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The reader is transported back into that lost civilization, when houseguests measured their visits in weeks, not days, when the Civil War was still a living memory for many adults, when Chatauqua Season was a fixture of the calendar and when the towns threaded along the railroad lines of America’s farming regions were prosperous and dynamic places. The historian, though, can tell you quite a lot. The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. There is no telling what became of the hanging fern baskets with American flags in them or of all those red geraniums. In every yard a dozen landmarks (here a lilac bush, there a sweet syringa) are missing. Of certain barns and outbuildings that are gone (and with them trellises and trumpet vines) you will find no trace whatever. Though the houses are not kept up as well as they once were, they are still standing. For one thing, there are no ruins to guide you. “To arrive at some idea of the culture of a certain street in a Middle Western small town shortly before the First World War,” he reflects, is a “delicate undertaking. “Time Will Darken It” takes place quite a bit later, in 1912, a moment so far out of reach for the reader that Maxwell invokes not history, but archaeology. The county seat is Lincoln, which prides itself on being the only place named for the Great Emancipator before he became president.” Louis,” Maxwell wrote, “the halfway point would be somewhere in Logan County. “If you were to draw a diagonal line down the state of Illinois from Chicago to St. On the map it lies roughly halfway between Peoria and Springfield. More often, he casts his attention back to the years of his childhood and young manhood, to the town that served as the model for Draperville: Lincoln, Ill.
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By the time “The Chateau” was published, in 1961, it had evolved into a time-tinted snapshot of the state of French-American relations at a specific moment, when the wounds of war were still fresh and the depredations of mass tourism had not yet begun. After spending a long-delayed honeymoon in France just after World War II, Maxwell conceived a novel about the misunderstandings between an American couple and some of the French people they encounter. He is rigorously specific about when his stories take place. His setting is almost always the recent past. He draws from memory, but also, you feel, from the available evidence - from blueprints and plat maps, from newspaper clippings, bundles of letters and the neatly cataloged documents of a county historical society. Starting his career under the influence of Virginia Woolf, he was a resolutely modern writer, attuned to the fine vibrations of individual and interpersonal psychology against the backdrop of everyday life. Maxwell, who lived from 1908 to 2000 and whose first novel, “Bright Center of Heaven,” was published in 1934, isn’t what we usually think of as a historical novelist, the kind who dresses up his characters in the costumes and idioms of olden times. He wants to replace snap judgments with nuance, to explore the gaps between intention and action, appearance and actuality. He too wants to know what goes on behind closed doors and curtained windows, even if his proclaimed motive is the preservation of provincial American society - or at least the memory of what it used to be - rather than its destruction. The narrator sets up the historians as his foils, though of course he shares in their motives. They deal in shame, singeing the reputations of people who, while perhaps not entirely blameless, are nowhere near as bad or as brazen as the scuttlebutt might suggest. The members of the bridge club, cataloging sins and casting stones, practice a local, predigital version of cancel culture. Some of the gravity in this often very funny book, a share of the darkness that shadows its radiant comedy of wayward desire and failed communication, emanates from a sober understanding of the consequences of gossip. When the historians gathered, he acidly notes, “they slipped all pity off under the table with their too-tight shoes and became destroyers, enemies of society and of their neighbors, bent on finding out what went on behind the blinds that were drawn to the windowsill.” The all-seeing, all-judging narrator who surveys this activity hardly condones it.
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“History” is Maxwell’s name for gossip, the brutal art of innuendo-dropping and inference-drawing practiced by the middle-class women of Draperville over sumptuous lunches (“the canned lobster or crab meat, the tuna fish baked in shells, the chicken patties, the lavish salads, the New York ice cream”) and ruthless rubbers of bridge. This observation occurs roughly two-thirds of the way through “Time Will Darken It,” William Maxwell’s 1948 novel about family discord and communal scandal in early-20th-century small-town Illinois. “OF THE LITERARY ARTS, the one most practiced in Draperville was history.”