William Maxwell
![Billie Dyer And Other Stories William Maxwell]( "Billie Dyer And Other Stories William Maxwell")
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By: Knopf
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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( M ) -> Maxwell, William
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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
An enjoyable memoir 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
I was impressed at how well the seven pieces that comprise this book, reminiscences of the author's boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois in the early twentieth century, hang together to create an almost novelistic sweep, a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. They were originally published as separate pieces, mostly in "The New Yorker", but I wonder whether the author had this collection in mind from the start.The labeling of this book as fiction puzzles me. As far as I can tell from internal evidence, it's acually a non-fictional memoir. An introduction by the author would have been welcome.
Fans of William Maxwell's fiction interested in learning about the author's background will find this book very enjoyable.
Stories Recalled in Tranquility 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.
There are a total of seven stories here, all gems. They are recollections of Mr. Maxwell's Lincoln, Illinois. Published in 1992 when the writer was 84 years old, these beautiful stories possess a nostalgic, almost elegiac quality as Mr. Maxwell remembers friends and family members long dead. We meet Miss Vera Brown, Maxwell's beloved fifth grade teacher who dies of tuberculosis at twenty-three and Billie Dyer, a local Black lad who became a doctor, among others.In "With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge" for Eudora Welty, Maxwell's longtime friend, he recounts a childhood prank that teaches him never again to be taken totally by surprise by cruelty, in this instance his and the other boys'own. My favorite story is "The Man in the Moon." The title refers to a picture of Maxwell's Uncle Ted, a handsome and carefree young man, and an unnamed young woman posing on a crescent moon in a photographer's studio. Uncle Ted was one of those folks with good looks and brains-- we have all known someone like him-- who never get their lives together. This story contains a wealth of wisdom. Mr. Maxwell says it far better than I can paraphrase. About Ted's luck, the writer says "Looking back on my uncle's life, it seems to me to have been a mixture of having to lie in the bed he had made and the most terrible, undeserved, outrageous misfortune. About Ted's death: "He must have been in his early sixties when he got pneumonia. He didn't put up much of a fight against it. Edna (his wife) believed that he willed himself to die." Finally on old age: "The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters."
For forty years Mr. Maxwell was a fiction editor at THE NEW YORKER and published a relatively small number of novels and short stories for one who lived into his nineties. I'm sure we will never know, however, how much readers have been enriched by this master's pruning of other writers' unwieldly prose.
Editorial Review:
Revives characters from the author's youth in Lincoln, Illinois, in the early 1900s in seven stories featuring a successful black surgeon, a sexy elementary school teacher, a rebellious young child, and others. 12,500 first printing.
