These chapters delve deep into the friendship of the murderer and his victim leading up to the event, as well as the affair. Later on in the book, he narrates entire chapters from a third person point of view that he admits has little to no factual claim behind it. He collects all the information he can on the event through old newspapers but they provide only a generic picture. The doubtful narrator lets us know that his memory of the time is vague and sometimes missing important pieces of information. Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.” After a few casual sentences of description, Maxwell writes, “The sound was not a car backfiring a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.” The first characters we meet-who never show up again-appear nameless in the second paragraph and “heard what sounded like a pistol shot. His descriptions are straight forward and emotionally flat, as if he is simply trying to tell us the facts of the story.Ī good example of that emotionless writing is the opening chapter, which tells the reader about the murder from a physically distant place.

Check it out! The unusual part about this character’s voice is his doubtful and anxious tone. It’s so common in fact that I recently posted a book review on such a novel titled Rainy Lake by Mary Rockcastle. It’s not so unusual to read a story narrated by an adult looking back on their childhood. This moment, more than any other, is the moment that haunts our narrator and pushes him to write down the story. Until, the narrator moves to Chicago and happens to see the boy in the hallway of his new school. After this dramatic small-town event, the boy’s mother moved their family to an unknown city.Ī year goes by and the boys have no contact. The boy’s father was suspected of killing his friend who was having an affair with his wife, but before anything could be proven, he took his own life. The narrator, who was not a very popular boy, found comfort in his quiet, neighborhood friend until the day he wasn’t there anymore. This first-person-POV novel is told from the eyes of an old man looking back on an event from his childhood that left a lasting impression. John Updike’s quote on the back cover reads, “What a lovely book, utterly unlike any other in shape I have ever read.” And he is not stretching the truth. The structure, the voice, and the POV all have very distinctive qualities.

This 135-page novel is unique in many ways. Book Review on William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow.

So long see you tomorrow review