Time Will Darken It [Paperback]

William Maxwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 1997

Pregnant with her second child, Martha King finds her marriage to lawyer Austin King more and more frustrating when her husband befriends his young foster cousin, Nora, and, in the process, unwittingly jeopardizes his marriage, career, and place in the community. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a quiet, thoughtful, knowing book . . . -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Sullivan

About the Author

   William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continues his education there and at the University of Illinois.  After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing.  He has published six novels, three collections of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children.  For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,  He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow,  the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (February 4, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679772588
• ISBN-13: 978-0679772583
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quietly now... everything is going to be all right.., October 23, 2000

By 

hugh riminton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Time Will Darken It (Paperback)

"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.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Writing From Another Time of Another Time, May 19, 2001

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Time Will Darken It (Paperback)

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Among the best depictions of the interiors of marriage, March 19, 2001

By 

R. L. Rone (Hazel Crest, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Time Will Darken It (Paperback)

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.