We know almost straight away that the culprit is Clarence Smith, the victim his friend Lloyd Wilson. It begins with a murder, although it cannot be called a mystery. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow trades upon similar feelings and ideas, albeit the story involves far more drama. As embarrassing as it is, it made me terribly sad to see that space in his upper gum and for some reason I have lived with a kind of guilt ever since, I have clung to it as though it was the breast of a stout motherly woman. Where is his life taking him, that once tough little boy who had tried to win my affection? What else has he lost along the way?

Marc’s missing tooth, I see now, although I didn’t see it then, was significant only in so much that it was missing, in other words it was the fact that it was once there, that I had seen it, that meant that I felt its absence so strongly.

It was not, as may be anticipated, the encroaching of one world, my school-life and my childhood, upon another, my college-life and my adolescence, that so distressed me, although I cannot say that that was pleasurable, it was his missing tooth, one at the very front of his mouth. I do not know, either, how he felt upon seeing me, whether it caused him any distress, like it did me. I have no knowledge of why he was there, because I did not ask him, although I knew that he was not a fellow student. I hadn’t seen him since leaving school, hadn’t, in truth, really given him that much thought. Until that day, the day I spotted him outside the entrance to my college. I hadn’t the heart to tell him how much what he had done disgusted me. He had shot the creature himself and thought I would appreciate the gift as I had spoken of my admiration for the animals.

One day, while still at school, he had turned up with a squirrel’s tail as a present for me. Marc was an ugly ginger-haired boy who had been in my class at school, who, despite the fact that we had no common interests, had somehow managed to become my friend, in the way that children make friendships by seemingly stumbling blindly, mindlessly into them. Indeed, I may lose a job or a girlfriend and what my mind will turn up, will nose out like a bloodhound, will be something like Marc Richardson standing outside Thomas Rotherham College one afternoon. In times of unhappiness my mind rummages around in the past for poignant or painful memories, as though seeking some kind of brotherhood or solidarity they need not be alike, the present feeling and the memory, in any way other than sharing the quality of being hurtful.

So long see you tomorrow review