Eileen Pollack | October/November 2014

NOTES

At its deepest level, setting is inseparable from fiction’s other essential elements. Yet most young writers consider it to be little more than a painted backdrop and a box of props. A more interesting way to conceive of setting is to imagine the world—or worlds—a story’s characters inhabit, the cultures that produced them, the communities within which they do—or do not—feel at home.

Of course, most of us are the products of more than one culture. A character might be defined not only by her religion, her social class, and the region in which she grew up; she might also be an insider in the world of gun owners, the world of anyone whose father has ever worked in a mine, the world of people so shy they can barely whisper their own name. A person might—through years of hard work, an accident of marriage, or the exigencies of economics—find himself to be a member of the world of professional violinists, or fly-fishermen, or parents who have raised a handicapped child, or men who have lost a brother, or men who have killed a brother, or veterans of the armed forces, or, more particularly, veterans of the Iraq war. A woman who decides to become a computer engineer will, after years of schooling and on-the-job experience, find herself to be an insider in the world of computer engineers (even if, within that world, she thinks of herself as an outsider in the world of male computer engineers). If you have ever done a stint at a fast-food restaurant, you will share with other employees of such establishments a unique set of skills (for example, popping open a cardboard sleeve and scooping up just the right number of fries from a hot metal tray without getting burned), along with a common set of satisfactions and humiliations.

To understand the richness of this approach, think of a world in which you are something of an insider, even if it is a world you haven’t inhabited for decades, and make a list of all the ways by which you can tell who does or doesn’t belong. For instance, what items of clothing would an insider wear that an outsider would not? What foods would an insider eat that an outsider would find revolting?

One of the greatest markers of who does or doesn’t belong to a given world is speech. A boy who grows up playing football in a hardscrabble Texas oil town and then goes off to study art in Chicago might speak one way with his coach and teammates, another way with his girlfriend, yet another way with his mother or grandmother, and a completely different way with his fellow artists. In each of those worlds, the speaker will use higher or lower levels of diction, different varieties of slang, differing levels of profanity. A joke in one world might fall flat in another, or even cause offense. If, like me, you grew up in a resort area, you might have dozens of terms to mock the tourists. If you are a gynecology intern, or an oboist, or a baseball aficionado, and you are speaking to other gynecologists, oboists, or baseball aficionados, you will use acronyms and jargon that outsiders find baffling. Depending on where you grew up, you might employ various levels of sarcasm; when I complain to my Midwestern friends that I am so frustrated that I want to shoot myself, they grow pale and urge me to reconsider, at which I remind them that native New Yorkers like me threaten to shoot themselves if they cannot find a parking spot.

To be an insider in a certain world is to be privy to the literal and metaphoric handshakes that denote membership in that clan. The rituals of the synagogue are not the same as the rituals of the church or mosque. The same middle-school girls who delight in grossing each other out with a farting contest at a sleepover party might be horrified if they let out a burp at a co-ed dance. Cross the street without a walk sign in Germany and the pedestrians at the curb will hiss. In a diner in Manhattan, be prepared for the highly rouged patron at the adjoining booth to lean over and inquire, “What’re you having, doll? You like it? How’s it taste?”

A person’s membership in a world might be marked by an initiation, whether a formal swearing-in ceremony that celebrates a newly minted citizen’s right to vote, or a more nebulous rite of passage that denotes a person’s membership in a world whose boundaries are less distinct—the acquisition of a driver’s license, the attainment of the legal drinking age, the purchase of a first house, the birth of a first child, the death of one’s second parent. One of the clearest and most important initiations many of us will ever face is the first day on a new job. Take the elevator up to the fifteenth floor and you will experience that disconcerting moment of not knowing where to find your own desk, or the Xerox machine, or the ladies’ room, not knowing who has the power to dispense staplers or pens, not being able to figure out who is above you or below you in the chain of command, not knowing which forms to fill out and which to ignore, which shortcuts to take and which might get you fired. A month later, you will not remember a time when your ability to navigate this world wasn’t as much a part of your repertoire of skills as your ability to wash your hair or brush your teeth.

