The Man In The Moon by William Maxwell, 1984
The magic trick:
Loving the characters so much that so do you
I will boldly and proudly proclaim that SSMT is the only website where you will find “The Man On The Moon” by William Maxwell smashed together with “There He Go” by Ladee Hubbard. The stories were published 29 years apart, yes. But more than that, they span very different worlds. Maxwell’s the story of the white small-town Midwest of the early 20th century. Hubbard takes us into the black south of late 20th century.
However, both – and this is why they’re featuring back-to-back this week on SSMT – feature protagonists reckoning with their family history through the memory of a particular ne’er-do-well uncle.
Both protagonists are set off on this journey down memory lane by photographs. In Maxwell’s case, the story really is incredibly inward-looking. This feels (like many of the stories he published very late in his life) like a story he put down on paper for himself. It meticulously walks through the family tree, detailing seemingly every single thing he knows about each branch.
So why is it enjoyable? That’s the magic here! Because it is enjoyable – at least it was to me. You never really feel the author’s hand reaching out, like you’re accustomed as a reader. You expect to be entertained. You expect to see the writer if not working hard to engage you, at least acknowledging you as the audience.
Not here.
This story is going to be what it is and if no one reads it, you get the impression the story (and Maxwell) does not care.
What it does, though, is it loves its characters. Very, very much. This is an author telling his family story. If it’s just for him, it doesn’t matter. He loves these people. He loves this process. Somehow that rubs off on the reader too along the way.
And that’s quite a trick on Maxwell’s part.
The selection:
My mother and her sisters had a certain pride of family, but it had nothing to do with a feeling of social superiority, and was, actually, so unexamined and metaphysical that I never understood the grounds for it. It may have been something my grandmother brought with her from Kentucky and passed on to her children. That branch of the family didn’t go in for genealogy, and the stories that have come down are vague and improbable.
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