Light, shadow in a long-ago Midwest

Updike called Maxwell "one of the wisest" voices in American fiction. (NANCY CRAMPTON)

This year marks the 100th anniversary of William Maxwell's birth and the publication by the Library of America of the first of two volumes of his work (the second will appear this autumn). It also brings the revelation to me, who had been living under the impression that Maxwell was a "New York writer" (ho hum), that five of his six novels are set in the Midwest. In addition to nine short stories, a couple of the author's introductions, and an address, the present volume, "William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories" ($35), contains four novels. The first, "Bright Center of Heaven" (1934), is set in an artists' colony and is interesting chiefly because it was the author's first novel. The other three are accomplished literary works. "They Came Like Swallows" (1937) is highly autobiographical and treats the shaping event of Maxwell's life: the death of his mother in the flu epidemic of 1918-19. Maxwell found artistic inspiration for this book in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," but his novel, so precisely observed and shot through with loss and longing for the plucked-out heart of the family, is much more to my taste than hers. "The Folded Leaf" (1945) is the story of an intense, unhappy friendship between two boys, and I have not yet finished it. This shouldn't prevent me from pronouncing on it (I never managed to finish anything by Woolf, after all), but space is limited and I wish to spend the rest of it extolling the greatness of "Time Will Darken It" (1948).

The story is set in small-town Illinois of 1912. The little burg's streets, houses, and outskirts, its history, social order, and domestic arrangements, and the spell of the seasons are meticulously rendered: painted in still lifes, exhibited in set pieces, and enmeshed in the narrative. Maxwell compares the conjuring of this world with archeological re-creation, but he is even more taken by the work's similarity to painting and by his own role as an artist. Indeed, the novel's title alludes to painting, and a long epigraph details the method of composing a landscape. That is all very well, but it says more about Maxwell's earnestness as an artist than it does about the story itself. That is much better understood by means of the title of the novel's third part, "A Serious Mistake."

The mistake in question is committed by Austin King, a lawyer, the son of a powerful, popular judge, now dead. It is the sort of mistake good people make because it entails putting scrupulousness before good judgment. In this instance, Austin allows a family, to whom he feels an inherited obligation, to spend weeks in his home as houseguests. This he does despite qualms about the strain it will place on his often-moody pregnant wife. The guests are the Potters: Mr. Potter, originally from the North, now a plantation owner in Mississippi and, as it turns out, a ruthless operator; Mrs. Potter, his wife, a weak, amiable woman; Randolph, their son, a vain, selfish charmer with a deep streak of cruelty; and Nora, their daughter, a hard case of a special sort. Filled with yearnings for communion of minds and romantic fulfillment, she makes Austin the object of her insistent desire.

This family is bad news. Their essence is summed up in their spoor: "During their stay, the Potters had managed to invest the rooms they slept in with much of their personality. They had moved things, chipped things, left rings in mahogany, left medicine stains, left the impression of their bodies in horsehair mattresses. Living partly out of suitcases and partly out of untidy dresser drawers, with disorder lying on the floor of their closets and toilet articles spilling over their rooms." These people are not going to play fair with a man who is motivated by decency, but the harm they do is gradual and insidious. Also drawn into the tangle are the King family's black servant and her daughter and a number of well-fleshed-out neighbors.

The novel hums with interactions between the several characters, all fully alive, their motives and actions marked as much by ambiguity, contrariness, and uncertainty as they are by deliberation. No one stands for something beyond his or her own self. Even the Potters, for all their Southern ways and outlook, are expatriated Northerners. This fact, I feel sure, is intended to circumvent stereotype - to invest these characters with an element of unwholesomeness that is purely their own. In fact, the novel's excellence lies in its thoroughgoing, inconvenient realism. You cannot sum up in definitive terms what it all means without violating its lifelike complexity or, indeed, without diminishing its fascination.

In "The Writer As an Illusionist," a lecture given in the mid-1950s and included in this volume, Maxwell points out that writing fiction is nothing less than a form of trickery. The reader, he says, "is asked to believe in people he knows don't exist, to be present at scenes that never occurred, to be amused or moved or instructed just as he would be in real life, only the life exists in somebody else's imagination." He further points out that the writer, too, has to be tricked, sucked into this made-up world. He describes the process of getting into a story, starting with imagining a little situation, a conundrum. Out of this a hazy world emerges, characters come into being, complicating matters, interacting, developing. The world becomes increasingly furnished to accommodate their actions, and those actions gain further nuance. The big question for the writer who takes this approach is: What is going on here anyway, and why exactly? It is Maxwell's signal gift that he can present so much information, and in such good light, without laying the dead hand of interpretation on it. Maxwell hasn't appeared to give all the answers, but they are there nonetheless, open to our endless inquiry and consideration. This is one of those novels whose characters and predicaments become part of a reader's permanent universe.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.