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Bright Center of Heaven
Change log: was entered at 167 pages. That is the page count in the Library of America edition, famously crunched together as they are. Having just read an original 1934 edition, I have adjusted the page numbers to be the correct 315 that they. J. Cody Gorman--7.1.2025
315 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1934
About the author
William Maxwell
133 books381 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American novelist, and fiction editor at the New Yorker. He studied at the University of Illinois and Harvard University. Maxwell wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America and the house where he lived at the time, which he referred to as the "Wunderkammer" or "Chamber of Wonders". He wrote of his loss "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). In 2008 the Library of America published the first of two collections of William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, Christopher Carduff editor. His collected edition of William Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by a second volume, Later Novels and Stories in the fall of 2008.'
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American novelist, and fiction editor at the New Yorker. He studied at the University of Illinois and Harvard University. Maxwell wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America and the house where he lived at the time, which he referred to as the "Wunderkammer" or "Chamber of Wonders". He wrote of his loss "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). In 2008 the Library of America published the first of two collections of William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, Christopher Carduff editor. His collected edition of William Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by a second volume, Later Novels and Stories in the fall of 2008.'
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 22, 2020
I have the Library of America collection of William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories. This is the first novel in the book, appropriately so, since this was Maxwell's first novel, written when he was 25.
Even though other reviewers, and Maxwell himself, found it to be lacking, I was charmed from the beginning. His sentences and descriptions are perfect. I could SEE the scenes playing out before me, imagine the Wisconsin farm known as Meadowlands, and get inside the heads of Mrs. West, her two sons, and the boarders staying there for the summer. The non-existent plot takes place over the course of one summer day in 1932. I myself loved being there amidst a lot of very unusual and different personalities. I don't think anyone but Maxwell could have made this group come alive to the same extent. To a "prose snob" (stolen from a friend), these sentences were just pure joy to read.
This short novel reminded me a lot of Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding", one of my all time favorites.
Even though other reviewers, and Maxwell himself, found it to be lacking, I was charmed from the beginning. His sentences and descriptions are perfect. I could SEE the scenes playing out before me, imagine the Wisconsin farm known as Meadowlands, and get inside the heads of Mrs. West, her two sons, and the boarders staying there for the summer. The non-existent plot takes place over the course of one summer day in 1932. I myself loved being there amidst a lot of very unusual and different personalities. I don't think anyone but Maxwell could have made this group come alive to the same extent. To a "prose snob" (stolen from a friend), these sentences were just pure joy to read.
This short novel reminded me a lot of Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding", one of my all time favorites.
July 25, 2025
Maxwell's earnest first novel is a comedy of manners, betraying its era (never much my thing) but a pretty damn wonderful creation, nonetheless. No, he had not yet tapped the vein that he would dedicate his life to; that would come with the very next book. Who would know that it would be a fucking masterpiece? That should not subtract from the many qualities of Bright Center of Heaven, a book underread largely due to it existing outside Maxwell's canonical examination of his real life familial trauma from different angles, approaches, even genres. Are variations on a theme in this season or something? Christ! Does nothing satisfy you, Bob? I'm taking the kids and moving to my mother's, you hooker.
And your goddamn cat...that asshole.
And your goddamn cat...that asshole.
October 9, 2013
3 and 1/2 stars
I've read that this first novel of Maxwell's was written before he found his 'voice,' which he did in his second; and that is true, though his gentle humor and kindness still come through in his depiction of his characters, as he renders them all fully. As with They Came Like Swallows, the mother at the center of the novel reminds me of Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, though at the beginning I was reminded more of her Clarissa Dalloway. The artist Cynthia, who is struggling with trying to depict more than just form, is perhaps like Lily in To the Lighthouse, and her philosophical musings certainly reflect Maxwell's view of what he is trying to get at with his writing.
I also read that Maxwell tried to suppress this novel, as he found it "hopelessly imitative" and "stuck fast in its period" (see The New Yorker), though I don't think that was necessary. The older Maxwell was being very hard on his younger self. The novel is well-written, with a few overwrought passages, but I found those forgivable in the case of the infatuated teenage son and a young, unmarried actress who's pregnant but has told no one yet, not even the unemployed teacher she loves and who loves her to literal distraction.
