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Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic-it blinds you with fairy dust. Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). If you've already read Billy Dyer, there's little here worth exploring, especially if you haven't yet enjoyed Maxwell's wonderful novels. Maxwell waxes poetic about a charming walk-up in Manhattan's Murray Hill in ``The Thistles of Sweden'' and sorrowfully rues the decline of New York in ``The Lily-White Boys,'' a sour tale of a Christmas Eve burglary. ``What Every Boy Should Know'' beautifully captures the pangs of adolescence as an awkward boy copes with sex and a demanding father. The best stories, like Maxwell's novels, are nostalgic, recalling a genteel bourgeois life in downstate Illinois in the earlier decades of the century. In ``A Game of Chess,'' Maxwell is particularly caustic about boorish Americans from the heartland who can't understand their bohemian relations in New York. The stories about French travel and its disappointments seem like cautionary tales for the sophisticated traveler. But even the stories from Maxwell's first collection of fiction-mostly about Upper East Side Manhattanites who live in fear of the city's darker corners and escape to country houses-aren't that impressive.
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At two or three pages each, these provide Maxwell little room to flex his literary muscle. An industrious tailor can't appreciate life in the present a carpenter breaks his vow to keep secrets and shatters a town's serenity in a land of immortals, the people begin to commit suicide. These slight modern morality tales derive whatever complexity they have by juxtaposing archaic diction and contemporary concerns, but they're mostly too formulaic.
#THE PEARL JOHN STEINBECK DICTION SERIES#
And the last quarter of the collection reprints what Maxwell himself calls ``improvisations,'' a series of fractured fables originally written to entertain his wife. The complete contents of the justly praised Billy Dyer (1991)-related stories that resemble Maxwell's novels-are reproduced here. Underappreciated as a novelist, Maxwell does little to enhance his reputation by collecting his short fiction, a volume of stories written over the past 50 years.