The Folded Leaf

Long before he was editing the likes of Nabokov, Updike, Salinger, Welty, and Cheever at The New Yorker, William Maxwell had established himself as a moderately successful novelist and story writer. Although "The Folded Leaf" is not his most acclaimed or famous novel, it probably has the most devoted (indeed, nearly cult-like) following. Its charm is its utter simplicity; a coming-of-age story, it is also a passionate tale about love--between two men. Yet this is no classic of "gay fiction" (although it will certainly appeal to gay readers); instead, "The Folded Leaf" tells about the intensely intimate, innocuously physical, yet almost entirely platonic relationship between two boys who don't quite fit in with the crowd and who grow up to be very different men. Published in 1945, this is the type of novel only the bravest of straight male authors would be comfortable writing today--and, in a way, that's too bad. Lymie Peters is the ectomorphic and studious introvert who meets Spud Latham, a dim yet muscular teenager who serves "as a kind of reminder of those ideal, almost abstract rules of proportion from which the human being, however faulty, is copied." Latham is new in town--his father has lost his job, and he lives with his family in a cramped apartment--and he inexplicably gravitates towards Lymie. At first Lymie's own feelings about Spud's attentions are ambivalent: "He couldn't help noticing the scales of fortune were tipped considerably in Spud's favor, and resenting it." What the boys have in common, though, is an undercurrent of barely suppressed fury that the people they know and the world around them aren't the stuff of their daydreams. Maxwell is compelling in his ability to transform what should be two excessive stereotypes into recognizable and believable flesh and blood. Even though Lymie almost sycophantically fawns over Spud (even serving as his towel boy at the gym), Spud in return offers emotional protection, social acceptance, and true friendship; in spite of Spud's increasing popularity, it is a relationship of equals, and the pair is inseparable. Maxwell has re-created the ideal friendship, which many of us once had, if only briefly in our youth--or in our imaginations. Ultimately, however, as with any relationship this close, the snare of jealousy and the fear of being alone gradually introduce crises that build to a startling crescendo. Although there is enough going on to move the story along, Maxwell's concern is psychological portrayal--and several of the pivotal scenes (even how the two boys meet) are completely left to the reader's imagination. But what makes this book memorable is Maxwell's lyrical and understated prose. This is a novel that invites hyperbole: the descriptions are disarmingly beautiful and the revelatory passages are quietly powerful. Lymie and Spud are so lifelike and, at the same time, so idealized that, when you've regretfully reached the last page, you'll be hungry to know even more about th

This was truly one of the most beautiful novels I've ever read and I would not hesitate to call it my favorite book. The title is taken from an excerpt from an art book describing techniques of landscape painting and that is exactly what the novel is: a richly, landscaped view of life. Maxwell's imagery leaves the reader feeling such a part of the world of Elm Street that it is truly heartbreaking to leave it and return to the present. Maxwell's use of light and shadow is outstanding and even the slightest and most obscure of characters (as well as inanimate objects and even insects) are crafted with intimate details. Everyone seems to have voice, color and emotion. There is an artistic term called chiaroscuro which describes the contrasts of shading of light and dark within a painting and that term encapsulates the book as well. Maxwell's characters are rendered clearly, but without moral judgment - there is no right and wrong or black and white. In it's place are a thousand variations of emotional color. While not a novel of action - admittedly not much of great consequence actually takes place - this is a novel of intense beauty and outstanding characterization. The images and emotions evoked in the novel live on in the imagination.

This is the best William Maxwell novel I've read and one of the best novels I've ever read. I found the writing in this book to have the quality of a daydream and for the situations to ring true to life. The novel unfolds as life does and the details fall right into place. The characters themselves often engage in daydreams, which helps give it that life-like quality. Anyway, with most novels you get a sense of a strong authorial voice behind the words, as if someone is telling you the story. With Bellow or Cheever or Nabokov, for example, Maxwell's contemporaries, all of whom I like, you get a strong sense that their voice is theirs alone. With Maxwell, the authorial voice is much more gentle, almost as if the author were vanishing and his words were rising up off the page like vapor. It's interesting that Maxwell's voice seems somewhat different, novel to novel. There are some stunning passages in So Long, See You Tomorrow, but this is my favorite of the Maxwell I've read. It captures time and place so well. The midwest in the 1920's. It's very endearing - Sally says things like, "in a pig's ear" - yet still mysterious and, finally, heartbreaking. I've read it three times in the past nine months and it is a book I'm sure I'll return to again.

What a remarkably sad little book this is. Maxwell's characters, so pure of heart and full of good intentions, nonetheless find themselves alone, or pining after loves that can never be, or bound up in marriages of profound, unspoken, disappointment. There are, certainly, moments of hope: the tender bond between Martha and her young daughter Abbey; the sweet story of Dr. Danforth's love affair in his autumn years; the unrequited puppy love between Randolph and Mary Caroline. But Maxwell's concern here seems largely to be with illusion and unfulfilled dreams. These are not novel literary themes, and yet he manages to put a fresh twist on them. The novel sweeps gracefully through time; the prose is as lucid and evocative as any writer's I've read, and Maxwell occasionally offers up such piercing insights into human nature that the reader is forced to go back and read passages a second, and even a third time. Time Will Darken It is a sweet, thoughtful and beautiful novel and I would highly recommend it to anyone. It is a shame that William Maxwell's name is not more prominent on the frequently-cited list of great American writers.

"There is no such thing as love," writes William Maxwell, so certain on the point he does not bother even to have a character say it.In fact, he seems to be saying "there is no such thing as the love WE MOST WANT".It is hard to say what makes this book so appealling, with its unfashionable setting and thinness of incident. But it IS appealling, a character study of delicacy and truth, so full of recognition that the pages turn themselves. Maxwell understands silences, the things unsaid in an evening of chatter, the state of armed truce that is the architecture of a respectable life, better than almost anyone. Eudora Welty calls it his "integrity". It is a good word.In the suffocating provincialism of 1912 mid-western America, town lawyer Austin King is undone through his own decency. Through his patience, his sense of propriety, his unwillingness to recognise the grasping motives of others, he unwittingly betrays his family and all but destroys himself.People in the landscape of Draperville, Illinois, dream of escape, have visions of what might now be called "authentic lives". But the centripetal pull of respectability, the complex web of family duty, entraps them all. The most ardent dreamer is young Nora Potter, whose infatuation with Austin King gives this story its fever and throws all other relationships into relief.The characters are beautifully drawn. Nora's obsession, which she sees as liberating, wreaks instead its inevitable destruction. Austin King, faithful to the belief that steadfast, if unimaginative goodness, will be rewarded in kind, is both noble and tragic. The minor characters are equally real. The interior world of the King's four year old daughter Abbey is the most convincing evocation of early childhood I have ever read.In many ways, though, the story is Martha's. Austin's role-bound wife, pregnant with their second child, hears the town's talk, yet copes better with Austin's apparent affair, than she could with his seamless virtue. The final page is hers, a denouement of such chilling and tender clarity it reminds me of the interior monologue that closes James Joyce's "The Dead".Whatever Maxwell seems to claim, this IS a book about love, and about its many shapes. Perhaps his truest opinion he entrusts to a minor character, the horse trader Danforth, deaf from an early age, who has long abandoned all thought of human intimacy. With no expectation of it, love comes anyway. It abides, and is beautiful.So is this book.