These seemingly disparate events converge in the most unlikely way: the narrator establishes an unusual and moving kinship with Cletus Smith, the son of the murderer.įrom there, the parallels begin to unfold. At the same time, the narrator is moving through the loss of his mother and newborn brother to the Spanish influenza. A tenant farmer named Clarence Smith has killed Lloyd Wilson, his neighbor and onetime best friend Smith then takes his own life. Relayed by a wise and vulnerable narrator who is recalling and interpreting events that occurred many years earlier, So Long, See You Tomorrow begins like a thriller, with a spare report of a murder in 1921 rural Illinois. Finally retired, Maxwell was able to focus on this pristine and lyrical treasure of a short novel, one which many critics and readers consider his major accomplishment. Needless to say, by editing others, he honed his own craft and style. Maxwell had written other acclaimed novels prior to this one, but the majority of his time and effort had been devoted to his work as the Fiction Editor at the New Yorker, where he elevated the work of some of the best known writers of the 20th century, including John Updike, J.D Salinger, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov. So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) was published in the 1980's, when author William Maxwell was 71 years old.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |