The narrator’s guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart. 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. Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends. 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. No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road. Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring. One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot. The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell’s deceptively simple manner:
Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify. 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. I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events – especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore. 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 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. 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. Sometimes I hate Blogger… Well, I’m going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you’ll know why… 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.
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