Thursday 15 December 2011

So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell

I want to cry a little bit, because I just spent two hours writing a post on So Long, See You Tomorrow, which disappeared when I tried to add a picture.  Sometimes I hate Blogger... Well, I'm going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you'll know why...

It has ended up being quite neat, though, that I'm blogging about a novella by William Maxwell - following on from other reviews in this vein this week.  I fell in love with Maxwell when I read They Came Like Swallows (thanks Karen!), bought up a few of his books, read half of The Chateau, and... stopped.  Not sure why.  But Rachel's review of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) catapaulted it up my tbr pile, and while I didn't love it quite as much as They Came Like Swallows, it's not far off.

I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events - especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore.  That makes me sound a bit sadistic, doesn't it?  But examples like Ian McEwan's Atonement and, even better, Jens Christian Grondahl's Virginia (reviewed here) show how this can create a structure of dual narratives, looking forwards and backwards, memories and regrets influencing the telling of past and present.  Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify.

The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell's deceptively simple manner:

One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot.  Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.  Within a few seconds it had grown light.  No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn't see anyone walking on the road.  The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.
Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends.  Living on neighbouring farms, their families had grown alongside each other, and Maxwell builds up this dynamic between neighbours and friends in a believable, simple manner - until circumstances change and the friendship is gradually unwoven, with the tragic results already revealed to the reader at the outset.  The narrator's guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart.  This guilt colours the narrator's presentation of the past, and is a net from which he has not been able to escape.  The novel moves between past and present, developing each narrative line, and demonstrating the far-flung influence of long ago events - in a way which flows beautifully, never forced, quietly showing Maxwell's novelistic expertise.

The narrator's own life was not easy.  Crippling shy and suffering from the early loss of his mother, the narrator feels that he has disappointed his father, and is out of kilter with the sort of boy he is expected to be.  Maxwell touches gently on the father's grief, in an example of his understated but powerful style:

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.  He continuted to sleep inthe bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was.
Many lesser novelists would have spent several pages dissecting the narrator's father's emotions, but Maxwell's talent is that he does not need to do so - he encapsulates everything we need to read in two short sentences.  It is this approach which exemplifies Maxwell's brilliance, but also how easily he could be underestimated.

The father does remarry, and the family is moved to a new home.  I love portrayals of houses in literature, and the scenes of their new home being built make for some great sections - the narrator compares the building site to Alberto Giacometti's sculpture 'The Palace at 4am'.  There is no picture of the sculpture in the book, it is only described verbally, but I went and tracked down an image.  In its curious form, seemingly incomplete and distorted, it reflects not only a building site but the structures of memory:



For, despite the murder and the family tensions, the true subject of So Long, See You Tomorrow is memory and the fallibility of memory.  Not so much that facts may be altered, but the distortion of remembered emotions and responses; superimposing later feelings over old ones, and the overlap between past and present:
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.
A murder mystery usually has a fairly straightforward structure - clues must be laid, of course, and herrings must be red, but the masters have laid out the pattern.  By removing the mystery of whodunnit, Maxwell explores the much more human, fascinating dynamics of how circumstances and personalities led to murder - and how the aftermath continues for decades and decades.  To construct a narrative through the abstract themes of grief, regret, love, pain, and guilt, Maxwell sets himself a much more difficult task - and achieves it.  I'm excited eventually to read more of Maxwell, and it was worth having to write this post twice to tell you how good this little book is...



Others who got Stuck into it:

"I don’t think I have come across a finer work of modern fiction." - Rachel, Book Snob

"Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose." - Trevor, The Mookse and the Gripes

"This book will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time." - Lynne, dovegreyreader

14 comments:

  1. I bought this one after Rachel raved about it - now to pull it out and read it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. New to me - will be looking out for it.

    Posts disappearing happened to me as well. You have persevered. Thanks for the review.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Create your post in in Word document or some such then copy it over to the blog. That way there is a back-up.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I admit to having only skimmed your review, enough to see that you loved it. That's because Rachel's review convinced me to buy the book ages ago and I haven't read it yet. Just like Susan in TX! I'll get right on it :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. That's come straight off my shelf, Simon. I love anything to do with the fallibility of memory and you've described that aspect so well. Thanks yet again.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I am a huge admirer of Maxwell but though for me he can do no wrong, like you I loved this less than They Came Like Swallows. But may I suggest Time Will Darken It, which in my opinion is his masterpiece. A wonderful writer (and a great review, but that goes without saying in your case).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh I feel so bad for you! I hate it when things like that happen... so much time and work! But you've written a great review anyway and I really enjoyed reading it!

    Megan @ Storybook Love Affair

    http://storybookloveaffair.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. So glad you loved this Simon, and beautiful review. I'm not sure if I did or didn't prefer it to They Came Like Swallows....both are magnificent in their own ways.

    I HATE it when I lose posts so now I write them in word first - top tip!

    ReplyDelete
  9. I just finished So Long this morning and it's one of the most extraordinary books I've read in some time. It will be long-lasting in my mind. Thanks for your comments here.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I know this hardly helps after the milk is spilt, but why not just copy to clipboard (or similar) at intervals? I've learnt to do this this the hard way after losing responses to posts on various sites.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Susan - we'll get you between us!

    Mystica - this one might even be available around the world - not often I pick them!

    Leaz - I know, I know... ;) I can't use Word, though, because of formatting issues when you change to Blogger. Old Blogger used to auto-save, which was nice. Oh well, live and learn.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Laura - I do that, if I know I'm going to read a book, I skim the reviews! Hope you love it.

    Carol - aww, thanks Carol - do you have any fallible-memory books to recommend?

    Harriet - my friend Barbara gave me Time Will Darken It a while ago, so I will move onto that one next. And what a lovely sentence at the end of your comment, thank you so much!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Megan - thanks, Megan! I am pleased I didn't give up on this review, because I did want to write about the book.

    Rachel - thanks, and thank you for encouraging me to read more Maxwell! Have you read Time Will Darken It, of Harriet's recommendation? (Have I, likely enough, commented on a review of it...)

    Jim - great! Was it your first Maxwell novel?

    Peter - I have been since! I was so used to Blogger autosaving that I hadn't got used to it's new stupidities...

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thank you for tracking down the sculpture! thanks for your comments.

    ReplyDelete

I've now moved to www.stuckinabook.com, and all my old posts are over there too - do come and say hello :)

I probably won't see your comment here, I'm afraid, but all my archive posts can also be found at www.stuckinabook.com.