So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979) by William Maxwell

Book Review

So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979)

by William Maxwell

   In August, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott published a lengthy article on American author William Maxwell as part of his series of "The Americans"- artists who help to define what is to be American.  The whole idea is to revive interest in "overlooked or under-read" authors (his formulation).  So far he has published essays on Wallace Stegner, Edward P. Jones and Joy Williams.   This process of artistic revival is very much at the heart of this blog- seeing how, if and when it works to bring an Audience to an author who is either non-canonical or canonical for other types of work besides literary fiction.  

  Answering the question of why William Maxwell came to be "overlooked or under-read" seems pretty easy, he wrote about an unfashionable part of the world (the American Midwest) during an unfashionable time, the middle part of the 20th century, after all the slots for canonical writers from the Midwest who wrote about the eartly 20th century/late 19th century, were filled.

  So Long, See You Tomorrow was his last novel by about 20 years, his second-to-last novel appearing in 1961 and this first appearing as a New Yorker short story (split into two parts) in 1979 before being published as a book in 1980.   A reader for looking for reasons Maxwell is "overlooked or under-read" might point the timeline of his bibliography:  novels published in 1934, 1937, 1945, 1948 and 1961.  Short story collections in 1956, 1966, 1977, 1988 and 1992.   That is not the kind of productivity meant to inspire the cultural-industrial complex to do it's best promotional work. 

  Next, you might consider his subject matter Wikipedia calls it "domestic realism," which, really didn't come into vogue as a subject of literary fiction worthy of canonical status until the 1970's, and didn't fully arrive until decades after that.   I've noticed that domestic realism penned by American authors from and about the Midwest seems to be a favorite for re-issue houses, probably on the grounds that republishing an American author has a better chance to catch on than publishing non-American authors. 

      So Long, See You Tomorrow recaps the events leading to a murder in a small town as experienced by various participants- a couple of broken marriages, allegations of infidelity, a divorce trial, back before you could just get divorced.  The events take place in the 1920's,  and I'm not sure I would be able to guess that it wasn't written back then- Maxwell has a style heavily influenced by the high modernism of Virginia Woolf, and everything about So Long, See You Tomorrow, feels like high modernism from the early 20th century.