Amazing but unsettling. The dangers of trying to appear to be too good ( )

Liked it, but I did lose track of people and events occasionally. My fault because I couldn't read large chunks at a time.
Funny, though ... if someone asked me now, four weeks after finishing the novel, what it was about, the best I could say would be "family saga." So does that mean it was an occupying read but not a memorable one?
Among the passages I marked that I liked were these:
It is a common delusion of gentle people that the world is also gentle, considerate and fair. Cruelty and suspicion find them eternally unprepared. The surprise, the sense of shock, paralyses them for too long a time after the unprovoked insult has been given. When they finally react and are able to raise their fists in their own defense, it is already too late.
...
(The waitress) was tired and her feet hurt. From years of watching people cut up their food and put it away, a mouthful at a time, she had contracted a hatred of the human race (and of traveling salesmen in particular) that was like a continual low-grade fever.
...
If there is no such place as Purgatory, there is at least Elm Street on a grey day in January. ( )

We have here a lovely portrait of a youngish middle class couple in a small town in Illinois in 1912. Social customs are observed, racial lines are respected, and the differences between men and women are poignant and quietly, patiently tragic.

Remember: Your great-grandparents, and their parents, too, were once young and full of ideals and energy. They didn't always fall in love with the right people. They didn't always love the people they married. Sometimes, they wished they'd made other choices. William Maxwell writes for a modern 1948 audience -- but he is SUCH a gifted writer and keen observer that the work might have been written yesterday.

This is a lovely book for a hot August day in Illinois, on a screened porch with an iced tea at hand. Perhaps a Boston fern or two to muffle the keening of the locusts. ( )

Here's a bit more than a trifle, a time capsule from 1948. The use of several racial slurs, spoken by Mississippi cousins, is disturbing and almost made me toss the novel in disgust. The author is revered for not only his writing, but for his 40 year stint as fiction editor at The New Yorker, through 1968 - which mean he shaped much of the fiction we were all exposed to during those years. The redemption of this novel is Maxwell's sensitive handling of a difficult marriage in overly involved Drapersville, a Midwestern small town, and his sensitive and loving portraits of neighbors and friends.

Quote: "Women are never ready to let go of love at the point where men are satisfied and able to turn to something else." ( )

A magisterially subtle book that says a lot about America, and families, and love, in the story of a family visit from post Civil War south to the emancipated north.