![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When the narrator moves to Chicago, he and Cletus pass each other in the corridor of their new school but each remains silent. Isolated by his mother’s sudden death the narrator’s fleeting friendship with Cletus Smith comes to a sudden end when Cletus is caught up in a domestic tragedy which culminates in the murder of his mother’s lover and the suicide of his father. Set in small town Illinois, Maxwell’s novel is narrated by an elderly man looking back over fifty years to his painful adolescence and an incident that still torments him: his decision to ignore a friend in need. He was the friend and editor of J D Salinger, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and published six novels of his own my favourite of which is So Long, See You Tomorrow. Maxwell became fiction editor of The New Yorker in 1937, remaining there for forty years. I’m not sure if all editors make fine writers but William Maxwell’s prose exemplifies the elegant, clean, quietly understated style that I so admire. ![]() This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy into as many hands as I could. ![]()
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