I have discovered William Maxwell. I knew vaguely that he
had been a New Yorker editor working with such writers as Salinger, Cheever, and Updike, but I knew nothing about his
fiction. I just read his second novel, They
Came Like Swallows, which is a delightful book. You can tell he was a fan
of Virginia Woolf, and the Midwestern family he shows us has a similar kind of
dependence on the mother to keep their world right-side up that you see in To the Lighthouse. That’s all I’ll tell
you, in case you haven’t read him. I’ll be reading The Folded Leaf next.