![]() Two pages later he is more circumspect: “Without thinking I would have said that acts of violence could hardly be expected to flourish in a placed where the houses were not widely separated and never enclosed by a high wall…” (5).Īt this moment and throughout the novel, the narrator is highly aware of the ways the world has changed since his childhood. ![]() The narrator follows this up with the following odd statement: “I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere it would come out in China” (3). “I know it only by hearsay,” the narrator says of a nearby lake that boys say has no bottom. The novel opens on a first-person narrator laying out the details of the killing while also doing everything possible to distance himself from it. This short novel – only 134 pages – begins with an extramarital affair and subsequent killing in a small Illinois town in the early 20 th century. I knew that Maxwell has a reputation as one of the great masters of mid-to-late twentieth-century fiction, in league with the likes of James Salter, Richard Yates, and others who write about silent, miserable men and the women who might perhaps love them if they weren’t so silent and miserable. I own a couple of them, though I borrowed So Long, See You Tomorrow from a co-worker. ![]() I’ve known for some time that there is really no excuse for the fact that I had not read any of William Maxwell’s novels. ![]()
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