So Long, See You Tomorrow

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell has built a thoughtful, heartbreaking novel around one awkward teenage moment and the guilt of a missed opportunity. On his first day at high school, shortly after his family moved from a small Illinois farming town to Chicago, he saw—and appeared to snub—a boy who had been a passing childhood companion. The boy, Cletus Smith, moved away after his father murdered the farmer next door, Lloyd Wilson, and then killed himself. Decades later, the narrator shares his story as a sort of apology, a belated attempt to offer Cletus the sympathy he failed to express in that moment.

In the quiet, unsentimental voice of an elderly man with something on his mind, Maxwell uses news clippings, memory and imagination to reconstruct the tangled story of the Smith and Wilson families and the events leading up to the murder. He also weaves in the sad tale of his own family's past. His mother died giving birth to his younger brother during the 1918 flu epidemic, plunging his father into a deep well of grief. Eventually, his father remarried, but young William continued to cling tightly to his sense of the way things were before his mother died. This response to loss informs Cletus’s story and serves as one of many demonstrations of the narrator's empathy.

Another—and one of the most unusual things about this book—is Maxwell’s use of the perspective of the Smith’s dog, whose life was shattered along with the family’s. It struck me as a wonderfully daring exercise in writing character, endowing a dog with thoughts, feelings and dreams. In another writer’s hands, it could easily come off like a bad Disney movie. What allows for this unusual point of view, what makes it succeed, is that a) it sounds pretty authentic, which I know seems silly to say about doggy point of view, but read it and see if you don't agree; b) the dog’s situation is essentially the same as Cletus’s, her losses no less heartbreaking; and c) one senses an incredible generosity behind this technique, in the author’s earnest wish to understand the whole story and to extend his sympathy—as he says, to "shake [his] head sadly and say, 'I know…. I know.'" That generous spirit is what makes this novel as affecting as it is.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a short work, but it's crafted with a precision and emotional force uncommon in books of any length. It’s the sort of coming-of-age story that should be taught in high-school English classes. (Forget about The Lord of the Flies! Toss your ratty copies of that goddamn Catcher in the Rye!) Maxwell writes with wisdom and poignancy on the vulnerability and anxiety of adolescence. Though the action occurs in the early 1900s (So Long is marvelously evocative of the time and place), it manages not to feel dated. And though its pace is… I’ll call it “careful,” the book is never boring, and every word is relevant. It’s a wonderful novel—wise and generous and very nearly perfect.