I don't usually do a synopsis (no spoilers) in a review, as those can generally be easily found elsewhere, but that's not the case with this novel. It details one day in late summer in the life of a widow with two teenage sons who takes in boarders at the family farm. The lodgers are all creative people of one type or another. The conflict, which takes a while to arrive and is dealt with too quickly, arises from the widow's inviting a lecturer to stay with them. He is black; her elderly spinster sister-in-law, who lives in the family home, is from the South and racist. This was written in 1933 when Maxwell was 25 years old.
I've read that this first novel of Maxwell's was written before he found his 'voice,' which he did in his second; and that is true, though his gentle humor and kindness still come through in his depiction of his characters, as he renders them all fully. As with They Came Like Swallows, the mother at the center of the novel reminds me of Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay, though at the beginning I was reminded more of her Clarissa Dalloway. The artist Cynthia, who is struggling with trying to depict more than just form, is perhaps like Lily in To the Lighthouse, and her philosophical musings certainly reflect Maxwell's view of what he is trying to get at with his writing.
I also read that Maxwell tried to suppress this novel, as he found it "hopelessly imitative" and "stuck fast in its period" (see The New Yorker), though I don't think that was necessary. The older Maxwell was being very hard on his younger self. The novel is well-written, with a few overwrought passages, but I found those forgivable in the case of the infatuated teenage son and a young, unmarried actress who's pregnant but has told no one yet, not even the unemployed teacher she loves and who loves her to literal distraction.
I don't usually do a synopsis (no spoilers) in a review, as those can generally be easily found elsewhere, but that's not the case with this novel. It details one day in late summer in the life of a widow with two teenage sons who takes in boarders at the family farm. The lodgers are all creative people of one type or another. The conflict, which takes a while to arrive and is dealt with too quickly, arises from the widow's inviting a lecturer to stay with them. He is black; her elderly spinster sister-in-law, who lives in the family home, is from the South and racist. This was written in 1933 when Maxwell was 25 years old.
January 19, 2017
I remember reading somewhere that Maxwell wasn't particularly proud of this novel, and I can see why--it seems like he hadn't quite found his voice or style yet, the voice that shines through so spectacularly in They Came Like Swallows. However, that's one of the things I really love about Maxwell as a writer: in reading his novels chronologically, you get to observe this incredible growth as a writer, with the bookends being the two novels based on his childhood. Bright Center of Heaven felt like a prequel to the rest of his work. That being said, I love William Maxwell and can't help but love anything he wrote. This novel definitely had some interesting aspects and memorable moments.
And in case you know me and I somehow haven't mentioned it yet, here's a public service announcement: read They Came Like Swallows, and read So Long, See You Tomorrow, but read them in that order.
And in case you know me and I somehow haven't mentioned it yet, here's a public service announcement: read They Came Like Swallows, and read So Long, See You Tomorrow, but read them in that order.
September 30, 2012
I understand why he suppressed this book. It's heavy in spots and not fully Maxwell stylistically, but it is still quiet and pretty book. Well worth the read.
January 8, 2020
A superb novel, especially for a debut by a writer in his mid-twenties. It makes a great sympathetic trio with Lampe’s At the Edge of the Night and Koeppen’s Pigeons on the Grass—novels which swirl among a cast of characters in a confined locale and time. Maxwell’s scene is more limited, but no less fruitful.
August 17, 2019
This is the first novel by William Maxwell, author of Pulitzer finalist ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’ and fiction editor of ‘The New Yorker’ magazine. He was there from 1936-1975 and worked with Cheever, Updike, Salinger and Nabokov, among others. Not a novel published singly, I found ‘Bright Center of Heaven’ in an American anthology of Maxwell’s early work. This is a quiet read though ambitious in its subject matter, and well worth spending time with before reading Maxwell’s later works.
He follows the time-honoured structure of placing a group of people in one place over a limited time period and observing what happens. It is a contemplative novel and, although it does work to a climax, it is more an insight into the mind of each character as events unfold.
Widow Mrs West and her two teenage sons Thorn and Whitey live at Meadowland, a dilapidated farm that they can no longer afford to run, with her husband’s sister Amelia and her son Bascomb, German cook Johanna and farmer Gust. Thorn feels close to the land to the ten-acre field gifted to him by his father on his sixth birthday. Now Thorn helps Gust to work the fields. Gust is all that remains of the farm in its agricultural days when talk around the dinner table was of crop yields and mechanisation. Whitey runs errands for his mother ‘Muv’ and tends to his canoe. Into this quiet rural world come the summer lodgers – a teacher, artist, pianist and actress – and with it the dinner conversation changes. It changes again when Mrs West’s invitation becomes known; Jefferson Carter, a Harvard-educated New York intellectual who is black, is coming to visit.
