March 14, 2025

All the Days and Nights, by William Maxwell

My first William Maxwell was his novel The Chateau, which I read a couple of years ago in a reading group all about books about houses that Anne Fernald ran online via the Center for Fiction, and that book was the perfect introduction to Maxwell, who published six novels between the 1930s and 1980s, along with many short stories, and also was fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Maxwell is the most Woolf-influenced male author I’ve ever encountered, and The Chateau made that clear, although not as clear as his second novel They Came Like Swallows, whose structure borrows much from To the Lighthouse and which is based on Maxwell’s mother’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic. It’s a biographical thread he picks up again and again his fiction, including in the short stories collected in All The Days and Nights, which makes for a strange and emotional experience for readers familiar with his preoccupations—unlike his characters, we know what’s coming, and yet haplessly hoping for some other outcome all the same. There’s something so vulnerable and real about Maxwell’s characters, their flaws and imperfections. He’s the only mid-twentieth century author I’ve ever read whose male characters struggle with infertility, which was also based on Maxwell’s own experience, and the way he writes about love and marriage is so tender and moving and honest. He writes about people at the mercy of fate, and I really love his work. So very much that I even read the entirety of his collected stories, which is a big deal. Big doorstop collected stories are nice to have, I guess, but not great for reading, and the only one I’ve ever successfully completed is Grace Paley, and she didn’t even write that much. Poor John Cheever’s collection just sat gathering dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally gave up the ghost, and got rid of it. But William Maxwell! I read the whole thing, and it was really great.