SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

For years, So Long, See You Tomorrow languished on my shelf, the victim of mistaken identity. I thought it was by William Trevor and not a writer held up alongside Steinbeck in the hallowed halls of American letters. Oops (and nothing against Trevor). Widely considered a classic, it concerns a murder and its repercussions on two boys’ friendship in 1920s era rural Illinois.

It starts, quite literally, with a bang. Lloyd Wilson is shot and killed by Clarence Smith, after the former has an affair with and, ultimately marries, the latter’s wife. While the gunshot is the crack that reverberates through the book, So Long… is really about small town life, and how the kind of shenanigans that fly in the big smoke can be the unravelling of an entire rural community. Written as a confessional - the narrator is ashamed of his treatment of Clarence’s son - it picks at the loose stones of country life in much the same way as a John Mellencamp song.

Alas, it lacks the urgency of anything by Steinbeck or the melody of Mellencamp and reminded me mostly of a less engrossing Kent Haruf novel. Finely wrought but a bit of a slog.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
Vintage Classics, 2012
153 pages