Time Will Darken It

Taking a certain elm-shaded street in a small Middle Western town—a street whose houses appear at the present day to have shrunk in size and dignity—William Maxwell has carefully and ironically restored the trumpet vines, the red geraniums, the hanging fern baskets, and the people who of a summer evening sat on their porches, watching the fireflies and the children playing Run, Sheep, Run.

Against this common memory, the author has projected a sensitive story about a man who has to choose, and cannot choose, between a young, idealistic girl whom he in merely anxious to help and his wife whom he loves. The dilemma that dogs his footsteps—why what he tries to do for one person too often works against what he is trying to do for someone else—Austin King does not at first recognize. He comes to understand finally when he is driven into a corner by the girl’s family, pseudo-Southerners with a gift for making friends and creating trouble wherever they go.

Time Will Darken It is both a thoughtful, realistic novel and a comedy of misused and abused hospitality. There is distinction in the writing of every sentence, and sympathy as well as concern for the deeper motives which misdirect the actions of morally ambitious people.

[Text from original dust jacket.]