So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

The Barnes & Noble Review
It was a cold, rainy day in Cleveland. Although I love Cleveland with the depth and breadth of my soul, I will concede this does not narrow it down. It was also the day I met Charles Baxter, whose work I'd admired for years, ever since I stayed up all night reading "First Light" and finished it and bawled my eyes out even though the ending isn't sad and I am not a crier, having only once in the two decades of my adult life sobbed over something that happened to me. I am not proud of this. I know that some readers may already be questioning how deep or broad my soul could possibly be. In my defense, I grew up in a small town in the American Midwest. So did Charles Baxter, although he and I have never discussed our crying habits.

I had invited Baxter to come give a reading at the university at which I then taught, and he and I had spent the day doing the usual classroom-visit stuff. Now we were driving the rain-slick streets of Cleveland, having just come from a bookstore where Baxter had signed copies of his then-new novel "Shadow Play."

Somehow we got started talking about writers who rarely get taught anymore or even get talked about much but who are better than many of those writers who do. My candidates were people like John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Richard Yates, and Peter Taylor. Baxter's list was smarter and more obscure. I don't remember everyone he mentioned, only that when he mentioned William Maxwell and I lied and said, "Gee, that name rings a bell," Baxter's eyes got big.

"Turn the car around," he said. "Excuse me?" "Go back to thatbookstore," he said. "If they have a copy of "They Came Like Swallows," I'll buy it for you."

Baxter had heretofore struck me as forthrightly sane, in that peculiarly midwestern way. I looked at my watch. "I don't know," I said, meaning that the time for Baxter's reading was closing in, and we had dinner reservations. "Won't take but a minute," he said.

And so I threw my car into a U-turn and we went back. The store did not have the book or anything at all by William Maxwell. "I'll read it," I said. "I promise." He nodded. We were midwestern men who had publicly expressed and heard expressed our passions. Time to go get a nice meal.

William Maxwell may be the definitive writer's writer. He's a masterful, accessible writer whose name comes up frequently in writers' shoptalk. He's also been a great friend to and booster of other writers. From 1936 to 1976, he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker, which allowed him to aid and abet the writing careers of such giants as John O'Hara, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, Frank O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, and John Updike.

Unlike most of the authors he edited (including all of the above), Maxwell was an American midwesterner. He was born and raised in Lincoln, Illinois, and his books are profoundly midwestern full of unquaint farms, befuddled dogs, sensitive paperboys, earnest churchgoers, and disappointed old people. His work is wildly emotional without ever on the surface seeming to be so. Even his publishing history is humble in a midwestern way; Maxwell published his own acclaimed short stories for 30 years before he agreed to publish his first collection (OVER BY THE RIVER, which came out in 1977, right after he retired from The New Yorker).

I did read "They Came Down Like Swallows," a sharply observed, unsentimental child's-eye view of his mother's dying, and I admired but for some reason did not fall in love with the book. The same strange effect that tempers passion in books you are assigned to read for a class can affect books pressed upon you with evangelical zeal (this doesn't stop me from evangelically pressing books on people). I blame myself.

When Maxwell's (highly recommended) collected stories, "All the Days & Nights," came out in 1994, reviewers stood to write benedictions for the career of the octogenarian Maxwell. These raves, I fear, made readers avoid Maxwell's book. Nobody likes a critics' pet. It's like being outside of a club you didn't know existed and being invited in by snooty people who wouldn't talk to you in high school or, worse, who live in New York City. At least that's how it is if you are an American midwesterner.

This attention, though, prompted Vintage to reissue most of Maxwell's books, and it was with one of these, the magnificent short novel "So Long, See You Tomorrow," that I became a Maxwell acolyte. I am, for this book's sake, willing to turn cars around to buy copies for new friends.

The book concerns a murder on an Illinois farm in the 1920s and, principally, that murder's consequence on the living—the families in particular, the town in general. The book is told, a half-century later, from the point of view of a friend of the murderer's...

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Book Club, American

Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American novelist, and fiction editor at the New Yorker. He studied at the University of Illinois and Harvard University. Maxwell wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America and the house where he lived at the time, which he referred to as the "Wunderkammer" or "Chamber of Wonders". He wrote of his loss "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). In 2008 the Library of America published the first of two collections of William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, Christopher Carduff editor. His collected edition of William Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by a second volume, Later Novels and Stories in the fall of 2008.'

Reviews

[Jaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

My heart was sliced to ribbons by this story. The narrator, an elderly man whose boyhood was scarred by a horrendous event, attempts to make sense of it all – and to make amends, as he tells it – 50 years down the road during the course of writing his memoirs.

In his memoirs, he talks about his childhood in Lincoln – about losing his mother to the influenza outbreak of 1918. He vividly recalls where they (his father, brothers and himself) lived and how they coped with their loss in their individual ways.

He talks about their home, and how more changes happened once his father re-married. He talks about his school years, his friends – and most of all, he bares all of his childhood feelings from his now 50-year cushion of safe distance in the future.

Through his memories, I felt like I was on a guided tour of history with my hand held snug and warm in his grip. He does warn me, however:

”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.” (Quote from the book; emphasis mine.)

So what we readers blithely label (and often dismiss) as an unreliable narrator is most likely every narrator who ever told a story. In other words, there is no such creature as a reliable narrator. This led me to understand that if a “reliable narrator” is what I am looking for in the stories I read, I am likely to be disappointed again and again.

The narrator in this book goes a step or two beyond that. Because they were young, and his friend Cletus’ father murdered a neighbour, the narrator goes on to weave his own memories further to include vividly coloured threads of what might have been happening in Cletus’ family as well as the family of the person murdered.

Despite his warning, despite knowing that he is inventing most of the story, I was completely under the spell of his tale. The emotions are real, the descriptions of two marriages falling apart and failing to re-form in similar or even different configurations are so tangible that I could have been there myself. I wanted to take some of the characters and shake them up; and others I wanted to protect with the ferocity of a mother lion defending her cubs.

