The heart is a lonely hunter

IN William Maxwell's outstanding short, complex novel So Long, See You Tomorrow (Harvill, £8.99 in UK), an elderly man describes a series of family tragedies which dominated his childhood and helped make him the individual he was to become; yet of even greater importance to Maxwell's narrator is his painful recollection of a chance encounter in a high school corridor with a boy who was once his friend.

Winner of the National Book Award in 1980, this calm, reflective and extraordinarily skilful novel offers American fiction at its finest. It is not surprising to see Richard Ford praising it; Maxwell, in common with the late Peter Taylor, represents an earlier generation of writers who predate Ford, sharing a quiet, sensitive tone and graceful prose which makes their work live on in the memory long after it has been read. During his forty year career as a New Yorker fiction editor, Maxwell, who was born in Illinois in 1908, nurtured writers such as John Cheever, John Updike, John O'Hara and Eudora Welty. The reissuing of Maxwell's work by Harvill is one of the literary events of the year.

The theme of this book is loneliness, which once brought the narrator and another young teenage boy together in small town Illinois. It is also about various levels of upheaval. The narrator's real life began with the death of his beloved mother when he was six; her absence forces him into accepting change. Far more vivid than this death, however, is the brutal murder of a tenant farmer, an event which has remained in the narrator's memory for more than fifty years. He would not have kept the murder of a man he never met alive in his mind for so long if "(1) the murderer hadn't been the father of somebody I knew, and (2) I hadn't later on done something I was ashamed of afterward. This memoir - if that's the right name for it - is a roundabout, futile way of making amends."

When he was twenty five, William Maxwell decided that as experience is vital for a writer, he needed to pursue a real life adventure and opted for a spell at sea. Later he discovered that "three quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal". His narrator confirms the idea that life is the stuff of art: "the look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered."

In the novel the narrator points to the habit people had of speaking about his mother in generalities: ". . . her wonderful qualities, her gift for making those around her happy, and so on - that didn't tell me anything I didn't know before. It was as if they couldn't see her clearly for what had happened to her. And to us." He remembers his father's attempt to capture a lasting image of his dead wife by having a photographer retouch a picture taken of her as a girl in order to capture the face of a woman who had died at thirty eight. The attempt fails. "The result was something I was quite sure my mother had never looked like - vague and idealised and as if she might not even remember who we were ... The retouched photograph came between me and the face I remembered, and it got harder and harder to recall my mother as she really was."

Throughout the novel the narrator expresses himself with this kind of precision and intensity. It is as if he is attempting to recreate a lost world, actually to relive experience. Much of the book's gentle power is due to the narrator convincingly attempting to understand a life and lives which have long since disappeared, and the quiet longing with which he tells his story. Despite the narrator's deliberate tone, the reader is drawn into his thoughts as they are being processed.

Elsewhere he describes being invited to stay with a boy whose mother had been a friend of his dead mother. "Without an experience to go on, I tried to be a good guest. Most of the time he [the boy] was friendly, and then suddenly he would mutter something under his breath that I could not quite hear and that I knew from a heaviness in my heart was the word `sissy' ... he was exactly the kind of boy I would have liked to be."

The heart of the book is the murder. The murderer is a husband who discovers his dissatisfied wife has fallen in love with his closest friend; he is also the father of Cletus, the young boy the lonely narrator had played with as a child on the building site which was to become his new family home. It is when the narrator begins to focus on the crime itself that Maxwell's technical skill fully asserts itself. Even while reflecting on his boyhood and gradual acceptance of his father's kindly second wife and the goodwill which existed between him and his stepmother - "there was enough self control in that household for six families" - the narrator constantly alludes to the crime, but then concentrates fully on it and its impact at the time on several people. This re examination is achieved through a remarkable reconstruction of events long past.

The two men have unhappy wives: one dutiful woman is unhappy because her husband does not love her, the other is resentful because she "perhaps expects more of life than is reasonable". Both men are tenant farmers and the owners of their land never permit them to forget this. Young Cletus, the son of the man who will eventually become a murderer, hates hearing the owner say the words "my land"; as the narrator observes, "even if his father, after working these acres for twelve years, doesn't feel the emotion of ownership, Cletus does".

The series of flashbacks in which the story is told eventually fits together like a Greek tragedy, which leads to the moment of cowardice which has haunted the narrator all his life. "I saw Cletus Smith coming toward me. It was as if he had risen from the dead. He didn't speak. I didn't speak. We just kept on walking until we had passed."

So Long, See You Tomorrow is partly an elegy and partly the narrator's coming to terms with himself. Few novels published this year - or any year - will match Maxwell's sad and beautiful meditation.