Customer Reviews

Time Will Darken It

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"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.

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.

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.

This was truly one of the most beautiful novels I've ever read and I would not hesitate to call it my favorite book. The title is taken from an excerpt from an art book 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. Maxwell's use of light and shadow is outstanding and even the slightest and most obscure of characters (as well as inanimate objects and even insects) are crafted with intimate details. Everyone seems to have voice, color and emotion. There is an artistic term called chiaroscuro which describes the contrasts of shading of light and dark within a painting and that term encapsulates the book as well. Maxwell's characters are rendered clearly, but without moral judgment - there is no right and wrong or black and white. In it's place are a thousand variations of emotional color. While not a novel of action - admittedly not much of great consequence actually takes place - this is a novel of intense beauty and outstanding characterization. The images and emotions evoked in the novel live on in the imagination.

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.

What a remarkably sad little book this is. Maxwell's characters, so pure of heart and full of good intentions, nonetheless find themselves alone, or pining after loves that can never be, or bound up in marriages of profound, unspoken, disappointment. There are, certainly, moments of hope: the tender bond between Martha and her young daughter Abbey; the sweet story of Dr. Danforth's love affair in his autumn years; the unrequited puppy love between Randolph and Mary Caroline. But Maxwell's concern here seems largely to be with illusion and unfulfilled dreams. These are not novel literary themes, and yet he manages to put a fresh twist on them. The novel sweeps gracefully through time; the prose is as lucid and evocative as any writer's I've read, and Maxwell occasionally offers up such piercing insights into human nature that the reader is forced to go back and read passages a second, and even a third time. Time Will Darken It is a sweet, thoughtful and beautiful novel and I would highly recommend it to anyone. It is a shame that William Maxwell's name is not more prominent on the frequently-cited list of great American writers.

...

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.

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.

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.

Whenever I read Maxwell, I am struck by how white the pages seem in my mind, how clean the words. I do not think I have read another author who embodies the midwest like Maxwell -- especially in the time period when he wrote. This book is simply wonderful.