William Maxwell’s writing is beautiful – straightforward, raw, immediate – it infiltrated my life like a song whose notes resonate so perfectly with one’s heart and soul that its refrain echoes in memory over and over again.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a little masterpiece of narrative compression. Though only 135 pages long, it can seem at times that whole paragraphs of unwritten backstory are suggested by every line, every image. A rundown of the plot will not give you a sense of the high level of mastery involved here, but here it is anyway. In the early 1920s one married farmer befriends another married farmer then steals his wife. Both marriages break up. The adulterous wife--Fern Smith--sues her husband for divorce and wins on grounds of maltreatment. This poor guy has been used by everyone: his best friend, his wife, and now the court system, since he cannot admit in open court that he has been cuckolded, to use that archaic and somewhat ridiculous term. It's essentially a love-triangle murder mystery without the mystery, since we know from the start who does what. Not so much a whodunit then, as a why-do-it. (Martin Amis' London Fields is a novel of this sort, though vastly different in narrative structure, technique, diction etc.) What's fascinating is William Maxwell's ability to produce gripping suspense even though we know what's going to happen next. I can't figure out how he actually does it. In a letter Hemingway once said, criticizing Faulkner, and here I paraphrase, that true literature, when it works, doesn't give away its methods; that even on second or third reading it somehow transcends its limitations as a text; whereas with Faulkner on a second reading "you can see how he's tricked you." William Maxwell's novella So Long, See You Tomorrow is clearly in that other, loftier, transcendent category of excellence.

[Maddy ✨ ~The Verse Vixen {AFK brb} · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Two friends on a scaffold, with no final goodbye,
One sank into silence, the other passed him by"

I lose myself in the enduring elegance of classics, offering them the thoughtful affection they’ve earned over generations. So Long, See You Tomorrow is a novel thin in pages but thick with ache.
It begins with absence—
the absence of a friend, of words never spoken,
of a murder that rippled quietly through a small town,
and of a boy who never truly left.

✦Plot & Structure-
This novel reads like memory—fragmented, fogged, fading.
A man, looking back on his childhood in 1920s Illinois, recalls a murder that shook his small town and the quiet, devastating friendship he lost in its wake.

“It happened the way all tragedies happen: not at once, but inch by inch, shadow by shadow.”

The book moves between past and present, seamlessly drifting from the narrator’s guilt-ridden recollections to the imagined inner world of his lost friend, Cletus.
What happened?
A man was killed.
A boy’s world was splintered.
But the real story is what wasn’t said.
What couldn’t be fixed.
✦Characters & Emotion- The Narrator:Once a boy, now a hollow man — carrying the weight of a small, lifelong regret: the day he failed a friend.

"So long," he said.
"See you tomorrow."

-Cletus Smith: the boy he couldn't reach — bruised by the collapse of a family, lost somewhere behind sorrowful eyes.
-The Adults: tired souls stumbling toward ruin, unable to change their fates or their failures.

✦Themes & Depth-
~Memory:
Not sharp or perfect — but a haze of feeling, of longing.
The novel reminds us: Memory isn’t a recording. It’s a wound we visit again and again.

~Regret:
Not the grand, cinematic kind — but the small everyday griefs.
The conversations we never had. The hands we didn’t reach for.

~Loneliness:
This book hums with loneliness, the kind that fills empty houses, abandoned fields, and hollow afternoons.

~Loss of Innocence:
Both the boys and the adults lose their illusions — about family, about friendship, about themselves.
And the loss is permanent.
✦The Heart of It All-
So Long, See You Tomorrow
is not a murder story.
It’s a story about the murder of connection—
the things we didn’t say,
the friends we didn’t hold on to,
the moments that passed us by
and refused to leave.
✦Keys to unraveling-
~A Shot in Darkness-A murder shatters a community.:
A catalyst that exposes the hidden tensions simmering beneath everyday life.

~New Beginnings, Old Shadows -The New House:
A symbol of uneasy change and the impossibility of truly starting over.

~The Trial:
A showcase of justice as imperfect and partial — more a performance than a reckoning.

~Friendship and Betrayal-A friendship tested by tragedy :
A heartbreaking symbol of missed connections, unspoken sorrows, and lifelong regret.

The meeting in the school corridor, a year and a half later, I keep reliving in
my mind, as if I were going through a series of reincarnations that end up
each time in the same failure. I saw that he recognized me, and there was
no use in my hoping that I would seem not to have recognized him,
because I could feel the expression of surprise on my face. He didn't speak.
I didn't speak. We just kept on walking.

╰┈➤Final Verdict (Soft, Thoughtful for 3 stars) ★★★☆☆ Maxwell captures the ache of lost time with grace. Though touching.. It reminded me why I need to return to the classics sometimes —
to sit in the stillness,
to ache without rushing to heal,
to remember that the softest stories often leave the deepest scars.
For all its quiet beauty, though, the novel didn’t quite break me. It made me think, made me reflect, but I didn’t feel like it truly shifted me in the way I hoped. Still, it’s a powerful reminder of the small, almost imperceptible ways life can change, and how even the briefest encounters can leave long-lasting imprints.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA PERDITA DELL' INNOCENZA, IL CONFINE DELLA MATURITÀ



William Maxwell è stato l’editor più importante della rivista The New Yorker dal 1936 al 1975, dall’età di 28 a quella di 67 anni: per tre giorni alla settimana era in redazione a fare l’editor di gente come Nabokov, Updike, Salinger, Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mavis Gallant, Frank O’Connor, Maeve Brennan, Eudora Welty, John O’Hara e altri - e per quattro giorni restava a casa a scrivere la sua letteratura.
So Long, See You Tomorrow, pubblicato nel 1980, è considerata la sua vetta, un eccellente romanzo breve, descritto dalla Gallant:
un palloncino trattenuto che poi prende il volo.
Mi ha fatto tornare in mente Harold Brodkey e i suoi racconti Primo amore e altri affanni, gli umori sono molto prossimi.


Un palloncino trattenuto che poi prende il volo.

Si tratta di ricordi che il narratore, all’epoca dei fatti un adolescente, racconta e rivive in modo tutt’altro che lineare, piuttosto simile a un labirinto, assumendo di volta in volta i punti di vista dei diversi personaggi coinvolti, cercando di riempiere spazio e materia emotiva che la memoria tende a lasciar svanire.

D’altra parte, la memoria parte fissando un momento del passato, ma poi lavora per così dire in avanti, elaborando, definendo, e anche modificando:
Ciò che noi, o perlomeno ciò che io, fiduciosamente, chiamo memoria – intendo un momento, una scena, un fatto che è rimasto impresso e quindi è sfuggito all’oblio – è in realtà una narrazione che va continuamente avanti nella mente; e il racconto spesso muta a furia di narrarlo. Troppi interessi emotivi in conflitto fra loro vi sono di mezzo perché la vita possa essere interamente accettabile, e magari compito del narratore è quello di riordinare le cose in modo tale da renderle conformi a questo fine. Comunque parlando del passato noi mentiamo a ogni emissione di voce.