It took me a while, at least halfway through, before I figured out the relationships and identities. Each person’s viewpoint is shown, their outward behaviour explained by inner worries. There is an intricate network of connections between them as well as individual stories, invisible from the outside, which Maxwell reveals piece by piece. Carter does his job as the catalyst for trouble around the dinner table. First he is blanked by Amelia, a hypochondriac Southern lady, old before her time; next, he argues with teacher Paul. Carter’s bewilderment and growing anger at this group of people serves to add a voice from outside Meadowland, another view of the world; he is as convinced he is correct about racial equality, as they are. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.”
‘Bright Center of Heaven’ was published in 1934 [the same year as F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’], before Maxwell joined ‘The New Yorker’, and was out of print for almost 70 years until this Library of America edition published in 2008. It is the beginning of Maxwell the novelist, a sensitive writer who takes his time and needs to be read without hurry. His are delicate stories without shouting. Maxwell was later unimpressed by ‘Bright Center of Heaven’, describing it as “hopelessly imitative” and “stuck fast in its period.” In ‘The Paris Review ‘he said, “My first novel… is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf is a particular influence. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I… discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character—the homesick servant girl—lock, stock, and barrel from ‘To the Lighthouse’.”
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-revie...
He follows the time-honoured structure of placing a group of people in one place over a limited time period and observing what happens. It is a contemplative novel and, although it does work to a climax, it is more an insight into the mind of each character as events unfold.
Widow Mrs West and her two teenage sons Thorn and Whitey live at Meadowland, a dilapidated farm that they can no longer afford to run, with her husband’s sister Amelia and her son Bascomb, German cook Johanna and farmer Gust. Thorn feels close to the land to the ten-acre field gifted to him by his father on his sixth birthday. Now Thorn helps Gust to work the fields. Gust is all that remains of the farm in its agricultural days when talk around the dinner table was of crop yields and mechanisation. Whitey runs errands for his mother ‘Muv’ and tends to his canoe. Into this quiet rural world come the summer lodgers – a teacher, artist, pianist and actress – and with it the dinner conversation changes. It changes again when Mrs West’s invitation becomes known; Jefferson Carter, a Harvard-educated New York intellectual who is black, is coming to visit.
It took me a while, at least halfway through, before I figured out the relationships and identities. Each person’s viewpoint is shown, their outward behaviour explained by inner worries. There is an intricate network of connections between them as well as individual stories, invisible from the outside, which Maxwell reveals piece by piece. Carter does his job as the catalyst for trouble around the dinner table. First he is blanked by Amelia, a hypochondriac Southern lady, old before her time; next, he argues with teacher Paul. Carter’s bewilderment and growing anger at this group of people serves to add a voice from outside Meadowland, another view of the world; he is as convinced he is correct about racial equality, as they are. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.”
‘Bright Center of Heaven’ was published in 1934 [the same year as F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’], before Maxwell joined ‘The New Yorker’, and was out of print for almost 70 years until this Library of America edition published in 2008. It is the beginning of Maxwell the novelist, a sensitive writer who takes his time and needs to be read without hurry. His are delicate stories without shouting. Maxwell was later unimpressed by ‘Bright Center of Heaven’, describing it as “hopelessly imitative” and “stuck fast in its period.” In ‘The Paris Review ‘he said, “My first novel… is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf is a particular influence. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I… discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character—the homesick servant girl—lock, stock, and barrel from ‘To the Lighthouse’.”
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-revie...
April 27, 2022
Bright Center of Heaven (1934)
Mrs. Susan West: widowed matriarch of Meadowland, comfortable, self-absorbed, essentially kind: “She listened a moment until she heard the reassuring strife of the red-winged blackbirds down in the marsh, and knew that the world was no better and no worse than it had been the day before; that it was, indeed, very much the same.” “Mrs. West held her hands to her head and moaned. To think of there being all kinds of washers. It was one more complication in a world already complex enough.”
Idealistic and wants to do the right thing, she speaks evanescently and unconstrainedly. She has invited the young and brilliant Negro Jefferson Carter to Meadowland, and takes in borders of necessity (apparently without requiring them to pay? I don’t recall an instance when a payment was mentioned, only that some were not paying): an artist, a pianist, Paul and Nigel (an actress), and the Negro writer / lecturer (who ends up not staying).
