Billie Dyer and Other Stories
Cooper, Rand Richards
THE VIEW AFTER SEVENTY BILLIE DYER AND OTHER STORIES William Maxwell Alfred A. Knopf, $18, 117 pp. imagination, to inform himself; like Maxwell's magical novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980),...
...it was the getting there that didn't much interest him...
...Billie Dyer and Other Stories offers an attractive mix of oral history, regional writing, autobiography, and fiction...
...Among them was Sergius Bolshakoff who, in 1919, began traveling from monastery to monastery throughout Europe, where he spent time garnering the wisdom of many contemporary spiritual fathers of Eastern Christian monasticism...
...like Maxwell's magical novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), it's a very belated coming-of-age book...
...Or on a town curmudgeon...
...The tips of his fingers were stained with nicotine and the whites of his eyes were yellowish also, in a way more often found in dogs than in human beings...
...For forty years, as fiction editor of the New Yorker, William Maxwell published some of America's finest writers...
...Conrad Baars Drawing upon their many years of psychiatric practice and their study of the philosophy and theology of St...
...ISBN: 0-8189-0612-2 192 pages $9.95 THE UNQUIET HEART Reflections on Love and Sexuality Jordan Aumann OP and Dr...
...Here is Maxwell on a dashing, failed uncle: "My uncle had a perfect understanding of how one should conduct oneself after one has arrived...
...Maxwell can be tender, and the stories might be sentimental, were they not so zealously guarded by accuracy and irony, those twin watchdogs...
...Maxwell knows that while facts are what we crave, one must invent to know the truth...
...being plowed under"-particularly in America, where we live, he laments, "in a perpetual present...
...I'd put it alongside such works as Delmore Schwartz'slnDreamsBeginResponsibilities...
...Or on his father's admired strictness: "[He] was capable of the sort of bluntness that makes people see themselves and their conduct in a light unsoftened by excuses of any kind...
...ISBN: 0-8189-0619-7 182 pages $9.95 RE Ft...
...O Many monks chose exile...
...Again and again we encounter persons and lives summed up with a lucid insight that goes right to the heart of things...
...But, as is always the case with William Maxwell, things are not as simple as they sound...
...The seamless weave of fact and fiction in these stories is both intriguing and impressive...
...ISBN: 0-8189-0621-9 459 pages $19.95 IN SEARCH OF TRUE WISDOM Visits to Eastern Spiritual Fathers Sergius Bolshakoff and M. Basil Pennington, OCSO In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the great monasteries of Russia were literally thrown to the four winds...
...Paul 2187 Victory Blvd., Staten Island, NY 10314 Phone toll free 1-800-343-ALBA (2522) Fax 1-718-761-0057 Commonweal 22 May 1992: 21...
...EC:JKiNS LCD l ()A'1 ND SLtit>A.L I TY available at bookstores or from Alba House a service of the Society of St...
...Griffiths...
...Thomas Aquinas, Father Jordan Aumann, OP, and the late Dr...
...Nothing that he said was ever calculated to make people feel better about themselves, but he could be very funny...
...an open-sided trolley car rumbling through the summer evening...
...His esthetic reflections sound similarly modest: he speaks not of writing or inventing these life stories, but of "reconstructing" them...
...Because he said so many unflattering things, it was assumed that he was a truthful man...
...or the late poems of Robert Penn Warren-all rich evocations of lost places and times...
...It is becoming abundantly clear that the dozen books he himself has produced during his long and fruitful career place him squarely in that celebrated company...
...In dialogue with contemporary concerns and controversies in the field of Christology, Father Kereszty presents a penetrating and integral approach to the mystery of Christ, with broad appeal to Roman Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians alike...
...It sometimes seems the main virtue Maxwell claims for this book is the factual and biographical information he was able to get his hands on...
...Annie Dillard's An American Childhood...
...The past," writes Maxwell, "is always JESUS CHRIST: Fundamentals of Christology Roch A. Kereszty, 0.Cist...
...the first local landing of an airplane, in a stubbly wheat field at the edge of town...
...Part of the excitement of reading Billie Dyer is feeling the past being reclaimed from history and restored, in your presence, to lived, told life...
...We get hints of persistent, if haphazard, researches: of telephone calls to relatives and old acquaintances...
...Bolshakoff to publish these conversations and has added a number of his own experiences with successors to these holy men...
...It then deals at length with patristic thought, providing a selective history of Christology up to the present day...
...Finally it synthesizes the results of these two inquiries in the light of modern concerns...
...Conrad Baars have formulated an approach to love and sexuality that stresses the need to subject our human emotions to the rational powers of intellect and will if we are to find joy and peace for our unquiet hearts...
...I would be content to stick to the facts," Maxwell coyly wrote in So Long, See You Tomorrow, "if there were any...
...Maxwell links the reader to an even more distant era through the older men of the town, who speak of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, of troublemakers shot for publicly celebrating President Lincoln's death...
...Russell Baker's Growing Up...
...The stories are rich in the artifacts of a small town childhood, circa World War I. There's a brother's lead toy soldiers, whose heads, broken off, have to be glued back on...
...The work begins with the biblical texts which formulate what is irreducibly new in the person and work of Christ...
...If you are the type of person drawn to old photographs, fascinated by the mys terious and vibrant actuality of people long since perished (that boy in the background, what was he smiling about...
...He had sad eyes and a sallow complexion and two deep furrows running down his cheeks...
...He speaks almost apologetically of having to "fall back on imagination" for the rest...
...Father M. Basil Pennington encouraged Dr...
...I don't think this necessarily follows...
...you will almost certainly love William Maxwell's book...
...of county histories carefully read and objects hunted down-like the notebook picked up by a real estate agent at the Dallas flea market that turns out to be the diary of Dr...
...William Dyer, the brother of the Maxwell family's maid, Hattie, and which, landing eventually on Maxwell's desk, forms the basis 20: 22 May 1992 Commonweal of the book's title story...
...He is relentlessly self-effacing-a ghostly narrator who watches, listens, recalls, and quietly judges while rarely allowing himself actually to appear: in these half-dozen first-person narratives, he uses his own name only once or twice...
...a fifth-glade teacher escorted by her adoring class on her birthday to an afternoon matinee of D.W...
...Resolutely digging, this author keeps unearthing small gems that sparkle against the darknesses of death and forgetting...
...Like So Long, See You Tomorrow, Billie Dyer is a meditation on the trickiness of memory-its incompleteness and its susceptibility to our own manipulating emotions...
...And his stories have a ring of absolute truth...
...Maxwell's writing has a modest quality that masks its power and high ambitions...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