So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Partendo da due immagini, una notturna, di morte, e una diurna, di vita, il punto di vista del narratore si mischia e s’immerge in quello dei personaggi, proprio come i due saluti ‘So long’ e ‘See you tomorrow’ diventano uno solo nel titolo.

È il classico passaggio d’età, quello dall’adolescenza all’età adulta, che permea tanta letteratura americana.
E, come spesso, è accompagnato da un vivo sentimento di perdita.



C’è un limite, certo, a quello che uno può pretendere da se stesso adolescente. E seguitare a sentirsi in colpa per quello che avvenne tanto tempo fa non è molto ragionevole. Eppure, mi sento in colpa. Un poco. E sarà sempre così, credo, ogni qualvolta penserò a lui. Mi chiedo anche di lui, cosa ne sarà stato. Se… se tutto questo avrà, finalmente, cominciato a sembrargli meno reale – più simile a qualcosa da lui sognato – dopo di che forse egli avrà potuto, invece di restare fisso lì, tirare avanti e condurre una sua propria vita, senza sentirsi distrutto da quanto – non per opera sua – era accaduto.


Primo amore, e altri affanni.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illinois native William Maxwell enjoyed a long, illustrious writing career. As his writing life was winding down, Maxwell penned an autobiographical, coming of age story about how events leading up to and following a murder in his small town of Lincoln, Illinois changed his perceptions of life. Resulting was So Long, See You Tomorrow, a perceptive novella which garnered the American Book Award.

Born in 1908, Maxwell enjoyed life in small town Lincoln, Illinois. A farming community in close proximity to the state capitol Springfield, the make up of the town was pretty much homogenous. One was either an in town person or a farmer who only came into town for errands and church. Even the school a one room, one size fits all classroom that went up through the eighth grade. In 1918 tragedy struck. After giving birth to Maxwell's youngest brother, his mother died of pneumonia two days later. His father did not know how to raise three boys on his own, so he sold the house the family had always lived in, and moved to a modest home on the outskirts of town. It was there, that he remarried Maxwell's stepmother Grace McGrath, and at age thirteen, the narrator met companion Cletus Smith, the focal point of this story.

Smith had moved into town with his mother following a tragic event that had upset the fabric of the town. Smith's mother was never suited to be a farmer yet she married Clarence Smith because he was available to her as a husband. Eventually, Fern Smith grew disillusioned with her marriage and engaged in an affair with her neighbor Lloyd Wilson. Because Lincoln was a tiny community, the whole town eventually talked about their business, which lead both couples to divorce, the women taking custody of the children. It was in this regard that Maxwell met Smith, and the two became best buddies until Smith's mother moved the family beyond the gossip to Chicago. Later on, Maxwell's father was offered a job opportunity in Chicago, and the family moved there as well. Maxwell and Smith ended up at the same high school, yet despite the closeness they once shared, Smith felt uncomfortable around someone who knew his past, and the two went their separate ways.

Fifty years later, Maxwell decided to reconstruct these events and the result was this novella. His writing is gritty, as his thirteen year old protagonist self sets about to dissect how the relations of two families who had once been close ripped apart the fabric of a community. The prose is raw and introspective and while I did not have any emotional attachment to the adults, I felt for the children whose lives had been effected by the poor choices of their parents. These events occurred at a time when children were not exposed to adult conversations and issues. Grappling with adult issues during this era must have caused the Smith and Wilson children much internal turmoil. Even Maxwell could not let the Smith-Wilson affair rest fifty years later and set about through his contacts in the publishing industry to reconstruct it. Only when he discovered the broad scope of the Lincoln tragedy of his childhood through his adult eyes could he let it rest.

I found So Long, See You Tomorrow to be a poignant look at how tragedy forces children to grow up too fast, and, unfortunately, this is true in any era. The prose was rich and introspective as Maxwell writes from many points of view to include all the key players in this tragedy. The result was a powerful, coming of age novella that won the 1980 American Book Award. I would like to thank my goodreads friend Carol for referring me to this book though her review because if not, this novella was not even on my radar. I rate this powerful So Long, See You Tomorrow 4 stars, and I will most likely look to read more of Maxwell's work in the future.

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is a delightful discovery from an author I had not previously heard of; I love the original title, "So long see you tomorrow," which wonderfully captures the nostalgia and regret permeating the novel. National Book Award 1982.
The story takes place in Lincoln, Illinois, in the 1920s. The narrator is a child, William, lonely and ultra-sensitive, who lost his mother, whom he adored, at age ten and whose life and the universe were shattered, especially as his father was rebuilding his life. He leaves the house and the landmarks of his childhood, making friends with another child who is lonely, like Cletus, who had to leave the farm where he had always lived following a tragedy. The children meet daily to play, but then Cletus suddenly stops coming. Her father has committed an irreparable act, and the budding friendship between the children, filled with unspoken words, comes to an abrupt end.
Nearly two years later, William, having gone to continue his studies in Chicago, briefly meets Cletus in high school but dares not speak to him. He will have no other opportunities, and it is to somehow atone for this error, which will obsess him for the rest of his life, so that he revisits his memories to evoke his childhood and seek to understand what happened to his friend. Everything is modest, subtle, and intriguing. It is a novel written at a child's height, with all the heightened sensitivity that characterizes a child's gaze—and lovely, haunting handwriting.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Storytellers are liars

John Updike said about this novel: "What a lovely book, utterly unlike any other in shape I have ever read."

He's right. While the subject matter of this book is not new or particularly original, the form is. The framework of the story is about a murder, yes, but William Maxwell tells us all the salacious details in the first chapter: farmers, neighbours, best friends, Clarence and Lloyd, become mortal enemies when Lloyd has an affair with Clarence's wife. Clarence murders Lloyd.

But that is not what the book is about, as I see it. The entire book is a recollection of an old man, a man who had been a young boy at the time of the murder. He had a fleeting but important boyhood friendship with Clarence's son Cletus prior to the murder. Now in old age, he is haunted by the last time he saw his friend. He is preoccupied by how the murder affected Cletus. He wants to see it in his mind's eye, to tell the story as best as he can. He does research by looking at old newspapers, but the facts are limited. He ransacks his memories. But, (and here is the crux of the book) memories are just blurry stories:

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. (...) In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

Having made this point, he tells us the story, in full admission that he is setting a stage, filling the gaps with fiction in his attempt to "reconstruct the testimony that [Cletus] was never called upon to give". He tells the reader "if any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it." He directs us to imagine Cletus' story as a deck of cards face down, turning each one over to see various (fictitious?) facets of the boy's experience. The first invention he makes is the dog, the darling dog who has her own heartrending narrative. And he goes forward from there constructing the story with a mixture of these "cards" as well as bits of truth of the story that are well known.

