritratto è estremamente realistico e sincero, la tematica non mi ha appassionato poi molto. Forse è una sorta di difesa per non dover rivivere le angosce personali, forse è una mia sorta di repulsione per il verismo, ma non mi ha poi tanto preso. Diciamo che il concetto in fondo è vero e potente: la donna, un po' per essere stata per anni costretta nel ruolo di "angelo del focolare", un po' forse per questione di intuito femminile, in certi compiti riesce meglio, lo dico per esperienza diretta. Ma presentata dal punto di vista maschile, perde un po' la sua forza. Significativo che la zia, per salvare cognato e nipote, decida di non accettare la proposta del suo ex marito di riprovare a ricucire un rapporto. Magari è solo una scusa, ma insomma: la donna come unica salvatrice della famiglia e costretta alla rinuncia. Forse, da donna, avrei preferito un maggiore richiamo alla speranza non legato unicamente alla figura femminile, perché il mondo lo si salva in due, donne e uomini, e la responsabilità deve essere di entrambi, e se non si sa dialogare coi figli ci si sforza di imparare. Detto questo, il quadro è descritto con maestria invidiabile. show less