conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled So Long, See You Tomorrow about Book, American, Award with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: is farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. "A small, perfect novel."--Washington Post Book World.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book about Book, American, Award?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: So Long, See You Tomorrow: It is set in Maxwell's hometown Lincoln, Illinois and tells of a murder that occurred in 1921.\nFifty years later the guilt-ridden narrator recounts how the relationships between two neighboring families led to the murder and how he himself failed to support Cletus, a close school friend who was the son of the murderer.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: So Long, See You Tomorrow
  Clarence's lawyer leapt to his feet and exclaimed, "Your Honor, I object," and the judge said sourly, "Objection overruled."
  Victor was easily trapped into saying things he did not mean, and that could not be true, and his confusion was such that the courtroom was moved to laughter again and again. After that, Clarence was called to the witness stand and placed under oath, and heard acts of his described that he could not truthfully deny. What Fern's lawyer did not tell the gentlemen of the jury was the provocation that led up to this violent behavior. And when Clarence tried to, he was instructed by the judge to confine his remarks to answering the questions put to him by counsel.
  Nobody said, in court, that Clarence Smith was pierced to the heart by his wife's failure to love him, and it wouldn't have made any difference if they had.
  The evening paper reported that Mrs. Fern Smith was granted a decree of divorce against her husband, on the grounds of extreme and repeated cruelty, the charges in his cross bill not being substantiated in the eyes of the jury. He was ordered to pay fifty dollars a month alimony, and she was granted custody of the children.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It turned warm again and there was a week of fine weather. Except for the oak trees, all the leaves had fallen. Otherwise it was like summer. With her paws resting on her nose, the dog followed the circling of a big horsefly, and when it zoomed off she closed her eyes and went to sleep, and dreamed that she was chasing a rabbit.
  Instead of getting on a train and going to Iowa to look for good land, Lloyd Wilson temporized. He told himself he couldn't leave before the first of November, and then it was November and the days went by and there was always something that needed doing, and with one excuse and another he kept himself from facing the fact that what he was proposing to do was impossible. He had spent his whole life on this place and leave it he could not. Even though the things people were saying about Clarence made it sound like he was more than half crazy and capable of anything.
  He noticed that Clarence put his finger inside his collar, as if it were choking him, and that his hands were restless, and he stuttered. None of this was at all like him. But he was prepared to give his tenant a satisfactory character, as far as it went. An unqualified recommendation wouldn't have been right, in the circumstances. He just wasn't the man he used to be, before he dragged his wife into court and all that. But it ought to be possible to say something sufficiently commendatory so that Clarence could still manage to find a place. The praise shouldn't be of so specific a kind that, if there was trouble later on, the people that took him on as their tenant would feel that he, the Colonel, had been less than candid. One way or another, he would work it out. He was at his best with ambiguities of this kind.
  To his surprise, Clarence didn't ask for any recommendation. Instead he shook hands and walked down the rickety wooden stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where he stood blinking in the harsh sunlight. He now had no wife, no family, and no farm, all through Lloyd Wilson's doing.
  It snowed and then there were three or four days of soft weather, leaving the ground bare again. After that, the nights were very cold.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If I'd had the presence of mind to say, "You don't have to worry, I won't tell anybody," would they have been able to stay where they were? Would his mother have trusted a fifteen-year-old boy to keep such a promise, even if I had made it?
  Sometimes I almost remember passing him in the school corridors afterward. And I think, though I am not at all sure of this, that I can remember being happy that I was keeping his secret. Which must mean that he was there, that we continued to pass each other in the halls, that he didn't move away. But if he had stayed on at that school, sooner or later we would have been in the same classroom, and I know that we weren't.
  Five or ten years have gone by without my thinking of Cletus at all, and then something reminds me of him—of how we played together on the scaffolding of that half-finished house. And suddenly there he is, coming toward me in the corridor of that enormous high school, and I wince at the memory of how I didn't speak to him. And try to put it out of my mind.
  There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one's adolescent self. And to go on feeling guilty about something that happened so long ago is hardly reasonable. I do feel guilty, even so. A little. And always will, perhaps, whenever I think about him. But it isn't only my failure that I think about. I also wonder about him, about what happened to him. Whether he was spared the sight of his father's drowned body. Whether after a while he and his mother were able to look at each other without embarrassment. Whether he had as lonely a time as I did when he first moved to Chicago. And whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson—whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.
  In 1948, two awestruck American tourists arrive at a stately château whose residents are just beginning to recover from the horrors and indignities of the war. Out of this tragicomic premise, William Maxwell creates our most astute and affectionate novel of cross-cultural incomprehension since the masterworks of Henry James.