The result is a truly lovely book. Maxwell drew me into this lovingly crafted story, a patchwork of truth and lies, one that was designed to give voice to a child's untold story, one that was created to help give peace to an old man's worried heart.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is miniature tour de force…powerful, moving and beautifully written in a spare writing style that evokes a profound sense of place. It’s no secret that this novella is an old man’s recollection of a tragic episode from his childhood…a love triangle and murder in a small, Illinois farm town in the early 1920s. Yet, this story reveals much more than an account of a crime of passion. This slender novel is about childhood memories, nostalgia and dealing with loss, guilt and haunting regrets.

Almost everyone in the novel has a point of view. And even though the book deals with shameful and selfish acts of betrayal, I felt sympathy for both of these deeply flawed families. Even the murderer’s farm dog had a POV. I’m not sure what astonished me more…the notion that an abandoned family dog would have a voice in the story or that I found her tale even more painfully gut-wrenching than everyone else in this tragic novel.

Finally, this story resonates with me personally…undoubtedly because I’m the granddaughter of Eastern Colorado dry land farmers… and my own parents (contemporaries of this author) lived their whole lives in that small farming community where I grew up. I found myself relating to and reminiscing with this narrator’s past recollections as they conjured up my own familiar memories and family accounts of bygone times.

This is a lovely little story…eloquent, pared down and full of heart. I was unfamiliar with this gifted author but I’ll definitely be on the hunt for more of his work!

[Angela M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is of those books that has been on my TBR for a very long time. I was called to read this now because of these words from my good friend Cathrine’s brief, but compelling review - “literary perfection” . A man late in his life recollecting traumatic events in his childhood, questions what he remembers . The details may be blurred, but the emotional impact of his mother’s death is clearly remembered and cemented in this man’s heart. His grief and loss as he desperately wants to go back to the way things were before she died is heartbreaking. One of the most moving portrayals of grief that I remember reading . The other event is a murder that occurs . It’s not the victim that is the loss for this boy , but the loss of his friend, the son of the murder. We can feel his regret and guilt at not having done more for his friend so many years ago. A short, but profound look at grief, marriage, friendships, a view of farming life in Illinois in the 1920’s and the storytelling our memories evoke . Beautifully written.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best depictions of the effect on children (and a dog!) of marital discord I’ve ever read. This small book manages to say so much about life across the generations with, at its root, the recognition of the importance of ritual for children and the damage that can ensue when a married couple no longer have anything new to offer each other. Located in rural farmlands in Middle America there were times when I felt dust between my teeth and in my hair so vividly does Maxwell evoke the landscape.

The novel hinges on a murder which we hear about in the first chapter. I loved the unusual form of this book. Maxwell approaches his subject from an oblique angle. The narrator is an old man reminiscing. His obsessive interest in the murder is the result of the guilt he feels for snubbing the murderer’s son one day at school. He pieces back together the events that led to the murder from the perspective of all involved. It’s a time honoured story - how a woman comes between two good friends and turns them into enemies. But almost everything about this novel feels fresh. The psychological deterioration of the cuckolded husband is especially powerfully conveyed, culminating when all the raw emotional upheaval he has suffered is belittled and simplified by the legal system during divorce proceedings. Most of all though it’s the children’s dislocation we feel. The prose is as bright and transparent as early morning dew on grass. A fantastic read.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Speechless... That was extraordinary.

(24 hours later)

I knew I was in for something special when I heard Richard Ford saying that this was one of his all-time favourite books but I didn't expect this level of amazement and mastery as I zipped through these 150 pages on a rainy October Sunday. How did someone manage to pack so much humanity in such a tiny work of art? The last time I felt such mind blowing concision was when I read "The Great Gatsby" for the first time. Every single sentence contains an entire world of thought and imagery and sensory detail that burns into your mind like a red-hot iron. The entire story is eerily seamless, moving like water from point of view to point of view, gathering speed like a storm about to burst. Rarely have I felt such emotional rawness and truths expressed in so few words. This is a true feat of the heart and mind.

I was also lucky enough to read this masterpiece with a most luminous and intelligent introduction by Ann Patchett. Obviously enamoured with this piece of work, she writes the following:

""So Long, See You Tomorrow" is structured not like a novel, but like the inner workings of the human brain. There are no surprises, only a constant circling of facts, the question of how things might have gone differently, the familiar retreat into personal experience. The narrator puts himself into characters he has no connection to, imagines their days, imagines the dog, without apology or explanation. Why has he stepped into someone else's life? Because this is how we try to make sense of the things we cannot possibly understand. It is an exercise in compassion."

Ann Patchett chose this novel as one to pass on to future generations. So would I.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

So. This novel is indisputably a 5-star book by any criterion. Each sentence is one the current crop of MFA-wielding authors dream of having penned. It becomes only more intense, lyrical, disturbing, resonant as it progresses to its end.

These 2 friends' reviews do it justice and are lyrical in their own right.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Keep your eye on the title. It reminds the reader that Maxwell's focus is on collateral damage, on the periphery, less on what appears in the center of the viewfinder.

There is one subset of readers I need to tip off, though, to a key (IMO) sub-plot. It's difficult to imagine a spoiler alert being necessary with respect to a novel that discloses the last event and its perpetrator early on. And yet, if I had known that the dog dies, I would not have read it, and I am not alone in avoiding reading that triggers certain memories. My warning for the unsuspecting is, if you won't read Old Yeller, be prepared here.

That's it. In every other way novels are appraised, evaluated, measured, SOSYT is perfect for any and every reader.

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uno de los aspectos más penosos en esta tragedia que es envejecer, y creo que ya lo he comentado alguna que otra vez, es la mochila de arrepentimientos que vamos acumulando a lo largo de la vida, una mochila cada vez más repleta de momentos en los que sentimos que nuestro comportamiento estuvo muy alejado de la idea que tenemos de nosotros mismos, de lo que creemos ser o, al menos, de aquel que nos gustaría ser. Pueden ser actos anodinos que ya no estén ni en la memoria de aquellos a los que causamos algún daño o fueron testigos de nuestros actos ridículos, pero que sorpresivamente asaltan nuestra conciencia provocándonos una especie de escalofrío embarazoso. Esta novela está justificada por uno de esos momentos en la vida del narrador, parece ser que trasunto del propio autor.

