Tag Archives: William Maxwell

#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.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

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 paragraph of TIME WILL DARKEN IT.

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 ‘They Came Like Swallows’ by William Maxwell #historical #classic

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Bunny Morison is eight years old and his mother Elizabeth is the centre of his life. Published in 1937, They Came Like Swallows is the second novel by William Maxwell. An autobiographical novella based on the 1918 flu epidemic seen through the eyes of Bunny, Robert and their father James, it’s a sensitive portrayal of the depths of family love not always outwardly expressed. William Maxwell This is a quiet character-led story about love, anxiety and grief, beautifully-written. I most enjoyed Bunny’s viewpoint, the simplicity and power of the love of a small child who sees things he doesn’t understand while sensing a significance. Thirteen-year-old Robert, first seen through Bunny’s eyes, seems a bully but is revealed in his own section as a boy approaching adulthood, protective of his pregnant mother and desperate to please his emotionally-absent father. And finally, James’s section shows the reasons for this distance. Each character is teetering on the edge of change, immersed in his own fears and hopes.
As the story unfolds we are introduced to the Morison’s wider family. Bunny dwells on his aunt Irene, Elizabeth’s sister. ‘… their hands felt entirely different and looked entirely different. From Irene’s hands he drew excitement, and from his mother’s the fact that she loved him. Irene and his mother were as different as the two faces of a coin. And yet they never seemed conscious of the difference.’ When their mother must go away to have her baby, Bunny and Robert go to stay with Aunt Clara, Uncle Wilfred and their Grandmother Morison. Robert, rubbing up against the house rules and being told he can’t do the things he wants to do, finds a dictionary hidden beneath the living room table. ‘Finding the wrong kinds of words in the dictionary was not a crime. They couldn’t put him in jail for it, but it was a thing he would not want to be caught doing, especially by Aunt Clara. It was like telling lies or listening to people who didn’t know he was there.’
A classic.
The title is from a Yeats poem:-
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air…
From ‘Coole Park, 1929’ by WB Yeats
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Try my reviews of these other novels by William Maxwell:-
BRIGHT CENTER OF HEAVEN
TIME WILL DARKEN IT

And read the first paragraph of TIME WILL DARKEN IT

If you like this, try:-
‘Anything is Possible’ by Elizabeth Strout
‘A Town Called Solace’ by Mary Lawson
‘The Pull of the Stars’ by Emma Donoghue

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5sD via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Bright Center of Heaven’ by William Maxwell #historical #classic

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This is the first novel by William Maxwell, author of Pulitzer finalist So Long, See You Tomorrow and fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine. He was there from 1936-1975 and worked with Cheever, Updike, Salinger and Nabokov, among others. Not a novel published singly, I found Bright Center of Heaven in an American anthology of Maxwell’s early work. This is a quiet read though ambitious in its subject matter, and well worth spending time with before reading Maxwell’s later works. William Maxwell He follows the time-honoured structure of placing a group of people in one place over a limited time period and observing what happens. It is a contemplative novel and, although it does work to a climax, it is more an insight into the mind of each character as events unfold.
Widow Mrs West and her two teenage sons Thorn and Whitey live at Meadowland, a dilapidated farm that they can no longer afford to run, with her husband’s sister Amelia and her son Bascomb, German cook Johanna and farmer Gust. Thorn feels close to the land to the ten-acre field gifted to him by his father on his sixth birthday. Now Thorn helps Gust to work the fields. Gust is all that remains of the farm in its agricultural days when talk around the dinner table was of crop yields and mechanisation. Whitey runs errands for his mother ‘Muv’ and tends to his canoe. Into this quiet rural world come the summer lodgers – a teacher, artist, pianist and actress – and with it the dinner conversation changes. It changes again when Mrs West’s invitation becomes known; Jefferson Carter, a Harvard-educated New York intellectual who is black, is coming to visit.
It took me a while, at least halfway through, before I figured out the relationships and identities. Each person’s viewpoint is shown, their outward behaviour explained by inner worries. There is an intricate network of connections between them as well as individual stories, invisible from the outside, which Maxwell reveals piece by piece. Carter does his job as the catalyst for trouble around the dinner table. First he is blanked by Amelia, a hypochondriac Southern lady, old before her time; next, he argues with teacher Paul. Carter’s bewilderment and growing anger at this group of people serves to add a voice from outside Meadowland, another view of the world; he is as convinced he is correct about racial equality, as they are. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.”
“Bright Center of Heaven was published in 1934 [the same year as F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night], before Maxwell joined The New Yorker, and was out of print for almost 70 years until this Library of America edition published in 2008. It is the beginning of Maxwell the novelist, a sensitive writer who takes his time and needs to be read without hurry. His are delicate stories without shouting. Maxwell was later unimpressed by Bright Center of Heaven, describing it as“hopelessly imitative” and “stuck fast in its period.” In The Paris Review he said, “My first novel… is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf is a particular influence. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I… discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character—the homesick servant girl—lock, stock, and barrel from To the Lighthouse.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Try my reviews of these other novels by William Maxwell:-
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS
TIME WILL DARKEN IT

And read the first paragraph of TIME WILL DARKEN IT.

If you like this, try:-
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BRIGHT CENTER OF HEAVEN by William Maxwell https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3vV via @SandraDanby

#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.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

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

And read the first paragraph of TIME WILL DARKEN IT

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