The Folded Leaf By William Maxwell Harvill £9.99 in UK
Young boys; one moody, resentful of his father's diminishing career prospects and increasingly, obsessively addicted to boxing as an efficient method of expressing himself, the other weedy, clever and loyal, marked for life by the early death of his mother, become friends in 1920s Chicago. Their relationship quickly becomes seriously lopsided as the physically powerful Spud is not bright enough to question the selfless devotion of Lymie Peters, the neglected son of a drunken widower. Spud brings Lymie home to supper and the visitor is struck, admittedly wrongly, by the impression of a close family.
The story is based on the themes of worshipped and worshipper, and the unfair advantages conferred by physical beauty and strength sounds a familiar one, but the quiet genius of the remarkable US writer William Maxwell turns The Folded Leaf - a slow-moving, apparently straightforward account of boyhood rivalr - into an unnerving performance of strange beauty.
During the past two years Harvill has reissued not only Maxwell's masterwork So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) twice, but quickly followed the collected short stories, All The Days and Nights, with a 50th anniversary edition of the novel Time Will Darken It (1948) - which in turn was joined within weeks by a further paperback version of the same title. Now comes The Folded Leaf, which was first published in 1945.
If it all seems a little urgent, who's complaining? Harvill's campaign to alert the reading public to Maxwell, who will be 91 in August, amounts to a valuable service to literature. Having spent more than 40 years as a New Yorker fiction editor whose charges included Cheever, Updike, Nabokov, Salinger, John O'Hara, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty and the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship which also produced a hefty volume of correspondence, gathered together in The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, edited by Michael Steinman (Knopf, 1996), Maxwell the writer has always worked in fits and starts. Now more than ever in this age of hype, inflated advances and cynical deals struck long before the books in question are even written, publishing needs to be able to offer work of genuine merit by way of countering the reality that writing books has become more about producing marketable products than creating literature.
"To know the world's injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at 15 did not have," observes Maxwell's omniscient narrator. There are many asides such as this, some barbed, others quite random. Much of the power of the narrative comes from the thoughtful, detached narrative voice - the facts are presented, judgment is left to the reader. A social gathering of academics is described as follows: "a stranger would have seen a room full of middle-aged and elderly people in groups of twos, threes, and fours, with teacups in their hands, talking a little too loudly in each other's faces." As the novel unfolds, it seems that Maxwell deliberately takes several excursions into the abstract in order to distance the two main characters from the centre stage while also serving to intensify their developing conflict.
The sequences involving Lymie and his insensitive father are heartbreaking. When making their annual trip to the cemetery where the boy's dead mother lies, Lymie brings roses and a container filled with water. "He tried to arrange them nicely in the Mason jar but the wind blew them all the same way and he caught the jar with his hand, just before it toppled." The pathetic, self-absorbed Mr Peters remains unmoved, "Quit worrying with them. . . they look alright."
Only a writer a skilful as Maxwell could prevent Lymie from appearing a total doormat, prepared as he is to allow Spud to take the girl he is interested in. Seen through the eyes of the other characters, whether it is Spud's mother, a professor or a fellow student, Lymie is vulnerable. Spud's personality, on the other hand, is a devastating portrayal of a boor who eventually becomes preoccupied by misplaced jealousy.
Maxwell evokes the chaos of college life as well as the petty tensions of a small town society. Of the several brilliantly drawn characters, one is the camp Mr Dehner, who has an antiques business but also rents rooms to college boys. Fussy and conniving, his monologues prove hilarious setpieces. When Lymie's father arrives, summoned by news of his having slit his wrists and his throat, Mr Dehner is ready with sympathy. "I just wanted to say how sorry I am. So shocking, wasn't it? Such an awful way to choose. Gas would have been much simplier . . . Always the unexpected. I've been horribly upset by all this. My nerves aren't strong, you know. I'm full of luminal right this minute. It isn't habit-forming, the doctor says, but if you took a lot of it. . . "
Few novels have charted the end of boyhood, and the coming of adult wisdom, as subtly and as humanely as Maxwell in this profound, atmospheric work which is as moving as it is shrewd and often funny.