FICTION

ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell by William Maxwell. (Knopf: $25; 393 pp.) In answer to the question “Where do your stories come from?” William Maxwell replies: “I wrote them to please my wife. . . . They came from I had no idea where. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a story and she would shake me and say ‘What happened next?’ and I would struggle up through layers of oblivion and tell her.” At least half of Maxwell’s characters actually inhabit this oblivion, and almost never make it to the surface of their lives to say the important things or make the critical changes. The other half are painfully awake, victims with strong characters, like the paperboy whose hard-earned bicycle is smashed by a hit-and-run driver, or the little girl with nightmares that keep her parents awake night after night: “He said, ‘What were you dreaming about this time?’ ‘Sea-things.’ ‘What kind of seethings?’ ‘Sea-things under the sea.’ ‘Things that wiggle?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Something was after you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Too bad. Go to sleep.’ ” Or the brother, who, in trying to get close to his relentlessly powerful and cruel older brother (a man anyone else would give up on), is lured into revealing his emotional instability and rewarded with: “ ‘I have the same background as you,’ Amos was saying, ‘and I’m not neurotic.’ ” There’s a lot of trying and failing and revealing in these stories; lives push along, passers-by get trapped in the subconscious of characters for months, children give up on ever getting justice.