“Han pasado cinco o diez años sin que haya vuelto a pensar en Cletus para nada y, de pronto, algo me lo recuerda… entonces lo veo acercarse hacia mí por el pasillo de aquel enorme instituto, y se me tuerce el gesto al recordar que no le dije nada. E intento quitármelo de la cabeza”

William Maxwell sabía muy bien del dolor que aflige a un niño cuando su familia se rompe y su vida cambia por completo. Con solo diez años tuvo que afrontar la muerte de su madre y, poco más tarde, el nuevo matrimonio de su padre que vivió como una traición a la memoria de su madre y hacia él mismo, al igual que el narrador de esta historia. No es la única traición que aparece en la novela: Lloyd Wilson traicionó a su esposa y a su mejor amigo, Clarence Smith, traicionado a su vez por su esposa Fern al mantener una relación sentimental con Wilson. Y, por supuesto, está la traición objeto de la novela, la del narrador a su amigo Cletus, hijo de la familia Smith, al que abandonó tras el trágico suceso y a quién, tiempo después en un pasillo de instituto, fingió no reconocer.

“… entonces tenía clase de matemáticas en el segundo piso, en la otra punta del edificio, y el tiempo justo para llegar antes de que sonara el timbre”

Como un homenaje a ese amigo, y ante la imposibilidad de reencontrarse con él después de tanto años, decide escribir sobre aquellos sucesos con el objetivo dudoso de apaciguar su culpa y encontrar una explicación a su incomprensible comportamiento que le marcó de por vida.

“Sabía que lo que le había ocurrido a Cletus era algo terrible y que él quedaría marcado para siempre, pero no intenté ponerme en su lugar”

La historia que nos narra su protagonista, a modo del testimonio que nunca le pidieron a Cletus, es una mezcla de recuerdos poco sólidos, declaraciones no fiables, información sacada de recortes de periódicos de la época y una ficción que intenta encajar todas las piezas y rellenar los espacios en blanco. Para ello, incluso inventa la existencia de un perro, que muchas veces es el punto de vista desde donde se observan los hecho y protagonista, posiblemente, de los párrafos más enternecedores de una narración que en general posee un tono frío y distante en la superficie, aunque profundamente conmovedor en el fondo, y siempre con un estilo sobrio y delicado. Una novela corta fascinante que recibió en 1982 el National Book Award.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an updated review from 2010, now reread in 2025.

In 2010, I read the Vintage edition.

In 2025, I reread this book from The Library of America's edition of William Maxwell's "Later Novels and Stories".

A spare, sad, and beautiful novel of loss and missed opportunities to make amends, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" is slim, powerful novel of heartbreak and the power of imagination.

The story centers on the lonely protagonist who looks back at his childhood in Lincoln, Illinois. He mother passes away, and he has two other siblings that he feels estranged from. His stern father marries his stepmother, Grace- and it is the protagonist trying to make sense of his friend Cletus, who disappeared after a sensational murder rocks their small town in the 1920s.

The narrator grieves over his mother's death, trying to make sense of his father's as well, "he gave away her jewelry and more important to me, her clothes, so I could no longer open her closet door and look at them" (Maxwell 515). He writes of the memories of his brother, "though we were different, he knew me inside out that is to say he knew my weaknesses and how to play on them" (Maxwell 514).

The protagonist befriends another boy, Cletus whom it seems is also stunted in his development in terms of processing his feelings. Cletus' father, Clarence shoots a man named Lloyd Wilson to death after learning that his wife Fern and Lloyd have been carrying on with an affair. Fern wants to leave Clarence, and this causes Clarence to murder Lloyd in a fit of rage.

Cletus and the protagonist’s friendship often consisted of their goodbyes with, "when the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along suppertime, we climbed down and said, "so long" and "see you tomorrow" (Maxwell 532).

After the murder takes Cletus away to Chicago- later the narrator finds himself living there as well with his father and stepmother, Grace. He runs into Cletus one last time at the high school where they're both enrolled, but does nothing to say anything.

The rest of the novel is about the power of memory and regret. The narrator has done nothing to make Cletus feel better and has done nothing to offer friendship and support for a friend who's gone through unimaginable despair and trauma and the pangs of awful, small town gossip.

It seems that moving to Chicago has enabled both to reinvent themselves from small town life. But as the narrator later moves to New York, and returns home to reminisce- he knows he could have done something, but didn't.

This is a coming of age masterpiece of the emotional, and of how difficult it is to grow up when the adults in these boys' lives are also hobbled by their own issues, their own problems.

Motherless boys are seen and not heard, and the hurt and cruelty of adolescence hangs in the air.

[Zoeytron · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is the early 1920's in a small farming community in Lincoln, Illinois.  A seemingly irreparable void is created in a family when the mother dies.  Two families end up torn asunder as a result of an affair.  Who amongst us doesn't carry a regret or two in our heart?  A modestly slim novel that speaks volumes.  Spare, beautiful, and heartbreaking.  This one is meant to be savored.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've said before that the ending of a work can make the work for me, and such is the case here. Not that the beginning wasn't wonderful, it was; in fact, the end reflects back to the beginning, another of my favorite things. And as I approached the end, I lingered over the sentences, rereading them: slight though they may seem, they are so worth it.

This slim novel is a perfect example of why a writer writes, how an incident can linger and fester until he works it out of his thoughts and memories, and still it is there, on the page, yes, but not worked out: it has merely become a different entity.
(May 20, 2012)

Update: A reread finished this evening and a wish fulfilled.
(July 19, 2015)

Another reread: The other night, rather late, I started reading this, as I felt the need of a ‘comfort’ read, which might seem odd, as this story is so sad. I was struck during this read at Maxwell’s not only working out the death of his mother through his narrator, but also through the character of Cletus (who has not lost his mother). Though it was my third read of this novel, the final chapter lost none of its power: it was just as beautiful and devastating as the first time.
(June 5, 2017)

[Mark Porton · Rating 5 out of 5]

So long, see you tomorrow by William Maxwell is a wonderful novella that starts with a small town murder in rural Illinois in the late 1920's. We quickly discover who the victim is and also the likely murderer.
 
The format of this story is different to anything I have read before. At the beginning the narrator is a boy and we learn all about his family and the various injuries and illnesses suffered by them (there’s a lot) and ultimately the death of his mother. His father then decides to build a house and it is while playing on this building site he meets Cletus, another little boy.  It seems the murderer is probably Cletus’ father.
 
