My Father’s Friends by William Maxwell, 1984
The magic trick:
Easily transitioning the story’s focus onto one friend in particular, while still bringing to life other characters along the way
Sometimes you want something a little faster, a little louder, a little more substantive somehow than the small, quiet, ideas-based stories William Maxwell delivers.
But other times – and it’s actually most of the time, by my tastes – you want exactly what Maxwell delivers, and you’re left to marvel at just how smart a writer this guy was.
This is one of those stories. It’s just astonishing, really.
The premise is simple. The narrator returns home to make arrangements for his father’s funeral. While there, he visits with a couple of his father’s friends. The insights he gathers about them reflect on his father, and soon we are traveling back into his memories to learn more about one particular friend, Aaron McIvor. The story slips easily into more of a story about Mr. McIvor’s life. But the whole time it’s pinging insights back to further illuminate both the narrator’s father and the narrator himself.
Very quickly, the reader has a rich portrait of several people and an entire way of life in Midwestern middle class America during the early middle 20th century.
And that’s quite a trick on Maxwell’s part.
The selection:
The things I am curious about now I was not curious about then. Where, in that small town of twelve thousand people, did Aaron McIvor’s mother live? Did she live by herself? And if so, on what? And what brought her all the way across the Atlantic? And what happened to his father? And how on earth did she come by that hat? None of these questions will I ever know the answer to.
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