A TALE OF LOSS
January 21, 2008
I have just finished William Maxwell’s probably forgotten So Long, See You Tomorrow. It is one of those novels which leave you feeling forlorn, bereft, forsaken when you get to the end. These are bits of the human experience beautifully dealt with by this author who lost his own mother when a child.
In fact, this terrain is so familiar to him that he can even convincingly limn the emotions of an abused farm dog tied to a rope by his indifferent departing master to await the new tenant who expects the dog as just another fixture. She eventually runs off to town and manages to find her old master. For this she is beaten and returned. When she turns back up, she is put down.
The humans don’t fare much better in this tale of boyhoods left exposed, as I suppose all are, to the whims, passions, and mistakes of their adult caretakers. Sometimes it is only the occasional small kindness that saves a life from total wreck. It is from reading this kind of tender prose that you realize how tenuously we are tethered to lives of happiness. It’s a wonder many of us have them.