We then jump many years to the future and our now adult narrator describes the live’s of two tenant farmer families living next door to each other. One of these families belonging to Cletus, the other, the belonging to the murder victim. The narrator uses a combination of historical facts and his own thoughts to describe the intricate dynamics and relationships between these two families and also within each family.
 
I don’t want to give too much away except to say I found the story of these two families and the interplay between the characters enthralling,  I just didn’t expect the story to grab me in the way it did.
 
There were no great surprises or shocks but this story about poor farmers in rural America, the hard lives, unfulfilling relationships, the struggles and oh the poor dog. Oh boy, I literally had a tear in my eye regarding the dog story, it was heartbreaking - in fact, there were many heartbreaking aspects to this story and I loved it
 
This one is an easy five stars.

[Fionnuala]

Written more than forty years after They Came Like Swallows, this book takes up the story of Bunny where it left off in that book. But the name Bunny is not used in this book; he has become the narrator, and he is never given a name, as far as I can recall - I read it very fast, perhaps too fast.
Unlike Swallows, this book isn't all about one family but branches out into an almost unrelated story about another couple of families during the same period, 1920s, state of Illinois. Maxwell makes the connection between the two stories well but I was never sure which was the main story, the one about Cletus Smith and his family and neighbours which takes up three-quarters of the book, or the one about the narrator. I have to admit to being a little distracted, as I read, by the framework linking these two stories together but the writing, as in Swallows, is a pleasure.

Perhaps I should leave it to William Maxwell to tell you himself exactly how this book came about and what he intended in it. These quotes are from a Paris Review interview, The Art of Fiction, No 71
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

In the case of So Long, See You Tomorrow, I was sitting at my desk, and something made me think of that boy I had failed to speak to, and thinking of him I winced. I saw myself wincing and I thought, “That’s very odd indeed that after all these years you should have a response so acute; maybe that’s worth investigating.” And so that’s what I set out to do.

With So Long, See You Tomorrow I felt that in this century the first-person narrator has to be a character and not just a narrative device. So I used myself as the “I” and the result was two stories, my own and Cletus Smith’s, and I knew they had to be structurally combined, but how? One day I was in our house in Westchester County, and I was sitting on the side of the bed putting my shoes on, half stupefied after a nap and thinking, If I sit on the edge of the bed I will ruin the mattress, when my attention was caught by a book. I opened it and read part of a long letter from Giacometti to Matisse describing how he came to do a certain piece of sculpture—Palace at 4 a.m.—it’s in the Museum of Modern Art—and I said, “There’s my novel!” It was as simple as that. But I didn’t know until that moment whether the book would work out or not.


Originally the first sentence was, “Very few families escape disasters of one kind or another.” When The New Yorker bought it, the editors were troubled by the fact that for the first twenty pages it read like reminiscence. A good many readers don’t enjoy that sort of thing, and over the years The New Yorker had been blamed for publishing too much of it. Actually, if writers don’t put down what they remember, all sorts of beautiful and moving experiences simply go down the drain forever. In any case, The New Yorker was afraid that readers, seeing also that it was very long, would stop reading before they discovered that it was really about a murder. So I moved things around a bit at the beginning.

I was having lunch with Pete Lemay, who was the publicity director at Knopf and is now a playwright, and he said that he had known Willa Cather when he was a young man. I asked what she was like and he told me at some length. It wasn’t what I had assumed and because I was surprised I said, “Whatever made her a writer, do you suppose?” and he said, “Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.” And then he begged my pardon. But I do think it’s deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer. With Ancestors I thought I was writing an account of my Campbellite forebears and the deprivation didn’t even show up in the first draft, but the high point of the book emotionally turned out to be the two chapters dealing with our family life before and after my mother’s death in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. I had written about this before, in They Came Like Swallows and again in The Folded Leaf, where it is fictionalized out of recognition; but there was always something untold, something I remembered from that time.
I meant So Long, See You Tomorrow to be the story of somebody else’s tragedy but the narrative weight is evenly distributed between the rifle shot on the first page and my mother’s absence. Now I have nothing more to say about the death of my mother, I think, forever. But it was a motivating force in four books. If my mother turns up again I will be astonished. I may even tell her to go away. But I do not think it will be necessary.

A couple of quotes from the book I liked:

When I dream about Lincoln it is always the way it was in my childhood. Or rather, I dream that it is that way—for the geography has been tampered with and is half real, half a rearrangement of my sleeping mind.

When this picture was taken she was head over heels in love with Tom Evans, but for some reason love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. One would almost think it didn’t exist

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another of the wonderful novels that was brought to my attention last year through Mookse Madness, a knockout polling competition in The Mookse and the Gripes group. This one is a short but near perfect novel.

The narrator looks back after many years at his boyhood in rural Illinois. The account starts with two tragic events - the death of the narrator's mother in the post-war flu epidemic and the shooting of a tenant farmer by his neighbour and former friend in a tragic romantic triangle. The narrator is haunted by the thought that he could have done more for his friend, the son of the murderer, and the book gradually plays out the drama as the narrator imagines it.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple of days ago my dear friend Nell told me I should read a book she was reading – this one. She said I would like the reference to the sculpture in it – well, among other things. I’ve now recommended this book to about 5 people and read it twice.

There won’t really be any spoilers in this review, even if it looks like there might be. The first thing to say is that the book is three tellings of the same story by the same person. A major event happens in their life when they are a child – more or less – and we are first told what they remember of this as an adult. Then they track down some newspaper articles from the time and we get this other version of the story. Finally, they recreate a kind of fictionalised account of the story.

In large part, this is a story about memory and how memory is less about being true than about being a constructed narrative. Which is really interesting, since although the writing in this book could hardly be simpler, the story can feel confusing at times – hence why I felt I needed to read it twice. There are still things here I’m not at all sure I understand – the ear is a case in point – but I still want to recommend this.

Now – Plato. The thing is that while reading this I couldn’t stop thinking about Plato and his idea that truth is not in this world, but in a world of ideal forms. So many of the people in this become idealised – his mother, for instance, and the idea that if the narrator had a photographic image of Cletus he would not have been so tormented by his memory that he might feel the need to write this reconstruction in the first place.

