A Grand Plotline

I am reading Ancestors, by William Maxwell. Or I should confess I am skimming a lot of it, because it does get boring. It is about Maxwell’s family genealogy, and likely only published in 1971 because he was a celebrated author and fiction editor of the New Yorker Magazine for thirty-nine years. Wikipedia lists his genre as domestic realism. That hooked me, because that is my favorite thing to read and to write about.

I started on Maxwell when I found on my own bookshelf a book of his short ...