MIDDLE WEST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 14

MIDDLE WEST

TIME WILL DARKEN IT, by William Maxwell; Faber and Faber. English price, 12/6, \WVILLIAM MAXWELL/’S novel is an American one, the year being 1912, and the scene a small prairie town. The general tone of the story is somewhat curious for a modern writer, particularly in view of the fact that Mr. Maxwell is one of the editors of the New Yorker. It is not unlike that of David Harum, if one allows for some shift in time and place-though with the difference that. Mr. Maxwell is not to be taken in by the mere surfaces of things. He painstakingly documents the prosperous mid-western middle-class ritual of the period, but at the same time makes the reader feel the unhappy tensions, family and social, that continually tended to subvert it, For good measure he also traces some of the undercurrents of that equally mysterious, though probably much less imbecile ritual, that is related to the dark beginnings of the life of men upon the earth. The past, in Mr. Maxwell’s view, despite the

authority of Henry Ford, is not bunkand this view, it should be noted, lines up with what appears to be a new or re-discovered tendency in American fiction. In a recent story, for example, Miss Eudora Welty attempts, in American terms, to recreate the story of Danae being visited by the god. Taken in its entirety Time Will Darken It is an interesting novel, smoothly and competently written as one would expect from an editor of the New Yorker; but it is dull in parts, and the author’s comments are sometimes naive-suggesting a contrast with the stories of Sherwood Anderson, whose naive dealing with similar material was always the right sort. Mr. Maxwell’s is

very often the wrong sort.

F.

S.