I came across William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow after reading an analysis of it in Stacy D’Erasmo’s The Art of Intimacy, another volume in Greywolf’s series on the craft of writing. The novel centers on the murder of a tenant farmer in a small Midwestern town in 1921 and on how the narrator, who was just a boy at the time, recalls the incident many years later. On its surface it’s a standard tale of adultery and murder, written in the traditional minimalist style of its time and subtextually critiquing the repressed values of early 20th-century small town America. Yet it’s also a profound meta-commentary on the act of writing itself. In recalling the events, what our narrator finds most haunting is not the murder itself but how afterwards he failed to comfort his friend Cletus, who’s father was the killer. It’s the narrator’s guilt over this failure of empathy that leads him to reimagine the events of the novel from the perspectives of those involved, not just Cletus and his father and the murdered tenant farmer, but also their wives and other peripheral characters and even one of their dogs. This then becomes the remainder of the novel: a retelling of the events of the murder, but from these far more intimate perspectives. The novel itself is thus an exercise in atonement, a way for the narrator to express the empathy he failed to show in the past.
The contemporary novel this all sounds similar to is, of course, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which a central character also crafts a narrative as a way to atone for a past wrong. But as M.M. Owen points out in a recent article on McEwan in The Point, Atonement is ultimately critical of its central character Briony’s decision use fiction as a form of repentance. In the novel, Briony falsely accuses Robbie, her sister Cecilia’s lover, of rape, and as a result Robbie and Cecilia are separated and never see each another again. Briony, though, ultimately believes that she’s atoned for her past lie by writing for us a novel in which they live happily ever after—and after learning that Robbie and Cecilia actually died separate from one another during World War II, we the readers are clearly are meant to feel unsettled at the idea that Briony believes her fiction is an adequate recompense for ruining two lives. For McEwan, then, fiction itself is a problematic way of righting a past wrong, and Atonement thus seems to be making the exact opposite point of Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Fiction here doesn’t become a way to empathize with real people but rather a way to deceive oneself with a false reality.
Yet, Atonement’s relationship to fiction is actually more complex than a straightforward critique, since Atonement is itself, after all, a novel. Robbie and Cecilia are only fictional characters, and any outrage we feel at Briony for using fiction as a way to avoid facing her guilt is just an emotion manufactured by McEwan through his own fictionalizing. Atonement is thus not a broad critique of all fiction, but instead a critique of fiction that crafts a comforting lie to help its readers avoid confronting a difficult truth. In this way, McEwan’s attitude towards fiction is not all that different from Maxwell’s. Unlike Briony, the narrator in So Long, See You Tomorrow uses his fiction to approach a truth he’s long avoided. For him, fiction is a way of getting closer to an emotional truth. For Briony, it’s a way of avoiding emotional truth.
So Long, See You Tomorrow and Atonement can thus help us understand how fiction should relate to truth and reality. Certainly, Briony’s escapism can be comforting, and many readers turn to novels for exactly that kind of pleasure. And Maxwell’s narrator’s own imaginative empathy is itself not exactly real. But both novels still argue that fiction has a duty to truth, no matter how relative or unknowable it may be. Thus, when we write stories from different perspectives set in places and times other than our own, our goal should not be to craft something that simply makes us feel comfortable. Instead, we have to do as Maxwell’s narrator does, exploring the uncomfortable and imagining what we might otherwise be unwilling to.