The Folded Leaf Author:William Maxwell "The Folded Leaf is a quite unconventional study of adolescent relationships -- between two boys, with a girl in the offing -- in Chicago and in a Middle Western college: very much lived and very much seen. This drama of the immature, with no background more glamorous than middle-class apartments and student fraternity houses, is both more movin... more »g and more absorbing than any of the romantic melodramas which have been stimulated by the war...
"Reading The Folded Leaf, one is reminded of certain American novelists who were working, against the popular taste, in the field of serious social realism at the end of the last century and during the early decades of this. In his effort to deal with young boys on a plane of detached observation as far as possible from the mere sentimentality and humor with which the subject has usually been treated in America, Mr. Maxwell is sometimes quite close to the Whilomville Stories of Stephen Crane: he approaches such matters as fraternity initiations and gratuitous schoolboy fights, the traditional customs of childhood, from an anthropological point of view which was also to some extent developed by Crane ... With careful, unobtrusive art, Mr. Maxwell has made us feel all the coldness and hardness and darkness of Chicago, the prosaic surface of existence which seems to stretch about one like asphalt or ice. But there are moments when the author breaks away into a kind of poetic reverie that shows he is able to find a way out."« less