Although many of the markers that denote membership in a world are obvious by looking or listening, the most powerful signifiers usually lie much deeper. Do people who grow up in a given culture believe that the secret to a good life is studying hard and doing well in school, or getting a union card and a job at the GM plant? If people in this neighborhood have a free afternoon, do they go fishing? Shopping? To the new Expressionist exhibit at MOMA? Do members of this community find it morally acceptable to cheat on their income tax? To shoplift a steak? To make millions on insider trading?

Most of us grow up assuming that everyone lives the way we live. Once we realize that the culture to which we belong is considered marginal or exotic, we often grow ashamed. Once, when Flannery O’Connor visited a writers’ conference, she commented on the generic nature of the settings in the students’ stories:

All the addresses on these stories were from Georgia or Tennessee. Yet there was no distinctive sense of Southern life in them. A few place-names were dropped, Savannah or Atlanta or Jacksonville, but these could just as easily have been changed to Pittsburgh or Passaic without calling for any other alteration in the story. The characters spoke as if they had never heard any kind of language except what came out of a television set.1

My guess is that those young Southern writers, like students I’ve taught who grew up in Detroit, or on farms in isolated stretches of Michigan’s upper peninsula, or in families of Jehovah’s Witnesses, saw their childhood worlds as the places they were trying to escape, shedding the markers of a culture that made them feel embarrassingly unlike the kids into whose houses they longingly peered while watching TV. For years—as an undergraduate at Yale, as a postgraduate student in England, as a reporter in New Hampshire—I tried to hide that I had grown up at a shabby, crass hotel in the Borscht Belt. Only when a classmate at Iowa remarked that if he had grown up in the Catskills, he would be setting his stories there did I begin to appreciate the riches I had been ignoring. And not until I saw Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet did I comprehend the literary potential of the crazy insurance company where I had worked so many summers, with its drab maze of offices above the Sears Roebuck catalogue store on Main Street—its beehived secretaries typing up accident reports from the waxy sky-blue belts that kept jamming in their antiquated Dictaphone machines, the claims adjusters in the back room, gumming their cigars while comparing stories about the titties on the women they had shtupped while investigating the bizarre accidents that had befallen the guests at the hotels and bungalow colonies the company for which we all worked insured. As I sat at my desk, wishing I were interning in a laboratory at Bell Labs or crewing on a sailboat like my classmates at Yale, little did I think I would willingly return to those dusty offices as the settings for my stories.

In fact, as writers become aware of the many worlds to which their characters might belong, they easily grow overwhelmed. Not to be overly schematic, for the purposes of a given story, it is simplest to consider that each major character is at home in one world. Then, something happens to disrupt that equilibrium. The world in which the main character feels at home collapses in an instant, or disintegrates over time. Or the world remains intact, but a character from another world pierces the membrane and disturbs the peace inside. Or the main character leaves her protective bubble, spends some time in another world, then returns a changed person. Or two characters, each the product of a different world, try to create a third world in which they can coexist. (If you have ever wondered what you might do with all the Venn diagrams you mastered in elementary school, feel free to use them now.) This paradigm can be as true for a story set in a world the writer knows intimately from childhood as for a story set in a world he or she invents. In fantasy or science fiction, the whole point is to examine the clash of values that occurs when alien worlds collide.