There is a point in this where the author mentions Plato’s idea of lovers being the rejoined halves of the splitting of the original humans in two. This is from the Symposium, but I’m going to bore you now with what Plato was actually doing. The Symposium is set very close to the time when Socrates ends up on trial. It is a drinking party where everyone gets to tell us something about the nature of love. The two halves idea is told by Aristophanes, the guy who write The Clouds – a play that mocked Socrates and so, in part, helped to convict him at his trial. That is, in some ways was partly responsible for Socrates’ death. Plato, by getting him to talk about these four-legged creatures we were supposed to have been descended from was, in turn, mocking Aristophanes. Except, that story is just about the only part of the Symposium people remember. In a book concerned with the untrustworthiness of memory, all that seems sort of relevant to me.

I really had never heard of this book before I read it – and would have probably been put off by the title – although, as I was saying to Nell, it is perhaps the perfect title for the book after you’ve read it. The narrator will go on seeing the other tomorrow forever. You really should read this.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lloyd Wilson is dead, he was murdered. There is little or no mystery about the murder. We are quickly told why he was murdered and who murdered him. We are told this story by a very uninterested party, a man who was a boy at the time and who remembers the events so well because of a simple omission of his own that he finds difficult to put behind him.

In the beginning, I found the book less than gripping. I did not like the way the story was being told from such a distance and by a narrator who had little first hand knowledge. But Maxwell’s focus changes from overview to detail about halfway in, and that is the point at which this novel takes on a different feeling entirely. Now we are inside the minds of those involved and now we see the collateral damage from ground level. Two families destroyed, children hurt and bewildered...not even the family dog escapes the pain.

What I noticed most about this novel was Maxwell’s ability to tell such a tale without placing blame. He almost makes the events feel inevitable, destined, unstoppable--but of course they are not. Like every event in life, these events are propelled by human choices. Some of the choices are made long before the final tragedy is set into motion, all of them impact more than the decision makers themselves.

At one point Lloyd says, ”What happened was that we--couldn’t prevent it.”

For me that statement was the question at the heart of this novel. Because so much of what happens seems to be preventable. Choices.

This is a short, powerful story. Read it.

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Most Vehement Flame

"jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame"
Solomon 8:6, King James Bible


This short novel about a 1921 murder-suicide in a small Illinois farming town mesmerized me. Written as the recollection of the narrator's friendship with another 14-year-old and his reconstruction of events from newspaper accounts fifty years on after he cannot shake a lingering memory of the last time he saw his friend, whose father killed his mother's lover and then himself.

The book is a timeless depiction of the human condition marred by matters of the heart, steeped in imagery of the moors of marital moral dilemmas as neighbors fall in love, she an abused and unhappy mom and he who married young and longs for love, as the author meticulously imagines how the marital betrayals metastasize into a cuckolded husband's mania, the isolation of their son (his friend), the estrangement of her married lover's children, and even the broken heart of the boy's/family's dog. What particularly haunts the narrator though is an event magnified in his mind in a later brief encounter with the friend, after which the friend disappeared from his life.

A raw, jarring novel I highly recommend.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow is a work of autobiographical fiction. Maxwell weaves together two stories of grief and loss: a boy reacting to the death of his mother from the flu in 1918 and the fictionalized murder-suicide involving the family of a boy the narrator becomes friends with for a short time. The narrator, as an adult, is looking back trying to piece together what he knows to make sense of the past and to assuage his guilt for not reaching out to help Cletus as he wished others had helped him when he was being bullied.

Maxwell's prose is sparse, each word carefully chosen; I can feel the restraint, as if all of the emotions are bubbling under the surface. This writing style, coupled with the intertwined storytelling, maintain the tension throughout the novella.

I appreciate how Maxwell uses the symbolism of the house under construction and of Alberto Giacometti's sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. (another piece which I have admired at my beloved MoMA). https://www.moma.org/collection/works...

While this is mostly a sad story, there are moments of simplicity and lightness.

“Sometimes she [Aunt Jenny] goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.”"

I can so relate to this. After a few hours working in the yard there is nothing I like better than an Epsom salt soak in the tub. And my bed, I never sleep as well anywhere else. At the end of a long day, finding my spot is bliss.

This book has been on my list for quite a while. Thanks Albert and Mark for giving me the nudge to finally read it.

Publication 1980

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

So long, see you tomorrow. Five words that all of us have said at one time or another. A simple phrase with the intent that tomorrow will come, and everything will be the same. For some of us, though, it doesn't come, and for others, things are irrevocably changed.

There is not a wasted word in this short novel, which tells us a great deal about the lives of two young boys who meet at a house under construction, play together there on the beams and scaffolding for a few weeks, then see each other again a couple of years later and pretend not to know each other. What happened before and after, and how and why is the tragedy here. Both boys lives and happiness were completely changed by two events, several years apart, that neither of them caused or could do anything about. As one character says, "Life is a shipwreck, start to finish".

The narrator of this tale is the same character as in "They Came Like Swallows". The setting is a small town in Illinois in the 1920's, and like Wendell Berry's novels and short stories, Maxwell creates a world and characters who weave in and out of his work, telling us what happens in plain, spare language that cuts to the quick, then soars, making us feel deeply as though we know these people personally. That is his genius. We even get into the mind of Trixie, the dog, who experiences the tragedy in her own way, and gives us her own perspective of events that she had no control of either.

On my favorites list.

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still a 5-star read for me! I will say that I'm glad I read it in print first. That way I was able to backtrack to reread pages or whole sections which is not possible in audio. William Maxwell reads the book when he is in his later years. It was so heartfelt as it is his fictionalized autobiography, but his narration somewhat lacked energy. Still such a great book. A classic!

Next I plan to read They Came Like SwallowsThey Came Like Swallows, published in 1937, also auto-fiction about the same family.

Why I'm rereading this: I'm doing a buddy read with IRL reading buddy, Diane, and thought I'd experience it this time in audio. Did not know that Maxwell himself narrates the book!
******
Original Review January 2019
How have I not known about this book? More importantly, how have I not known about William Maxwell? I came to So Long, See You Tomorrow in one of those convergences I love so much. I was lunching with a friend and extolling the wonders of the Backlisted Podcast where the author/publisher hosts and their guests talk about older, sometimes neglected, books. I was thinking she'd love the one on My Ántonia, but as she was finding the podcast on her phone, she looked down the list and exclaimed about the one on this book, telling me it was in her top 5 books of all time. https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/26...?

