Bittersweet Truth

TIME WILL DARKEN IT (302 pp.)-- William Maxwell--Harper ($3).

Nora didn't want to settle for a magnolia & moonlight life on her father's Mississippi plantation. Her discontent spilled over: "Sometimes I wish I were a nigger or an Indian or anything that would keep me from having to be myself, Nora Potter, who goes to parties and pays calls, and sits by quietly, with nothing to say, while Mama does all the talking." Mama really talked incessantly, but now that Nora was up North, she too found her tongue, and ended by talking too much. She told her cousin Austin King, who was already married, that she loved him, and pinned her heart so conspicuously to her sleeve that his wife Martha and the rest of the townspeople of Draperville, Ill. couldn't miss it.

In the hands of most current novelists, the commonplace and slight story of Nora's indiscretion, Austin's kindly rejection of her advances, and the effects these events have on Austin's wife, pregnant with her second baby, would be something to read in a hammock and forget by dinnertime. Maxwell has made it something more.

A fiction editor of the New Yorker, he can make a room, a house, a whole town come to life without raising his voice. Nothing happens in Time Will Darken It that small-town readers won't immediately recognize as next-door truth, but what does happen (gossip, housework, dinner parties, childbearing) is conveyed sensitively, in clean and restrained prose. Time Will Darken It is often too loosely constructed, frequently lingers with characters who don't help the story along, but it weighs with considerable accuracy and tenderness the half-articulated impulses of disenchanted people who believe, with Author Maxwell, that "the apple had gone bad a long time ago, and slugs had eaten the rose, that the hay had mildewed in the barn, and the last hope of fair dealing was lost in third-grade arithmetic."

Readers will spot a trace of the practiced world weariness, the wry disenchantment and resigned disillusionment with which New Yorker fiction is loaded. Editor Maxwell's storytelling is of the same breed, but it is a thoroughbred in its class.

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