January 13, 2026

The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell

I LOVE William Maxwell, love, love, LOVE William Maxwell, whose novels are the most curious blend of realism and modernism, and who writes about men, love, and longing so very tenderly. For the last few years, I’ve read one of his novels over the winter break, but I think I’ve read his better known books and so my local secondhand bookstores were turning up nothing, and finally I couldn’t take the void and ordered a copy of his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, a story of male friendship set in the 1920s. (What set me over the edge was the email I received from my friend Julia reading, “OMG KERRY I don’t think you impressed upon me just how brilliant and devastating THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS really is. oh how i loved that novel.” [I actually think that receiving such novels is the meaning of life.])

And I liked it so very much. And while I was reading it, I was THRILLED to see a Substack Note from author Brandon Taylor who was reading The Cheateau, which was my first William Maxwell book, and Taylor writes, “This novel is warm, funny, but also probing and wise and profound about surfaces, about illusions, by the yearning for meaning, about the strangeness of travel, about the mystery of human relationships. It is social, historical, but also timeless. I just loved it. LOVED IT. SO MUCH. I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. AMAZING BOOK.” (William Maxwell. He makes us emphatic. We can’t help it.)

He also remarks on Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow being way overhyped, which was interesting because it was the one novel of his that did not move me at all, but I had assumed that the problem was mine. Maxwell’s work can be a little bit difficult, usually where difficulty might not be expected, a bit strange, uncanny, and tricky to decipher in places—there were threads in The Folded Leaf I had a hard time following. I had assumed I wasn’t reading well with So Long…, but maybe it’s just not his best work. Which is fine, because his best work is so good.

The Folded Leaf is the story of two high school boys who are both misfits in their own way, and who end up being best friends, but neither of them are ever able to articulate just what their connection means to them, or what its parameters are, which means things end up being very messy and complicated as they move through the years, going off to university together, Lymie making all the grades, Spud becoming a boxing star, much to his mother’s chagrin. Where does one boy end and the other begin? The novel’s climax is brutal and devastating.