Billie Dyer and Other Stories

For all that Maxwell's prose is beautiful and evocative, his approach is meticulous and his viewpoint almost clinical. What fascinates him most is that, unlike the big events recorded in newspapers and histories, the stories of ordinary people are recorded mainly in the memories of living persons. Those memories are not only ephemeral, but mutable and prone to editing and embellishment. Great family deeds are magnified; misdeeds are forgotten and their perpetrators and their histories (good and bad) shunned. The most poignant moment comes in Man in the Moon when the narrator, who had known his black sheep uncle mainly through the disparaging comments of his family, decides to visit him, and comes to see in him a core of goodness and dignity.

There are a total of seven stories here, all gems. They are recollections of Mr. Maxwell's Lincoln, Illinois. Published in 1992 when the writer was 84 years old, these beautiful stories possess a nostalgic, almost elegiac quality as Mr. Maxwell remembers friends and family members long dead. We meet Miss Vera Brown, Maxwell's beloved fifth grade teacher who dies of tuberculosis at twenty-three and Billie Dyer, a local Black lad who became a doctor, among others.In "With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge" for Eudora Welty, Maxwell's longtime friend, he recounts a childhood prank that teaches him never again to be taken totally by surprise by cruelty, in this instance his and the other boys'own. My favorite story is "The Man in the Moon." The title refers to a picture of Maxwell's Uncle Ted, a handsome and carefree young man, and an unnamed young woman posing on a crescent moon in a photographer's studio. Uncle Ted was one of those folks with good looks and brains-- we have all known someone like him-- who never get their lives together. This story contains a wealth of wisdom. Mr. Maxwell says it far better than I can paraphrase. About Ted's luck, the writer says "Looking back on my uncle's life, it seems to me to have been a mixture of having to lie in the bed he had made and the most terrible, undeserved, outrageous misfortune. About Ted's death: "He must have been in his early sixties when he got pneumonia. He didn't put up much of a fight against it. Edna (his wife) believed that he willed himself to die." Finally on old age: "The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters." For forty years Mr. Maxwell was a fiction editor at THE NEW YORKER and published a relatively small number of novels and short stories for one who lived into his nineties. I'm sure we will never know, however, how much readers have been enriched by this master's pruning of other writers' unwieldly prose.

This lovely collection of events in Maxwell's life are charmingly rendered and very poignant."Love" the story of the death of his beloved fifth grade teacher from TB at age 23, was only 4 pages long but touched me in ways that an entire book might not have done. It was sad but not sappy.In "My Father's Friends", he discovers many things when he visits his father's friends to tell them of his father's death. He relates the biographies of these men in a most subtle and loving way.The story of his uncle, who never accomplished much, evoked such sadness for a life lost and never found.Like the other reviewer, I cannot understand why this book was classified as fiction when he writes of his father, mother, stepmother, brother, etc. and relates events that really happened. I know this because I just listened to an audio interview with Maxwell and he mentions many of these events. But I got my copy from the library, where it was in the fiction section.

I was impressed at how well the seven pieces that comprise this book, reminiscences of the author's boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois in the early twentieth century, hang together to create an almost novelistic sweep, a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. They were originally published as separate pieces, mostly in "The New Yorker", but I wonder whether the author had this collection in mind from the start.The labeling of this book as fiction puzzles me. As far as I can tell from internal evidence, it's acually a non-fictional memoir. An introduction by the author would have been welcome.Fans of William Maxwell's fiction interested in learning about the author's background will find this book very enjoyable.