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Ah, a lovely book!
Feb. 26th, 2011 01:05 pmWilliam Maxwell's The Folded Leaf has been floating around on my to-read list for so long now that I'm no longer sure how it got there. Maxwell was a longtime editor of The New Yorker, so perhaps I read about it there; after all, there is no publication more in love with its own illustrious history than The New Yorker. Regardless, I have now read it at last, and I loved it.
Set in Chicago in the 1920s, The Folded Leaf tells the story of an intense friendship between two boys, Lymie Peters and Spud Latham. If I tell you that the boys are opposites--Lymie studious and gangly, Spud possessed of all the popularity and physical beauty that Lymie knows he will never have--and if I tell you that the novel follows them to college, where they live together in a boarding house until Spud falls in love with a girl and joins a fraternity--if I tell you all of this, you may imagine a broad, unsubtle story, full of stereotypical characters and situations. I don't know how to write a synopsis that would do justice to the tenderness and deep insight that Maxwell brings to his novel. It would be so easy, for instance, to view Lymie's continuing devotion to Spud, even while Spud pulls farther and farther away from him, as pathetic. But Maxwell won't let us get away with that--he makes us see Lymie's feelings as complex, evolving, and painful.
The book was published in 1945, and it's heavier on narration than is currently fashionable, but that didn't bother me. It reminded me of Winesburg, Ohio and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in the way it seeks out the things that are weird and secret in everyone, even the peripheral characters. But what I loved most was Maxwell's willingness to let his story dwell in ambiguity. He doesn't feel the need to define Spud and Lymie's feelings for each other as friendship, love, or sexual attraction--he allows them to exist as a complicated mixture of all three. There is one frankly erotic fight scene between Spud and a stranger in a park, and a great deal of physical intimacy between Spud and Lymie (they share a bed in their boarding house, for instance), but Maxwell never feels the need to declare whether the boys are gay or straight.
Near the end, the novel undergoes a slight shift toward melodrama that is perhaps unnecessary, but all in all it is a lovely, compassionate, and beautifully written book.
Set in Chicago in the 1920s, The Folded Leaf tells the story of an intense friendship between two boys, Lymie Peters and Spud Latham. If I tell you that the boys are opposites--Lymie studious and gangly, Spud possessed of all the popularity and physical beauty that Lymie knows he will never have--and if I tell you that the novel follows them to college, where they live together in a boarding house until Spud falls in love with a girl and joins a fraternity--if I tell you all of this, you may imagine a broad, unsubtle story, full of stereotypical characters and situations. I don't know how to write a synopsis that would do justice to the tenderness and deep insight that Maxwell brings to his novel. It would be so easy, for instance, to view Lymie's continuing devotion to Spud, even while Spud pulls farther and farther away from him, as pathetic. But Maxwell won't let us get away with that--he makes us see Lymie's feelings as complex, evolving, and painful.
The book was published in 1945, and it's heavier on narration than is currently fashionable, but that didn't bother me. It reminded me of Winesburg, Ohio and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in the way it seeks out the things that are weird and secret in everyone, even the peripheral characters. But what I loved most was Maxwell's willingness to let his story dwell in ambiguity. He doesn't feel the need to define Spud and Lymie's feelings for each other as friendship, love, or sexual attraction--he allows them to exist as a complicated mixture of all three. There is one frankly erotic fight scene between Spud and a stranger in a park, and a great deal of physical intimacy between Spud and Lymie (they share a bed in their boarding house, for instance), but Maxwell never feels the need to declare whether the boys are gay or straight.
Near the end, the novel undergoes a slight shift toward melodrama that is perhaps unnecessary, but all in all it is a lovely, compassionate, and beautifully written book.
