Rating: 
Summary: Quietly now... everything is going to be all right..
Review: "There is no such thing as love," writes William Maxwell, so certain on the point he does not bother even to have a character say it.In fact, he seems to be saying "there is no such thing as the love WE MOST WANT". It is hard to say what makes this book so appealling, with its unfashionable setting and thinness of incident. But it IS appealling, a character study of delicacy and truth, so full of recognition that the pages turn themselves. Maxwell understands silences, the things unsaid in an evening of chatter, the state of armed truce that is the architecture of a respectable life, better than almost anyone. Eudora Welty calls it his "integrity". It is a good word. In the suffocating provincialism of 1912 mid-western America, town lawyer Austin King is undone through his own decency. Through his patience, his sense of propriety, his unwillingness to recognise the grasping motives of others, he unwittingly betrays his family and all but destroys himself. People in the landscape of Draperville, Illinois, dream of escape, have visions of what might now be called "authentic lives". But the centripetal pull of respectability, the complex web of family duty, entraps them all. The most ardent dreamer is young Nora Potter, whose infatuation with Austin King gives this story its fever and throws all other relationships into relief. The characters are beautifully drawn. Nora's obsession, which she sees as liberating, wreaks instead its inevitable destruction. Austin King, faithful to the belief that steadfast, if unimaginative goodness, will be rewarded in kind, is both noble and tragic. The minor characters are equally real. The interior world of the King's four year old daughter Abbey is the most convincing evocation of early childhood I have ever read. In many ways, though, the story is Martha's. Austin's role-bound wife, pregnant with their second child, hears the town's talk, yet copes better with Austin's apparent affair, than she could with his seamless virtue. The final page is hers, a denouement of such chilling and tender clarity it reminds me of the interior monologue that closes James Joyce's "The Dead". Whatever Maxwell seems to claim, this IS a book about love, and about its many shapes. Perhaps his truest opinion he entrusts to a minor character, the horse trader Danforth, deaf from an early age, who has long abandoned all thought of human intimacy. With no expectation of it, love comes anyway. It abides, and is beautiful. So is this book.
Rating:
Summary: This is not a NOT review....
Review: ... A beautiful, memorable landscape, March 18, 2000
Reviewer: Michelle McDowell from Tacoma, WA
This was truly one of the most beautiful novels I've ever read. The title is taken from a excerpt from an art textbook describing techniques of landscape painting and, that is exactly what the novel is: a richly, landscaped view of life. Maxwell's imagery leaves the reader feeling such a part of the world of Elm Street that it is truly heartbreaking to leave it and return to the present. His use of light and shadow is outstanding. The images and emotions evoked in the novel live on in the imagination.
Rating:
Summary: Elegant, not tedious.
Review: A suprisingly moving and insightful book. The slow pacing of the first half of the book coincides with the carefully measured lives of the characters and the dreary summertime heat in which they move. The keen observations Maxwell makes about human emotion, from the flutters of adolescent love to the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, are the heart of this seemingly simple and quietly desperate story.
Rating:
Summary: Please read.
Review: I grew up in the American Midwest, 80 years after Maxwell. But in his books I feel myself condensed and distilled, and all the work and love and sorrow of the world brought to life, as intimate as a family portrait in a drawer. Maxwell quotes an Italian painter in the epigraph to this book. I am reminded of a painting, too: Mary holds the dying Jesus in her arms, while behind her dozens of 15th-century Florentines carry out their lives, bartering and joking and courting each other. I cried, looking at it. Maxwell's work is so piercing because the lives of each of his characters affects but does not contain within it the lives of all the others. A woman's dying son is the whole world's grief, but first of all it is hers alone. In a world in which lives and ideas are generated and immediately discarded, I am grateful for the presence of Maxwell's words in my life.
Rating:
Summary: Please read.
Review: I grew up in the American Midwest, 80 years after Maxwell. But in his books I feel myself condensed and distilled, and all the work and love and sorrow of the world brought to life, as intimate as a family portrait in a drawer. Maxwell quotes an Italian painter in the epigraph to this book. I am reminded of a painting, too: Mary holds the dying Jesus in her arms, while behind her dozens of 15th-century Florentines carry out their lives, bartering and joking and courting each other. I cried, looking at it. Maxwell's work is so piercing because the lives of each of his characters affects but does not contain within it the lives of all the others. A woman's dying son is the whole world's grief, but first of all it is hers alone. In a world in which lives and ideas are generated and immediately discarded, I am grateful for the presence of Maxwell's words in my life.
Rating:
Summary: A book that will stay with you long after it is read
Review: Maxwell's second finest (after "So Long See You Tomorrow") is an insightful view into the complex workings of even a successful marriage and the high price of human weakness. The dark view of Austin's susceptibility to the flattery of a younger, easier nature in Nora is borne out by the shock of the latter part of the book. Time does indeed darken it. Maxwell is truly one of our finest writers, underappreciated due in large part to his elegant restraint. Like a true Midwesterner, there is nothing flashy in his prose. It is as austere as it is powerful. This is truly a memorable book, which will stay with you long after it is set down.
Rating:
Summary: A book that will stay with you long after it is read
Review: Maxwell's second finest (after "So Long See You Tomorrow") is an insightful view into the complex workings of even a successful marriage and the high price of human weakness. The dark view of Austin's susceptibility to the flattery of a younger, easier nature in Nora is borne out by the shock of the latter part of the book. Time does indeed darken it. Maxwell is truly one of our finest writers, underappreciated due in large part to his elegant restraint. Like a true Midwesterner, there is nothing flashy in his prose. It is as austere as it is powerful. This is truly a memorable book, which will stay with you long after it is set down.
Rating:
Summary: Among the best depictions of the interiors of marriage
Review: Maxwell's Time Will Darken It is among the most rewarding and satisfying reading experiences I have ever had. His characters are wonderfully made. With sparse style and grace he captures the quiet spaces of day-to-day living, the in-between areas in which lives unfold. The novel is also among the best depictions of the interiors of marriage I have encountered, with the intricacies of the interatctions between Nora and Austin, awaiting their second child and besieged by the visitation of distant relatives, rendered simply and movingly. A fine, fine novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious!
Review: Maxwell's writing is enjoyable but the restraint of his characters makes the story very slow-moving and boring. Reading this book was a chore
Rating: 
Summary: Writing From Another Time of Another Time
Review: The world is the less for the death of William Maxwell at age 91 last year. His prose is restrained and precise. He knows the use of silence on the page; his dialogue convinces both in the words and the spaces between the words. I read in a profile of Maxwell in the New Yorker that he wrote this novel's numerous short chapters by deciding which characters hadn't talked together for a while in the story, and getting them together. I liked that thought. Whether true or not, in reading this novel one enters two different times -- 1948 when Maxwell wrote it and the 1912 Midwest he recreates. I can't imagine something this quiet and directed being written in these frenetic times. It is a wander through memory, but -- thanks to Maxwell's careful rendering -- better than memory for it is sharp, accurate and sure. Still, I can't give this novel a five star rating. As much as I like Maxwell, his writing and the obvious care he took to get the language exactly right, a craftsman at work, the key characters don't really convince me. Nora is much too shallow to captivate, confuse or immobilize someone like Austin. Meanwhile, Austin himself is, in some parts of the novel, too smart, too dogged in the flashback of his pursuit of Martha, to also be as easily duped or unfeeling as he is drawn in others. Here's a final recommendation, though -- when the final scene arrives for each character, and they pass through the novel for the last time, one cares about each one and what happens in the unknown next that extends beyond the last page.
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