Aunt Amelia Bascomb: “In a second she would stop on the threshold of the dining-room to fasten the breastplate and make sure the helmet if her invulnerable gloom.”
Bascomb West:
Nigel Foley: vivacious, good swimmer, independent. Cares for her lover, Paul, but is afraid to share her suspected pregnancy with him.
Paul, 38-year-old no-longer schoolteacher; vague but in love, possessed of (or wishing for) a rich inner life, and seeking the chimera of employment both more satisfying and more remunerative than school-teaching.
Whitey (Benjamin), 15, and Thorn, 18: Susan’s sons,
Covering a single day (like Ulysses and To the Lighthouse), it’s Very funny, in a sad sort of way. Two main plot points of Nigel’s pregnancy and Carter’s visit both unresolved, and hence the novel became unsatisfactory and I didn’t read it all. (A third point, the Meadowland’s approaching insolvency, could not be resolved in a day, of course, so that was more a looming disaster than an unresolved issue.)
Mrs. Susan West: widowed matriarch of Meadowland, comfortable, self-absorbed, essentially kind: “She listened a moment until she heard the reassuring strife of the red-winged blackbirds down in the marsh, and knew that the world was no better and no worse than it had been the day before; that it was, indeed, very much the same.” “Mrs. West held her hands to her head and moaned. To think of there being all kinds of washers. It was one more complication in a world already complex enough.”
Idealistic and wants to do the right thing, she speaks evanescently and unconstrainedly. She has invited the young and brilliant Negro Jefferson Carter to Meadowland, and takes in borders of necessity (apparently without requiring them to pay? I don’t recall an instance when a payment was mentioned, only that some were not paying): an artist, a pianist, Paul and Nigel (an actress), and the Negro writer / lecturer (who ends up not staying).
Aunt Amelia Bascomb: “In a second she would stop on the threshold of the dining-room to fasten the breastplate and make sure the helmet if her invulnerable gloom.”
Bascomb West:
Nigel Foley: vivacious, good swimmer, independent. Cares for her lover, Paul, but is afraid to share her suspected pregnancy with him.
Paul, 38-year-old no-longer schoolteacher; vague but in love, possessed of (or wishing for) a rich inner life, and seeking the chimera of employment both more satisfying and more remunerative than school-teaching.
Whitey (Benjamin), 15, and Thorn, 18: Susan’s sons,
Covering a single day (like Ulysses and To the Lighthouse), it’s Very funny, in a sad sort of way. Two main plot points of Nigel’s pregnancy and Carter’s visit both unresolved, and hence the novel became unsatisfactory and I didn’t read it all. (A third point, the Meadowland’s approaching insolvency, could not be resolved in a day, of course, so that was more a looming disaster than an unresolved issue.)
March 8, 2026
This is a strange, ambiguous, beautifully written book about 11 people living in a superannuated farm which has transitioned into a summer boarding facility and artist retreat who are visited by a Black man, a leader in the movement to educate and re-establish the Black race in the face of suffocating prejudice. Tightly or very loosely related to each other by family, love, history, necessity, or desire, each of the characters contains a universe of thoughts, hopes, dreams, disappointments, and fears. They live in parallel with poignant intersections. I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that quite captures this very palpable sense of the immensity of individuals living in proximity with one another- kind of “close but not touching,” but more than that. Certainly reminds me of Virginia Woolf- Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse. It has the same kind of dreamlike intimacy and otherness.
October 31, 2016
This book deals with a day (more or less) in the life of a small group of people living in a boarding house for artists, run by Mrs. West, her two young sons, and two workers. The main event of the novel, which is really more of a novella, is the visit of a New York intellectual, who happens to be black. Maxwell, with his characteristic sensitivity and basic empathy for human beings, lets us into the consciousness of each character in turn.
I read somewhere that Maxwell didn't like this novel, which was his first, and tried to suppress it. But his writing is so beautiful, so economical, so humane, that I am glad that it was collected in the Library of America volume of his early novels and stories.
I read somewhere that Maxwell didn't like this novel, which was his first, and tried to suppress it. But his writing is so beautiful, so economical, so humane, that I am glad that it was collected in the Library of America volume of his early novels and stories.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews