Having read Maxwell’s literary criticism and his prize-winning novel, ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’, I looked forward to reading this book of short stories, but I found it a bit unsettling.  Was I reading a memoir or were these fiction or was the book some neorealistic combination of the two?  Having finished the book, I remain unclear as to where facts end and fiction begins.

Nonetheless, the 7 pieces in this book bear the hallmark of Maxwell’s writing—fine details described in clear and memorable prose.  The stories all take place in Lincoln, Illinois where Maxwell was born in 1908 and lived through most of his childhood.  The stories are in the form of a first person narrator whose mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic, who lived with an aunt and uncle and who joined his remarried father in Chicago.  These plot elements in the stories were all elements of Maxwell’s actual life, so what was fiction and what was memoir???

The seven stories are linked together by the history of two families, one being Maxwell’s and one the eponymous Dyers, an African-American family living in Lincoln.  Billy Dyer who grew up to be a well-respected surgeon in Kansas City despite the racial prejudice at the time, was a close friend of Maxwell’s brother while Billy’s father delivered coal and Billy’s mother and sister were domestics in the narrator’s home.

Perhaps by blurring the lines between biography and fiction, Maxwell was better able to delve into the issues of family, inequality, prejudice, and small town life.  Whichever category these stories fall into, the writing is reason enough to read them.  Maxwell was truly an artist who could not just critique and edit the work of others, but produce his own art as well.