William Maxwell’s remembrance of childhood and of an episode of violence whose effects rippled into his old age is a book too evocative and too tender even to produce tears. One hundred years ago in this country is, we come to realize, much longer ago than it sounds. This is a time foreign to us now, but still in our bones, an almost ghostly past, fey, yet firmly rooted in the well-chosen details of the text. Were things better then? Implicity, Maxwell says they were, but he does not write to produce nostalgia. Rather, longing, perhaps … a hopeless longing that hides behind sparse language. I remember, but cannot locate, an example describing a new childhood home, the transition into whose emptiness might stand in for what we discover moving from childhood to adulthood, or from early twentieth century to early twenty-first century America.