If this 1945 novel were published today it would be marketed as YA. Two fifteen year old boys, one solidly middle class, athletic, and good looking (Spud), the other lower middle class, half-orphaned, small, skinny, and ridiculously unathletic (Lymie), become best friends on the north side of Chicago in the 1920s. We're given vignettes of their daily lives at school, in sports activities, in their respective apartments with their families, such as they are. Lymie lives with his heavy-drinking salesman father and they take all their meals at the local cheap restaurant, where his father ogles the female customers and tries to look down the waitress's uniform. Spud's family has been forced to move from a large, comfortable house in Wisconsin to Chicago, and he sleeps in a closet-like porch in the apartment, but his family is whole and his mother serves big, nourishing meals every night. When she sees how skinny Lymie is, she deduces he is missing a mother, takes him under her wing, and insists he come over for dinner whenever possible. (Biographical note: William Maxwell's mother died when he was ten in the 1918 flu epidemic.)The novel then skips ahead several years as the boys enroll at the University of Illinois. Their social lives continue apace: Spud boxes and is invited to join a fraternity and falls in love with a girl, while Lymie gets good grades, is ignored by the fraternities, and expands his crush on Spud. I felt that literary claustrophobia brought on by too much youth and too much 1920s. Boys giving girls pins, boys calling each other "fella," fraternity initiations, sorority dances, ghastly young love. Maxwell indicates this is a coming-of-age story with his title The Folded Leaf, taken from "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred Tennyson. The folded leaf is the form of the new leaf as it first emerges on the branch:Lo! in the middle of the wood,t The folded leaf is woo’d from out the budtWith winds upon the branch, and theretGrows green and broad, and takes no care,tSun-steep’d at noon, and in the moontNightly dew-fed; and turning yellowt Falls, and floats adown the air.tLo! sweeten’d with the summer light,tThe full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,tDrops in a silent autumn night.
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.
What do You think about The Folded Leaf (1999)?
It's at the same time both easy AND very hard to write about this strange period of adolescence in a way by which I feel attracted. I have always had a particular fondness of stories such as the one presented here, however, often the tone & style make the different works of different authors too easily interchangeable to stand out as remarkable pieces. Maxwell's narration certainly achieves that (for me). I loved it when he leaves the close-up perspective of the characters, and draws general conclusions or puts their individual actions into a much wider, almost universal context.
—Stephan Frank
This novel, written in 1945, explores in sensitive and subtle details the love of two boys as they become young men, and is probably as direct a novel that could be written on that subject at the time, maybe even now. I am not generally a fan of the "pained adolescence" novel, having had several of them forced on me in junior high and high school. Maxwell's gorgeous, patient prose, by contrast, achieves the admirable task of placing the reader in the minds and milieus of these young men, without forgetting that there is an entire world of frustrated and failing adults around them. Indeed, in addition to the story of the boys, Maxwell also shows us the almost charming ignorance of the privileged, the isolated social realm of the university and those who subsist on its margins, and the pained self-awareness of men who have failed at their task of raising their sons. But it is the story of Lymie and Spud--one a nearly helpless physical specimen, the other full of misdirected anger--that is the core of this extraordinary, heartbreaking novel.
—Chazzbot
What I learned: Love hurts, especially when you love both a boy and a girl.The narration of William Maxwell's third novel, set in prohibition-era Chicago and the University of Illinois, is distant, almost cool. Maxwell moves freely between characters, observing their outward and inner states. The story, however, centers on two characters, Lymie and Spud, one feeble but bright, the other a boxer, violent and beautiful. The choice to tell this story at a significant distance seems right, not only because the events of this coming-of-age novel could easily slip into melodrama or sentimentality, but also because the quiet observations of the characters from varying points of view allows the reader to see more completely the world in which Spud and Lymie are situated, certainly more clearly than either of them could articulate on their own.The distant third-person narration also seems necessary given the time and the subject matter. The relationship between Lymie and Spud is intimate, and the book intimates throughout that Lymie's attachment to Spud is more than that of a friend. When Spud moves out of the boarding house and the bed the two boys share, Lymie is devastated; he lays his own arm across his chest and imagines it is Spud's in order to fall asleep. The climax of the novel leaves little doubt about Lymie's feelings, but what is interesting is that the narrator never comes out and says that Lymie is in love with Spud. It does say that he is in love with Sally, Spud's girlfriend. Spud notices Lymie's feelings for Sally and is jealous, all of which is commented on quite directly, but the relationship between Spud and Lymie is always viewed at an indirect angle.In 1920s Midwestern America homosexuality certainly existed, but it was rarely, if ever, pointed to directly. Maxwell could not easily "come out" and say that Lymie has sexual feelings for Spud, and in fact the characters and story are too complicated for such stark labels. Lymie is no more a homosexual than he is a heterosexual, and bisexual implies a consciousness that is decades away. As in each of Maxwell's novels, the characters resist classification, a trait that makes "The Folded Leaf" ahead of its time, and ahead of our time too.
—Dan Rivas
