gossip is living history. history is petrified gossip.
The source of the comedy and pathos–of the plots, deceptions, and serendipitous harmonies that give Maxwell’s narratives their structure and rhythm–is the inability of any single person to fully understand the architecture of that web. In “Time Shall Darken It,” as in three novels that preceded it (“Bright Center of Heaven,” “They Came Like Swallows,” and “The Bent Leaf”), Maxwell favors a floating point of view that occasionally lands on consciousness. of a particular character, revealing how incomplete a person’s understanding can be. sometimes the character is a child, like abbey king, the 4-year-old daughter of austin and martha, concerned with understanding the ways of adults and her own reactions to them. but the difference between abbey and her father, her mother, her cousin nora and the neighboring matron mrs. the beach is of grade rather than class. everyone in this world is to some extent a child, because everyone has to infer the rules in the middle of the game. and the rules are always changing.
maxwell’s most sustained exploration of that confusion is surely “the castle,” in which the misunderstandings between harold and barbara rhodes, their hosts and other guests at an old loire valley palatial boarding house, are near perfect. The stakes are lower than in “Time Shall Darken,” in which the Austins’ marriage, Nora’s well-being, and Draperville’s delicate communal order seem to be endangered by the specters of adultery and shady dealings. the French are all inscrutable, but each baffles in a particular way, according to gender, class, generation, and temperament. they can be warm and trusting one moment, aloof and even hostile the next. Barbara and Harold are always trying to figure out what they could have done to cause affection or offend.
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reasons for some of the behavior are provided in a final section called “some explanations” which a reader of knopf, your publisher, urged you to remove. takes the form of a question and answer session between the narrator and the reader. “You don’t like to draw your own conclusions” about why something happened, the writer asks. yes, but then I like to know if the conclusions I have reached are correct. how not to be when everything that happens happens for so many different reasons?
part of what makes maxwell a fictional historian, as opposed to a writer of historical fiction, is the resistance to ambiguity itself. the motives may not be entirely rational, and the reasons may not be entirely knowable, but even extreme or capricious varieties of human behavior have observable patterns and causes. Maxwell spent over a year in psychoanalysis with Theodore Reik, and while his fictions are not Freudian case studies, they are deeply analytical, driven by a spirit of inquiry rather than plot mechanics, and animated by a belief in the overdetermination. everything happens for so many different reasons!
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This playful but never frivolous engagement with fiction as a form of knowledge creates a simultaneous effect of complexity and clarity. “Time Shall Darken It” may be primarily the story of Austin King, but he’s not exactly the lead. he is, on the one hand, too passive to be the center of the story. And although his non- or near-affair with Nora and its impact on her family’s life is the book’s main incident, it’s not entirely accurate to say that his crush on him plays out in the context of other events in Draperville. and in the king. home.
there is a version of this essay that defends maxwell on the basis of the astonishing topicality of his fiction.
You could also say the opposite: that nora’s romantic angst and the alienation between austin and martha form the background against which a vivid and varied picture of midwestern life before world war one emerges. that also underestimates maxwell’s art. The shifting currents of desire, jealousy, frustration, and decency that define the Austin-Nora-Martha triangle flow through a complicated circuit that encompasses the extended royal family, the neighborhood, the town, and even the nation. You don’t have to read between the lines to find hints of sectional conflict, racial inequality, class stratification, and cultural resentment in these pages. all of that is right there, in front of the narrator’s eye. what holds everything together is not so much his omniscience as his curiosity, his historian’s hunger to discover why what happened happened.
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