Childhood memory and the afterlife of a single event give William Maxwell’s fiction its quiet emotional force. So Long, See You Tomorrow begins with a murder in rural Illinois and becomes a meditation on the narrator’s boyhood, guilt and what he failed to understand about two neighbouring families. They Came Like Swallows follows a Midwestern family through the 1918 influenza pandemic from several viewpoints, while The Folded Leaf centres on an intense friendship between two young men. Maxwell’s prose is spare, precise and emotionally restrained, with memory and perspective more important than dramatic plotting. For marketplace browsing, the clearest links are twentieth-century American literary fiction, Midwestern novels and memory-centred family stories alongside writers such as Alice Munro and John Cheever. Read more Less
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