Fiction Podcast: Tony Earley Reads William Maxwell

In this month’s fiction podcast, Tony Earley reads “Love,” by William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 until 1975. The story, which first appeared in the magazine in 1983, is narrated by an older man looking back on his fifth-grade teacher, a young woman who was adored by her students but fell ill and left school midway through the year.

Earley, whose own short stories have been appearing in the magazine since 1999, compares Maxwell’s style to Willa Cather’s; he says that he was drawn to Maxwell’s traditional American storytelling and to his fearlessness in writing “emotionally about emotions.” “Love” is concise and simply written, but its details accumulate in subtly powerful ways. “He’ll give you something early in the story that you may not pick up on at first,” Earley says, “until he gives you the second part of the equation, and then the first part lights up behind you.” Here is the narrator describing his classmates’ eagerness to please their beloved teacher:

Somebody left a big red apple on her desk for her to find when she came into the classroom, and she smiled and put it in her desk, out of sight. Somebody else left some purple asters, which she put in her drinking glass. After that the presents kept coming. She was the only pretty teacher in the school. She never had to ask us to be quiet or to stop throwing erasers. We would not have dreamed of doing anything that would displease her.

The story begins with scenes of doe-eyed adoration, but its title, Earley says, is “sneakily cruel”; it is, in the end, about a boy’s discovery of love’s “tragic impermanence.”

You can hear Earley’s reading of “Love,” and his discussion with the New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.