In this way, setting becomes integral not only to character, but also to plot and theme. The conflict that propels the story’s main action arises from some upset to the protagonist’s world. The rupture or dissolution of the culture in which a character feels at home, or the friction that arises as the story’s protagonist moves from one world to another, exposes and calls into question values that until now have been taken for granted. In British and European literature, such a dynamic traditionally tends to occur as a character attempts to rise from one social class to the next. Think of the map you might draw to chart Julien Sorel’s progress from his father’s timber yard in the woods outside Verrières, to the much grander house of the town’s mayor, to the seminary in Besançon, to the monarchist household of the Marquis de la Mole, down again to prison, then up to the courtroom and even higher to the guillotine, or the flurry of arrows that might represent Elizabeth Bennet’s movements from her parents’ house to Bingley’s mansion to Darcy’s Pemberley. Until recently, European writers weren’t much concerned with characters who crossed boundaries of race; even so, right from the start, there was Robinson Crusoe, travelling from the bosom of his middle-class English family to his enslavement by Salé pirates, to his ownership of a plantation in Brazil, to his sojourn aboard a slaving ship, to his confinement on an island where he re-creates the England he has fled, only to have the equilibrium of that newly built world upset by cannibals, one of whom becomes Crusoe’s companion and/or servant, Friday. Then there are Marlow and Kurtz, travelling deep within an Africa they perceive as the heart of darkness, and Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Aziz blundering in and out of each other’s worlds in India.

By the early 20th century, the old order had sufficiently crumbled so Russian literature could produce a bookish Jew who joins the Cossacks, issuing his brutally succinct reports on the values he must relinquish to earn the respect of his more manly yet cruder comrades. In turn, Isaac Babel’s stories served as an inspiration for African American writers attempting to describe their own escape from closed, repressive worlds into the larger society that once excluded them. When I was his student at Iowa, the brilliant African American writer James Alan McPherson often spoke of his debt to Babel; the debt is especially clear in a story like “Gold Coast,” in which McPherson explores not only the traditional border crossings of a black janitor who has access to the secret lives of the white people whose apartments he tends, but also the complexities that arise when that same janitor—who happens to be earning his way through Harvard Law School—enters a romantic liaison with a white woman. Just as Babel chronicles the divisions within the seemingly monolithic Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement, McPherson also explores the tensions experienced by African American characters as they move in and out of various worlds within the black community, as in “Why I Love Country Music,” a Southern black man’s explanation to his New York-born wife as to why he likes to square dance, or “The Story of a Scar,” in which a working-class black woman tells a pretentious black stranger how she acquired the long, curving wound that mars her face.

In Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones, who studied with McPherson, takes his characters on similar journeys, both within the predominantly black world of Washington, D.C., and into the larger white world beyond. Diagramming the worlds inhabited by the various characters in Jones’s masterful novel The Known World is a tutorial in the controlled complexity that can result from using setting to structure narrative. Here we have a variety of plantations scattered across a fictional county in antebellum Virginia, some managed by white slaveholders, others by free black slaveholders, as well as farms and businesses owned by free blacks who cannot or will not own slaves and free whites who cannot afford to, the quarters of the slaves themselves, and the more mobile worlds of bounty hunters, sheriffs, and slave traders. Throughout the novel, we get the sense that the narrator views his tale as a sort of living tapestry, with the threads attached to each character weaving in and out of the carefully embroidered worlds the writer has stitched to his canvas; no surprise that such a tapestry shows up in the final pages in a physical form.

Seen in this way, setting is both the primary subject and the key structural element of much of 20th-century American fiction, with its tracking of the great migrations of women and men from every nation on the planet, the mixing and mingling of peoples hitherto kept apart, the great currents of American citizens flooding from South to North, from East to West, from the country to the city, from the city to the farm, not to mention the infiltration of previously all-male worlds by women, or the ghostly co-existence of the closeted gay world parallel to the heterosexual straight world, or their eventual intermingling.

Young writers might protest that this idea of centering a story on the conflicts that arise from a character’s identity as African American, Chinese American, Jewish, or gay, let alone Southern or Midwestern, is dated or too schematic. Take Toni Cade Bambara’s 1972 story “The Lesson,” in which a group of Harlem schoolchildren, led by the rambunctious narrator, Sylvia, are escorted on a field trip by a young black woman named Miss Moore, who, although she grew up in their neighborhood, has spent enough time in the wider world to come back radicalized. Despite Sylvia’s resistance—she senses that whatever lesson Miss Moore wants to teach is going to threaten her position as the Queen Bee of her gang—Miss Moore ushers the children through the doors of F.A.O. Schwartz, whose flagship store on Fifth Avenue sells miniature sailboats that cost more than a thousand dollars. Suitably outraged, Sylvia’s best friend, Sugar, exclaims: “You know, Miss Moore, I don’t think all of us here put together eat in a year what that sailboat costs.”2 When Sylvia tries to shut her up, Sugar goes so far as to resist her authority. After all, in a world in which rich white people can spend more on a toy clown than the children’s parents pay for a month’s rent, Sylvia’s supremacy seems punier than it did when the children were stuck in Harlem.

In the face of such power, even Sylvia feels her confidence wither to shame. “Got as much right to go in as anybody,” she tells herself. “But somehow I can’t seem to get hold of the door. …”3 Cowed, the children return to their neighborhood, where Sylvia lets Sugar get a head start on their race to the candy store. “[A]in’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin,”4 she proclaims, although we can guess that she now understands she will face much more powerful opponents in her grown-up life than the black children who, until now, seemed her only competitors.

The use of setting in Bambara’s story—not to mention its title—might strike readers as heavy-handed. Yet, within the thickly drawn outlines of the story, the author sketches in far more subtle details. Take this bit of dialogue in which the children peer at a small, unfamiliar object whose $480 price tag baffles them:

“That’s a paperweight made of semi-precious stones fused together under tremendous pressure,” [Miss Moore] explains slowly, with her hands doing the mining and all the factory work.

“So what’s a paperweight?” asks Rosie Giraffe.

“To weigh paper with, dumbbell,” say Flyboy, the wise man from the East.

“Not exactly,” say Miss Moore, which is what she say when you warm or way off too. “It’s to weigh paper down so it won’t scatter and make your desk untidy. “ So right away me and Sugar curtsy to each other and then to Mercedes who is more the tidy type.

“We don’t keep paper on top of the desk in my class,” say Junebug, figuring Miss Moore crazy or lyin one.

“At home, then,” she say. “Don’t you have a calendar and a pencil case and a blotter and a letter-opener on your desk at home where you do your homework?” And she know damn well what our homes look like cause she nosys around in them every chance she gets.

“I don’t even have a desk,” say Junebug. “Do we?”

“No. And I don’t get no homework neither,” says Big Butt.

“And I don’t even have a home,” say Flyboy like he do at school to keep the white folks off his back and sorry for him. Send this poor kid to camp posters, is his specialty.5

Along with the comedy comes a deeper ambiguity. Miss Moore might be well intentioned, but is she really doing the children a favor by stirring their awareness of the rich white world? Or is she, out of bitterness at her own powerlessness, trying to whittle Sylvia’s bravado to a less-threatening size, perhaps even striking out at a deluded younger version of herself? Is she instilling outrage at the divide between rich and poor, or infusing the children with a newfound longing for goods they will never be able to afford? And in what way, really, is “The Lesson” outdated? If someone today were to take a bunch of kids from inner-city Detroit to the upscale mall in suburban Troy, would they be any less outraged or cowed?

The same analysis might be made of John Updike’s classic story “A&P,” which charts the growing dissatisfaction of a young man who works at a grocery store on Boston’s north shore. The narrator is so clearly at home in his world that he can recite the items shelved in each aisle and predict which customers will put which items in their carts. He even has a ditty he sings each time he rings up a purchase: “I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT—it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case ‘Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!’”6

Then three pretty girls in bathing suits prance in to buy some herring snacks. Their queenly demeanor, their disregard for the dress code, and the fact that they have come in to buy an item the store’s regulars rarely buy allows the narrator to imagine the difference between his world and theirs. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks,” the most regal of the three girls explains, and her voice startles the narrator,

the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks.” All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a really racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stenciled on.7

Shamed by his invisibility to these girls, Sammy quits his job, leaving behind the apron and bow tie that identify him as an employee of the A&P (“The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered”). Outside in the parking lot, he briefly enjoys his liberation. And yet, with his heartbreaking final line (“…my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter”), he signals his realization that even in America, raising oneself to a higher social class entails more than ripping off a uniform and announcing, “I quit.”8

The Atlantic and Pacific grocery chain has long since gone belly-up. Herring snacks are no longer considered gourmet fare. And yet, whenever I teach the story, I delight in Updike’s exquisitely detailed rendering of the world of work. And I can’t see that the author’s focus on a young man who suddenly becomes determined to make himself known not as “Sammy,” the name stitched on an apron borrowed from the establishment where he works, but as an individual, a human being, is any less relevant today than it was when Updike wrote it.

Setting will always be fundamental to fiction. What is childhood if not the world that determines who we are? What is family if not the world whose eccentric rituals, ways of speaking, eating, loving, and inflicting pain, create in each of us the most primal sense of belonging or separation? What is marriage if not the collision of competing worlds? Think of the scene in Annie Hall in which Annie’s healthy, genteel relatives politely discuss “swap meets” and “boat basins” and Grammy’s special sauce for the Easter ham, while on the other side of the screen Alvie’s raucous clan gobbles their brisket while evaluating this or that relative’s “coronary” or “di-a-BEET-is,” or the scene in which Alvie tells his therapist that he and Annie have sex three times a week, which he dismisses as “hardly ever,” while Annie provides her therapist with the same statistic but complains that Alvie demands sex “constantly.” Perhaps the trope of the healthy Midwestern WASP marrying the neurotic New York Jew is no longer as fresh today as it was in 1977. But the idea that a story can be set in motion by bringing together lovers who have been shaped by different worlds will be obsolete only when every family on the planet comes to observe the same rituals and share the same values as every other, at which point fiction as we know it will have ceased to exist.

If any text demonstrates the timeless power of setting as a key fictional element, it is William Maxwell’s heart-stoppingly beautiful novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. That Maxwell viewed setting in much the way I am presenting it here is evidenced by the physical boundaries he assigns to the abstract emotional worlds through which his characters pass. At the novel’s outset, Maxwell’s narrator describes the most devastating event of his life: the loss of his mother, who died of pneumonia two days after giving birth to his younger brother. Neither the narrator’s father nor his older brother seems able to talk about the devastating grief all three have suffered. The only comfort the boy can find is to join his father’s nightly pacing around their house, the son’s arm around the older man’s waist as they walk from the living room to the front hall, then past the grandfather’s clock and into the library, and from there back to the living room. Together, man and boy search for the life they have lost, a world so palpable Maxwell gives it a physical dimension:

Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. 9

Later, describing his father’s remarriage, the narrator meditates on his stepmother’s role as interloper in a kingdom where she cannot help but be an outsider. “In fairy tales the coming of a stepmother is never regarded as anything but a misfortune. Presumably this is not because of the great number of second wives who were unkind to the children of their husband’s first marriage, though examples of this could be found, but because of the universal resentment on the children’s part of an outsider.”10 The narrator recognizes that this was “the moment to forget about that door I had walked through without thinking, and about the void that could sometimes be bridged in dreams, and about the way things used to be when my mother was alive. Instead, I clung to them more tightly than ever, even as I was being drawn willy-nilly into my father’s new life.”11

After that, the novel becomes obsessed with houses—and the rooms within those houses, and the objects within those rooms—as markers of the emotional worlds in which the characters have become trapped, or the worlds they are seeking to escape, or the worlds they are attempting to re-create or create anew to replace the worlds they have lost. Almost immediately after the narrator’s father remarries, the father and his second wife set about building a new house. Each day after school, the boy watches the carpenters go about their work, waiting for the moment they leave so he can climb around the scaffolding and enjoy the “agreeable feeling, as I went from one room to the next by walking through the wall instead of a doorway, or looked up and saw blue sky through the rafters, that I had found a way to get around the way things were.”12

How fitting that this half-built structure is where the narrator meets another boy who has been left homeless by the emotional explosion that has torn apart his family’s farm. “Before the stairway was in, there was a gaping hole in the center of the house and you had to use the carpenters’ rickety ladder to get to the second floor,” the narrator says. “One day I looked down through this hole and saw Cletus Smith standing on a pile of lumber looking at me. I suppose I said, ‘Come on up.’ Anyway, he did.”13 What the narrator senses is that Cletus is as much an exile from the comforts of a happy childhood as he is, Cletus’s mother having carried on an affair with the sharecropper on the neighboring farm, a man who also happens to be her husband’s best friend. Until now, the narrator and Cletus, one from the city and the other from the farm, have moved through each other’s orbits at school without exerting much gravity on each other. Perhaps they shared the same classroom, or they practiced tying reef knots in the same Boy Scout troop. “I only knew that I knew him,”14 the narrator says. Thin, bookish, unathletic, the narrator has, until now, been an outsider among the coal miners’ and sharecroppers’ sons who inhabit his town. Yet as he and Cletus walk with arms outstretched along the skeletal walls of the half-built house, they achieve a precarious balance neither can achieve in the dwellings in which they are now forced to live with the distracted survivors of their parents’ marriages.

Each evening, when the sky informs the boys that suppertime is approaching, they climb down and say “So long” and “See you tomorrow,” only to learn that “one evening this casual parting turned out to be for the last time.”15 Cletus’s mother has sued his father for divorce, and even though the father is the wronged party, he is humiliated in court, stripped not only of his wife and sons but also his farm. Distraught, he shoots his former best friend, then turns the gun on himself. Called upon to identify his father’s weapon, Cletus leaves the narrator—and his own childhood—behind.

Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment when he was confronted with the broken gun in the sheriff’s office, he must have crossed over the line into maturity, and though he is referred to as a boy, wasn’t one any longer.16

No physical barrier prevents the narrator from visiting his friend in this sorrowful new land. And yet, he never goes. “I knew it was a most terrible thing that had happened to Cletus and that he would forever be singled out by it, but I didn’t try to put myself in his place or even think that maybe I ought to find out where he lived and get on my bicycle and go see him. It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.”17

By now, the narrator’s new house is finished, and, unlike Cletus, he regains at least nominal membership in the world of Boys Who Have a Real Home. Later, the narrator’s father and stepmother move him to Chicago, where he attends an urban high school with three thousand students. In this world, where “the failure to do well in sports didn’t make you an object of derision,” he is accepted for what he is. And yet, this newfound equilibrium is ruffled when he glimpses Cletus in the hall, an invader from a world so distant it’s as if Cletus “had risen from the dead.”18 The boys have more in common than any two people in that building, yet they can’t find a language in which to say hello. As much as the narrator wishes to assure Cletus that he won’t let on to anyone that Cletus’s father killed his mother’s lover and then killed himself, he is silenced by any young man’s awkwardness in the face of passion and death, as well as his inability to imaginatively breach the gap between their worlds. After all, “the bloodhounds had never been after my father, and I didn’t know (how could anyone know, how many times has such a thing happened to a thirteen-year-old boy?) what he had been through. Any more than a person who hasn’t had a car door slammed on his fingers knows what that is like.”19

If So Long, See You Tomorrow were a more conventional novel, it would end there, with the narrator recalling his childhood betrayal of Cletus Smith and recounting the guilt that has plagued him since. But Maxwell is only getting started on his real project, which is, first, to reinforce the boundaries that initially separated the narrator from his friend, and then to summon a lifetime’s worth of empathy and insight to transcend those boundaries. While not excusing his betrayal, the narrator acknowledges that Cletus was a child of the country, while he, the narrator, was a child of the town:

Suppose Cletus had come to spend the day with me when we were small children. There would have been a dog following us around. And in the barn a horse, a high carriage with red wheels, hay, bags of oats, etc. But then he would have discovered that I had never harnessed the horse to the carriage, and that we couldn’t ride him bareback to round up the cows because there weren’t any. The house was a lot larger and more comfortable than his, and there was a sandpile in the back yard, but what was a sandpile compared to the horse barn, the cow barn, sheds, corncribs, the chicken house, the root cellar, the well, the windmill, the horse trough, and a swimming hole? In town there were cardinals and bluebirds and tanagers and Baltimore orioles, but he had the mourning dove, the forever inquiring bob-white?, the hoot owl, and the whippoorwill.20

In terms of status and wealth, sharecroppers like Cletus’s dad might have been at a disadvantage to their counterparts in town. And yet, the narrator tells us, neither the sharecroppers nor their town-dwelling cousins would have traded worlds. Similarly, despite the long list of chores and the limited opportunities Cletus faced on his father’s farm, the narrator doubts that Cletus would have changed places with him.

Instead, what the narrator does for the rest of the book is to change places with Cletus. Even if he cannot atone for his teenage indifference to his classmate’s plight, he can mine his adult experience to understand what he couldn’t make sense of as a child. (For another example of this strategy, see Sherwood Anderson’s poignant story “Death in the Woods,” in which the narrator attempts to fathom the beauty and brutality of the life and death of a poor farm-wife whose naked corpse he glimpsed in the woods when he was a boy too young to comprehend what he was seeing.) In Maxwell’s novel, the older narrator takes it upon himself to conjure the sights, sounds, and smells, the manners and mores, of the neighboring farms inhabited by the Wilsons and Smiths, after which he imagines the tornado of passion that rips apart the farmhouse walls, twirling everyone around and scattering them to their fates.

In the end, So Long, See You Tomorrow reveals itself as the story of the boy Cletus, who, through no fault of his own, is sucked from a world in which he is blissfully at home, and then has that very world sucked from his soul by the selfish actions of the adults who control his life; on a less dramatic scale, Cletus’s loss is mirrored by the narrator’s exile from a world in which his mother still lived and loved him. The narrator and Cletus Smith may endure more of an uprooting than most children suffer. But don’t all of us spend our lives mourning our childhood worlds and attempting to re-create them, or fleeing those childhood worlds and attempting to establish families in which we feel more like insiders than outsiders, then trying to protect these new worlds from invasion and attack? We endure exiles and migrations. We cross from room to room, from house to house, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from school to school, from job to job, from family to family, from lover to lover, from husband to husband or wife to wife, all the while experiencing the pull and tug of conflicting rituals and beliefs. If mapping such journeys isn’t an essential and timeless part of writing, I don’t know what is. 

Eileen Pollack’s most recent novel is Breaking and Entering, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. She teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Notes

1. O’Connor, Flannery, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1969), p. 103.
2. Bambara, Toni Cade, “The Lesson” in The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Eighth Edition, ed. Ann Charters (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011) p. 86.
3. Ibid, p. 84.
4. Ibid, p. 87.
5. Ibid, p. 84.
6. Updike, John, “A&P” in Charters, p. 1316.
7. Ibid, p. 1315.
8. Ibid, p. 1317.
9. Maxwell, William, So Long, See You Tomorrow (New York: Vintage International, 1980), p. 9.
10. Ibid, p. 16.
11. Ibid, p. 23.
12. Ibid, p. 25.
13. Ibid, p. 27.
14. Ibid, p. 28.
15. Ibid, p. 31.
16. Ibid, p. 42.
17. Ibid, p. 43.
18. Ibid, p. 50.
19. Ibid, p. 51.
20. Ibid, p. 53.