by William Maxwell
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Product Description
Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers--the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights." The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 My God, what a beautiful book!, 2008-11-18
That was all I could think as I read the final page and closed this book, The Folded Leaf. And there was this sense of wonder too, that William Maxwell lives on in this small masterpiece, first published over 60 years ago. I have made it a habit in recent years to try to contact authors whose works I read and admire. Maxwell died in 2000 though, so I felt instead this awful sudden sadness at the passing of a man I never met. But he left behind this book, this message from the past, which imparts such a detailed picture of what it was like to be young and alive - and in love - back in the 1920s. Because this is much more than just a story of an intense and important friendship between two boys, and then, young men. There are definite and obvious homoerotic undertones in the relationship between Lymie and Spud, but this repressed impulse is never acted upon. It remains unsullied, and Lymie's feelings - his love - for Spud are as pure and unselfish as you will ever find in literature. Their relationship is perhaps best expressed - culminated - in a scene that takes place in a hospital room after a crisis has been narrowly averted -
"Neither he nor Lymie spoke. They looked at each other with complete knowledge at last, with full awareness of what they meant to each other and of all that had passed between them. After a moment Spud leaned forward slowly and kissed Lymie on the mouth. He had never done this before and he was never moved to do it again."
This is not, however, a book about homosexuality. This is a book about loneliness and about the paramount importance of friendship. I will say it again. This is a beautiful book. - Tim Bazzett, author of Reed City Boy
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Folded Leaf, 2008-01-03
William Maxwell writes in the small spaces. He explores the little sad areas of our lives that are comprised of looks that are not returned, thoughts that remain unuttered because we simply cannot figure out how to say them, and embraces we wish we have shared but did not because we lack the courage to put our arms around the person we love. The Folded Leaf is a beautiful, melancholy story by an author whose understated value has sadly caused a lack of popular appreciation compared to his flashier contemporaries - Hemingway, Nabokov, Bellow, Updike, Roth.
The Folded Leaf is the story of Lymie and Spud, two young boys who share a strong friendship, even though they seem utterly different. The novel is told primarily from the perspective of Lymie, a shy, withdrawn, introverted and very sensitive young man who loves Spud with all of his heart. Spud, on the other hand, is something of a strong man, an athlete who does not understand, but is able to appreciate, the sensitivity of his friend. They compliment one another, with Lymie taking security from Spud's strength while Spud draws another kind of strength from his friend.
The two boys love one another, with Lymie's love much the stronger, but the love remains platonic. It is the casual, affectionate, innocently physical love of young boys who become college men understanding that there is nobody else in the world more compatible with them than the other. A girl, of course, shatters this, but even though Spud may lose that first blush of pre-sexual affection, Lymie does not. The novel moves very slowly from the boys' strong relationship to a rather one-sided, heartbreaking examination of what happens when one friend moves on and the other cannot.
Is the story a homosexual one? It is hard to say. Spud and Lymie are physically affectionate, going so far as to spend almost their entire college life sleeping in the same bed. Note: Sleeping. While there is a lot left unsaid about Lymie's true feelings - he wonders, every now and again, when he shall meet a woman of his own to marry, but the wondering is academic rather than passionate - my reading of the novel is that Maxwell was happy to have Lymie's feelings remain ambiguous. Lymie is very much in love, and it is to the author's credit that the love does not have to be defined as sexual or emotional - it is simply what we see on the page. Lymie loves Spud and Spud loves Lymie: in different ways, it is true, but what they both feel is what we would call love. Maxwell is shrewd in avoiding the question of romantic or platonic love - what we have is love, just love, and it is shown to be enough. I highly doubt Lymie would have considered his feelings for Spud as anything wrong, and Spud - athletic, not very intelligent, given to boisterousness - certainly has no problem with his diminutive friend.
Maxwell shines the brightest when he is delving into Lymie's thoughts. We understand most of the novels scenes, from their school days to when they bunk together at university to when Spud becomes a (rather ignoble) boxer to Spud's engagement with Sally, from Lymie's perspective, allowing us to see the friendship in a way that Spud, and an outsider, never would. Consider this long quote: 'Lymie didn't know what the trouble was, but he was not dismayed. He had worn Spud down once before and he was sure he could do it again. Every day between four-fifteen and four-thirty he appeared at the gymnasium and stood a few feet away from the punching bag where Spud, if he wanted his gloves tied on or any small service like that, wouldn't have to go far to find him. When Spud came up from the showers, Lymie was there waiting by the locker, like a faithful hound. He made no move to open the lock, or to touch anything inside the locker that belonged to Spud. Occasionally while Spud was dressing and afterward on the way home, Lymie would say something to him, but Lymie was always careful not to put the remark in the form of a question, so there was no actual need for Spud to reply.' This is unrequited love at its most honest. Sadly for Lymie, Spud of course does not appreciate the layers of meaning and feeling behind Lymie's behaviour, and of course there is conflict that ends in tears. The novel ends the only way it should, but there is hope for the friendship and hope for Lymie, forced by circumstance to face the reality that even though his boyhood love may never have lost its intensity of feeling, Spud's certainly has.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
An understated masterpiece about an intensely intimate friendship, 2005-10-30
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 these two friends.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
One of my all time favorites, 2004-08-22
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.
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
 Back when we were fab., 2003-06-10
The Folded Leaf is beautiful and lucid, a compelling read and useful for showing us what life was like for a young man in the 20s. Some of the story doesn't seem to add up- for example, I never was convinced that Spud was a compelling character but hey, maybe he just wasn't my type. And the ending is tainted with the histrionics that seems to characterize so much early gay fiction (and so much of it written now). But in the end, this may not really be a gay book, so much as a book about one boy who loves another, and how they both dealt with it. Final analysis, the book is warm and generous and kind, beautifully written and quite bold. I can recommend it without hesitation to a general audience, and some should read it as a classic text (and you know who you are).
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