Tag Archives: American classics

#BookReview ‘The Folded Leaf’ by William Maxwell #historical #classic

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The world in The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell is of another age when childhood lasted longer than it does now. Teenage boys wear breeches, naked youths jump into a pool at a school swimming lesson and teachers call their pupils Mister in this story of male friendship in 1920s mid-America. William MaxwellThe storytelling is easy, languid, introducing us to two boys. Lymie Peters, skinny, clever, on the edge of things and living with his absent widowed father. Newcomer Spud Latham, strong, angry, a boxer. Both dissatisfied with their lives. Their unlikely friendship grows from the late school years to college in Indiana, through fighting, bullying and a rather barbaric initiation by humiliation into a school fraternity, to discovering girls. Today the boys’ friendship may be viewed through a same-sex lens but there seems a group acceptance of ambiguity in this male group where girls are admitted infrequently to the fraternity’s grotty basement apartment where they take it in turns to dance to the shaky sounds of the victrola. It is a group innocence that feels rather alien today. This balance is upset when Sally enters their lives.
Maxwell’s prose is a delight, so simple, never over-stating, building slowly. First published in 1945, The Folded Leaf is Maxwell’s third novel. He was fiction editor at The New Yorker for 39 years, working with writers including Nabokov, Updike, Cheever and Salinger. A story set in the last century but still familiar today.
The Folded Leaf is a story of youthful shyness and arrogance, mis-communications, silence and assumptions, and what can happen when feelings are unexpressed. A thoughtful read that stays with you.

See my reviews of other novels by William Maxwell:-
BRIGHT CENTER OF HEAVEN
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS
TIME WILL DARKEN IT

And read the first paragraphs of TIME WILL DARKEN IT and THE CHATEAU.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt
‘Brooklyn’ by Colm Tóibín
‘Some Luck’ by Jane Smiley #1LastHundredYears

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE FOLDED LEAF by William Maxwell https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7c6 via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Elodie Harper

#BookReview ‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell #historical #classic

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Two families, the one from the South visits the one in the North. America before the Great War, class divides, manners, family duty, the race question and, beneath the politeness, love is turbulent. This is the world of Time Will Darken It. I don’t know why I have never discovered William Maxwell before now, but I will certainly seek out his other books. William Maxwell Draperville, Illinois, is the setting for this observation of manners which at times reminded me of Austen. Draperville is based on Maxwell’s own hometown of Lincoln, Illinois. In 1912, the Potter family from Mississippi visit the family of their foster son. Austin King, lawyer in Draperville, struggles to live up to the reputation of his father Judge King. The interaction and resulting effects of the King and Potter families over four weeks and three days, is detailed in a way reminiscent of Austen. And the detail is fascinating. The interaction between the generations, the expectations of the men and women, norms of behaviour and what happens when those norms are broken. This pre-war period teeters on the verge of war, and all the changes that will soon be brought about.
This is a wise book about relationships and how one’s own self-perspective, and that of your parents, changes over time and with experience. “…the history of one’s parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, proves to be too large ever to move, though each year’s frost forces it up a little higher.”

Try my reviews of these other novels by William Maxwell:-
BRIGHT CENTER OF HEAVEN
THE FOLDED LEAF
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS

And read the first paragraphs of TIME WILL DARKEN IT and THE CHATEAU.

If you like this, try:-
Some Luck by Jane Smiley
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview TIME WILL DARKEN IT by William Maxwell via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1I1

#BookReview ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson #classic #Americanwriters

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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson had been on my shelf for a while, bought because of reputation, and anticipated. Perhaps I expected too much of a first novel because, though it has amazing reviews, I struggled to connect with the story. The writing, however, is beautiful, poetic, elegiac. Marilynne RobinsonIt is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans, who grow up beside a haunting lake in the vast open countryside of mid-America. The lake dominates the life of everyone who lives around it, it floods every year, and floods the house where the two girls live, first with their grandmother and then with their Aunt Sylvie. We see Sylvie’s attempts at housekeeping dwindle as the house floods each winter, as her care for the house fails, so the two girls are uncared for. Not abused, but not clean, not sent to school, not disciplined. It is a novel about the failure of housekeeping in this house, and in the family, and it is the two who girls who suffer.
The sad story moves at a slow pace, and until halfway through I had no clear picture of how the two girls were different. It is Ruth who narrates, much of which is description of the house which lays at the heart of the story.
All the description, though, is poetic. Ruth’s grandmother in her elderly years “continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing.”
This is not an easy read, often obscure. There was no strong thread to pull me through the book, to keep turning the pages.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read my reviews of Robinson’s other novels:-
GILEAD
HOME
JACK

Try the #FirstPara of GILEAD here.

If you like this, try:-
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zG via @SandraDanby