The Folded Leaf - William Maxwell

‘The Folded Leaf’ is one of those books I might not have found without blogs. Danielle, of A Work in Progress’ posted about it earlier this year and her description of the relationship between the two main characters Spud and Lymie lodged in my mind. The novel is a coming of age tale, written with an adult audience in mind, rather than teenage readers (like ‘Catcher in the Rye’, or ‘Firefox: Confessions of a Girl Gang’) and it’s narrative is created out of a quiet, sincere intimacy that immediately appealed to me:

‘Spud Latham, who had nothing to do and was in not hurry to go home, since it wasn’t home that he’d find when he got there, stood in front of his wooden locker and twiddled the dial. He was in the throes of another daydream. The school principal, on looking back over Spud’s grades, had discovered that there had been some mistake; that they should all have been S’s, not C’s and D’s. So he had the pleasure of coming home and announcing to his incredulous family that he was valedictorian of his class and the brightest student in the history of the school.’

Lymie Peters lives with his father in a boarding house. He’s sloppy, studious and no good at games, in fact that’s the first thing the reader learns about him. While the boys at his school don’t hold his physical fitness against him, it is an acknowledged fact that whichever team Lymie is on, during physical education lessons, will lose and Lymie always feels like an outsider, although he knows that with a little work he could become part of a group. Spud Latham has transferred schools and as the new boy he’s also an outsider. He’s physical, extremely neat and comes from a secure, nuclear family, he is the exact opposite of Lymie. When Lymie first offers him friendship, after Spud saves Lymie’s life in the school swimming pool, he rejects it, but later a prank played on them results in a moment of boy bonding and they become inseparable.

I think Spud’s first rejection of companionship really illustrates his character. He’s suspicious of friendship, always ready to be snubbed and finds emotional relief in fighting. He’s also blind to much that is outside his own experience, for example believing that Lymie’s unwillingness to treat him when they eat out stems from a miserly tendency, rather than the fact that he has to support himself without help from his father. Spud is the main cause of the problems that come between the boys in later years, when Spud refuses to believe that his girlfriend Sally, and Lymie are just friends. It’s quite clear to anyone reading the book that Lymie is only interested in Spud and has spent the majority of his life keeping his feelings of jealousy in check, as Spud meets other friends, then falls in love with Sally. I think because the reader sees so much of Spud through Lymie’s eyes and because Spud is also a bruised, unsure character despite all his advantages, it’s possible to come away with a sympathetic view of him, but his blind spots create episodes of such severe meanness that it’s hard to forgive him. I thought that the harshest thing Spud ever thinks is that he prefers to sleep alone, when the fact that he and Lymie sleep in the same double bed at their boarding house is so important to Lymie.

William Maxwell examines friendship with tenderness, but also with a kind of terrifying ferocity that expresses itself in very final expressions of feeling. In college Spud spends hours denouncing Lymie to a fellow boarder Rheinhart and eventually Rheinhart tells Lymie ‘He’s jealous of you…He comes over to the house sometimes when you’re at the library and he sits in my room and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you.’, when Lymie confronts Spud ‘To his horror he saw that Spud was smiling.’ and as Lymie leaves he claims he has forgiven Spud, but Maxwell as omniscient narrator lets the reader know that ‘Actually, Lymie didn’t forgive Spud anything.’ . There is no room for the characters to be persuaded to think differently, nor any room for the reader to hope for reconciliation between the characters. With every one of these type of lines the reader feels Lymie and Spud becoming increasingly cut off from each other.

Maxwell seems convinced that deep friendship is inevitably tied up with envy and rage, as is sexual attraction. Early on in the book Spud fights with a blond boy who he then befriends and despite his love for Spud, Lymie often expresses envy, which manifests itself as occasional episodes of rather ridiculous violent anger. It initially seems like a bleak message; people can’t be friends with people who have different strengths from them, without ending up despising their friends, but by the end of the book it feels like Maxwell is maybe talking about how low confidence has led Lymie to over emphasise Spud’s good qualities. He includes a heavily symbolic dream close to the end of the novel to show that once Lymie is free of Spud’s enchantment he is able to become a better version of himself. Despite the blurb’s hints that ‘for Lymie, still mired in guilt and self-doubt, the end of their intimacy is more than he can stand’ the ending is ultimately positive and I was glad about that, even while I wondered how many other challenges Lymie might have to overcome in his future.

Much of the action is presented in chapter long vignettes, so something will happen and in the next chapter the action will have moved a little away from this episode, which is partly because Maxwell has to cover quite a few years of the boys lives. This technique also allows him to step away from the main characters quite naturally and focus for one chapter on a secondary character. The result is wonderful short portraits of a few characters, although really these chapters aren’t necessary, as the characters play little part in the main story. These character sketches are strangely emotional additions to the novel, despite their short length and they made me feel much more engaged with the smaller characters, like Reinhart and Professor Severance. It might sound odd to say that I enjoyed the author’s digressions from the main relationship, but sometimes digressions are a necessary element of writing.

Remember to leave a link to your own review in the comments if you have one.

Other Reviews

A Work in Progress