• Marginalia: William Maxwell

    Jenny Xie

    01/2025

    For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Jenny Xie—whose story “Stick Season” appears in our Fall 2024 issue—considers the risks inherent in storytelling.


    Set in rural Illinois in the 1920s, William Maxwell’s slim, devastating novel So Long, See You Tomorrow circles the murder of a farmer named Lloyd Wilson by his former best friend, Clarence Smith. The novel is a masterclass in oblique perspective: Our narrator is a man who, fifty years after the crime, remembers a fleeting friendship with the murderer’s son, a farm boy seemingly worlds away from his own middle-class life in town. Through memory and imagination, the narrator reconstructs the intertwined lives of Wilson and Smith and the brutal way an affair detonates their families, uprooting the life of his young friend as collateral damage.

    Told from this remove, the book demonstrates the excruciating paradox of storytelling: In saying anything at all, we narrow the multivalent truth. “In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw,” says the narrator, who spends the first half of the book focusing not on Wilson and Smith, but his own boyhood—a sidestep that dramatizes the powerlessness of children in the wake of their parents’ decisions. When he turns his attention to the feuding families, the narrator emphasizes the senselessness and unknowability of their conflict. In this passage, he adopts the perspective of the Smiths’ herding dog:

    She waited a long long time, trying not to worry. Trying to be good—trying to be especially good. And telling herself that they had only gone in to town and were coming right back, even though it was perfectly obvious that this wasn’t true. Not the way they acted. Eventually, in spite of her, the howls broke out. Sitting on her haunches, with her muzzle raised to the night sky, she howled and howled. And it wasn’t just the dog howling, it was all the dogs she was descended from, clear back to some wolf or other.

    Having lost his wife, sons, and livelihood, Smith sells his once prosperous farm, leaving the dog behind to work for the new owner. Resisting an omniscient point of view—this would convey too much confidence—the narrator inhabits the farm’s last remaining caretaker as a window into subjective truth. The free indirect discourse here is simple and childlike; we pity the dutiful dog as yet another victim of a drama out of her control or understanding. In the last breath, however, her desperation takes on a transcendent tone, and her howling becomes an invocation of “all the dogs she was descended from, clear back to some wolf or other.” This gesture at instinct and inheritance is a poignant example of the novel’s persistent questions about what passes between generations—whether it be love, loss, or violence. Through constant shifts in perspective and time, Maxwell explores how we might resolve the unresolvable.

    Jenny Xie is the author of Holding Pattern, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Times editors’ choice. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Joyland, and The Offing. She’s the grateful recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Yaddo, and other organizations. She lives in Brooklyn and online at jennyxiewrites.com.

    Read More

    Web Design and Development by Riverworks Marketing