I immediately listened - it's one of Backlisted's best - then borrowed this amazing book from the library. It might be the perfect novel; well the perfect novella really as it contained a mere 135 pages in my paperback edition. I love books that are reminiscences and the way that Maxwell writes his memories is like memories happen to us, flooding our mind and emotions in no particular order as we try to make sense of our past. Our unnamed narrator looks back to the years that were defining moments in his life - a few short years after his mother died of the Spanish flu in the 1918 epidemic, his best friend's farmer father shot and killed his neighbor one morning. Based on Maxwell's own childhood unmooring in Lincoln, Illinois, we are drawn in to the narrator's memories of his life as well as the stories of his friend, his friend's family and of small town life. Our narrator experienced an incident with his friend that he regrets; maybe we've all been there, years later, thinking and thinking about something we wish had gone differently, trying to rewrite the story.

The writing is rich in language and emotion, so much so that at about the halfway point I went back to the beginning to experience the first half of the book again. Maxwell also creates a palpable sense of place, maybe made easier for me to see and feel having grown up in a farming community not too far from Lincoln, in the vast Illinois prairie. It's just occurring to me that he and Cather have much in common in this regard. I'm sure he will also become a favorite author.

In 1982, Maxwell was interviewed by The Paris Review as part of their series The Art of Fiction - something he should know much about, not only as an author, but as fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936-1975! A wonderful piece. https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...

Why I'm reading this: Divine intervention channeled through friend Susie Jones and the Backlisted podcast!

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!!!
I had wanted to read this for the longest time—
It’s such a powerful sad short story…..
….soooooo beautifully written …. emotionally real.

The impact on children …
My god -not to be underestimated—
not to assume that children are resilient!

“Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept reoccurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way around: I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery”.

I’m left with how deeply sad chronic regret is — how debilitating it is to mental health — so much remorse, sorrow, and helplessness … not only an unpleasant feeling — but so unhealthy.

This must be one of the greatest, saddest short stories ever written!
That said —— if you happen to be the one reader left who has not read this story….
(a late bloomer reader like me to boot) - and not much of an ‘oldie’ type reader very often — and….
hesitate to read classics or vintage —
the only thing I can add —
Don’t skip this one!
But all the hundreds of people who have read it before me already know that!

Phenomenal (novella?/!)….
point is — it’s just not long—
but it ‘is’ richer-than-rich!!!

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, 22 years ago I read this book. I think it was the first book I read by William Maxwell. I would have liked to have met the man, he seemed to be a gentle soul. He was fiction editor for The New Yorker, This book came after an 18 year hiatus from writing novels (too busy being editor for the NYer no doubt).

It won the National Book Award in 1982 and I am glad for that.

[Laysee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel…heard what sounded like a pistol shot..." Thus began the arresting novella by William Maxwell. “So Long, See You Tomorrow” was written in 1980 and won the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The story was set in the early 1910s to 1920s in Lincoln, Illinois. Even though the central event was the murder of a tenant farmer (Llyod Wilson), the more compelling story (at least for me) was that of the nameless narrator as he recollected his painful childhood and attempted to reconstruct the events leading up to the fatal shooting. The murderer was the father of a playmate (Cletus Smith) whose companionship the narrator treasured for blunting the grief he felt when his father remarried after his mother’s death. “So long, see you tomorrow” was the boys’ parting shot until the murder, which brought to an abrupt end their mutually therapeutic playtime.

Maxwell sensitively conveyed the bleak internal landscape of the 10-year-old narrator when his mother died: "The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything." There was something touching in how the child found comfort in curling up with his books at home in the darkest corner he could find. It was moving how the child put his arms around the waist of his grief-stricken father as they numbly paced their sad house together night after night. There was so much love wrapped up in grief – unspoken – it ached. Interestingly enough, the same scene was poignantly recapitulated in the final chapter by the narrator who was by then an adult.

Maxwell also captured the social expectations of life in the 1920s. It was a time when fathers did not openly show their affection for their sons. The narrator reflected on the ambivalence (a seeming alloy of aloofness and tenderness) of his relationship with his father: "We were both creatures of the period."

I guess in reading a book, each reader finds himself or herself anchored in parts of the story that struck a chord. For me, it was the void between the past and the present that the adolescent narrator and Cletus, each unbeknownst to the other, needed to cross when their families fell apart. This, however, is not the whole tale. There is the larger story surrounding the murder, which Maxwell told with the skill of a consummate story teller.

On many levels, I found this too to be one of the kindest books I have ever read.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. (p 27)

In this shattering, though very simple, piece, Maxwell writes the story of mid-western boys, one looking back on his childhood and remembering the other boy caught up in the vortex of a murder on a farm. The details sound bare, simple, almost trite but Maxwell turns them into a tale of Everyday, Every person, Everywhere. He captures the relationships between people beautifully: the complexity, the guarding, the loves and hates, the hidden feelings and thoughts, the crippling emotions. And he does it with a brilliance of expression.

The narrator explains:

Looking back, it seems clear enough that I
brought my difficulties on myself. To begin with, I
was as thin as a stick. In any kind of competitive
game, my mind froze and I became half paralyzed. (p29)

Ah, yes, says the lingering child in each of us. I was there.

And there is this image of loss and despair:

Take away the pitcher and the bowl, both of them
dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats,
sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open
for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take
away the horse barn too--the smell of hay and dust and
horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain
beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door.
Take all this away and what have you done to him? In
the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of
asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as
well start life over again as some other boy instead.
(p 113)

This is such a beautiful work in spite of its sadness, because of its ability to capture people in their essence. I know I will read it again. It reminds me of other of my favorite books, such as Housekeeping, because it seems to speak something very essential which I must keep seeking.

Very highly recommended.

[Antoinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ Anyway, I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighbourhood, and he didn’t tell me about his. When the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along toward suppertime, we climbed down and said “So long” and “See you tomorrow”, and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot.”

We know right from the start that a murder occurs. We are told who and we are told by whom. Our narrator, ( who is Maxwell, as this book is semi autobiographical) 50 years in the future, is still haunted by that event, because of the aftermath and his own actions. Looking back, he reflects on his life prior to the murder and all his own personal heartache and turmoil.
He then decides to piece together what happened. Through his research and his own additions, he tells us the story of what led to the murder.

This book is 130 pages of sheer perfection. The writing is exceptional, the story riveting and the characters, including Trixie, the dog, so real.

After finishing it, I went back to reread all the sections I had highlighted. There is something truly wondrous about this book.

I am so glad to have finally read William Maxwell. My thanks to the Backlisted podcast, whose program on William Maxwell, made me have to read him.

I highly recommend this book!!!