William Maxwell.

I bought All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories on Ebay over a year ago. It arrived in the mail and went right onto the bookshelf to hibernate. Hype has a stubborn inertia that can ultimately ruin things for me, and to properly tame it is a process of weeks or months.

I finally picked it off the shelf on a glorious cold night in Austin. I made a good fire, and I fixed a big pot of coffee after work.

I was baffled and awed by the first story, “Over by the River,” and that old, rare feeling returned. To be in the hands of a master. Show me, you say to the artist, to the chef, to the docent, the lover who works so effortlessly in beauty and perfection that you are compelled to submit. “Over by the River” is a longish domestic story about a middle-aged, middle class couple and their children in New York City. On page three, I put the story down and gleefully went off to retrieve a pencil (I found early on a few sentences to mark). Marginalia is a mostly outgrown habit, but I can’t deny the energy and excitement that I feel from interacting with words on a page. An early scene has George Carrington walking the family dog in an existential funk when he sees a tanker on the East River. He waves to the crew, “and they waved back but it was too far to jump.” I laughed aloud at the absurdity. The notion of escape is bittersweet; George realizes there are places he would never see, experiences he would never have.

George’s wife Iris is battling her own malaise, and when the girls left for school each morning, “she waited for her soul, which left her during the night.” She daydreams about moving to a house in the South of France, where the girls are “allowed to grow up slowly, in the ordinary way, and not be jaded by one premature experience after another.” I am reminded of a great scene in Mad Men where Don’s daughter Sally runs from a ballroom party and witnesses an intimate moment – on a piano stool – between one of her father’s coworkers and a mature, sophisticated woman. George’s dreams are more surreal; what he thought was his topcoat turned out to belong to a lifelong friend he had not seen for seventeen years and naked strangers came and went. “Over by the River” is a series of disorienting moments, in which the edges of George’s reality blur until they disappear.

Slowly and expertly, Maxwell constructs a supra-reality around this family that is dizzy with dreams and dreads, coincidence and tragedy. In this world, boredom, cliche, and self-consciousness are more threatening than conflict and loss. The characters are out of step somehow, stumbling through expectations, and always with one eye fixed on some shimmering ideal. The reader, too, feels out of step in a separate way. In a brilliant scene, the neighborhood dads gather in the church to practice for their Christmas program. “With the two tall windows at their backs they were missing the snow, which was a pity.” Here, Maxwell suggests the possibility of a warm Charlie Brown-like appreciation of Christmas snow, only to dash the sentimentality in the next sentence; the uniqueness of a snowflake is “a miracle, of course, but it was a miracle everybody has long since grown accustomed to.” Then, after teaching us the game, Maxwell doubles down and throws the reader off again.

The men struggle for the spirit of the songs; “they did their best, but the nineteenth century words and the ninth-century plainsong did not go well together.” When one man with a good strong voice excels, the group feels “they would have been happier without him.” This made me laugh too. As the reader embraces Maxwell’s ironic tone, and whiles away each hymn along with the men, the music teacher “glancing nervously at the clock,” the group finishes together, unexpectedly, “in a flush of pleasure on the beat, loudly, making the room echo.” It is the last song of the night but suddenly they feel as if they could go on singing for another hour. Instead they are made to file out of the room. The misdirection is great. There is a suggestion that modern urban life is so frenetic, that when we are presented with opportunities for communal, genuine experiences, it takes us so long to decompress that we miss the mark, and we can’t relax — even when we’ve carved out time in our schedules to do so.

At times Maxwell lulls us into a meandering thought, and we turn a corner to confront him directly. He pickpockets our stability and darts into shadow again. At a cocktail party, George converses with different guests, losing himself in a blend of their stories and his own thoughts, and then suddenly he resurfaces to hear his conversation partner say, “but it isn’t really distinguishable from what goes on in dreams.” Wait, what? George himself is struggling with the real, and the reader is beginning to examine the relationship between dreams and reality, and then Maxwell the author boldly confronts the point in an unexpected vehicle – cocktail party pleasantries. Maxwell takes the plate, the pitch comes, and he connects on two levels! The balls both soar into the stands of the stadium.

Reality bends further in a scene of familial myth. To placate his restless daughter Laurie one night before bed, he reads to her a tale of three dogs. One, “with eyes as big as saucers, one dog with eyes as big as millwheels, and a third dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen.” The central point of it all, perhaps why the damn dogs have such big eyes, is obscured by the random specificity of the final comparison. The scene ends without explanation or comment, and is reshuffled into the deck; a new paragraph finds George in his bedroom rummaging through a drawer. Maxwell steers the story towards territory we’re all familiar with, childhood storybooks, and flips the expectation so we are left wondering what the hell just happened. The takeaway is that even our nostalgia for the stories of our youth can be misplaced – those stories often don’t make any rational sense, and our comfort in thinking back on them is an illusion.

Sometimes dreams and reality dovetail and perturb their separate spheres. One night, George’s wife Iris dreams that he is having a heart attack. George’s response is pointedly moral, “should you be dreaming about that?” As if our dreams are choices. Iris describes how she “could not extricate herself from it but went on and on, feeling the appropriate emotions but in a circular way.” This circular path within the dream continues until finally the “sounds she made in her sleep brought about her deliverance.” The door opens both ways; reality feeds our dreams and in this case, dreams rupture themselves and force us awake.

Visions of a menacing tiger keep Laurie up one night, and she cannot sleep. But the tiger is subject to the laws that govern the little girl’s reality. “The tiger could do anything he wanted to expect roar his terrible roar, because then the bedroom door would fly open and would come running.” But just as the rules are established, the tiger violates them to her surprise by putting its head in the air conditioner. “That isn’t possible,” she thinks. “But is was,” Maxwell persists, “more and more of his body disappeared into the air conditioner, and finally there was only his tail, and then only the tip, and when that was gone so was she.” The dream tiger’s presence in the room is the last wisp of her conscious mind, in limbo between wakefulness and sleep. The reader might be comforted by the thought that tigers do not dwell in the city, a fact unavailable to the impressionable child. But the reader’s confidence soon stumbles, as it is revealed in the city paper that a tiger has escaped from the zoo. “But that was a different tiger; that tiger escaped from a circus in Jamestown, Rhode Island.”

One night, George is awakened by a voice crying “help,” from the street. He is drawn to the window. He is afraid somebody is being robbed or murdered. The noise stops. He is sick with horror. Perhaps the paper will have some word of it in the morning. But he forgets to pick up the paper in the morning. He felt “he ought to go through weeks of the News until he found out what happened. If it was in the News.” But Maxwell has one last joke at our expense: “And if something happened.”

He exposes a circuit of observer, thing observed, and thing confirmed by a third party, here: the news, to add to the juggling act of thing dreamed, thing heard, thing read, thing believed, thing felt. Where in all of this is thing real? When the story ends, and our comfortable binary of dreams and reality has been obliterated, we are happy just to concede him the point and get back to doing the dishes.