William Maxwell (1) (1908–2000)

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.… (more)

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… (more)