[It] is peculiary reassuring to read "The Folded Leaf."… Mr. Maxwell is not putting on a show for the international literary world …; he has no gospel for Europe at war. He does not even have to brush aside the magazine and movie formulas, for he does not hear them humming in his ears. He has fixed upon a segment of experience and has molded it into a work of fiction through a style and a narrative skill which have been learned in the struggle with his subject…. This drama of the immature, with no background more glamorous than middle-class apartments and student fraternity houses, is both more moving and more absorbing than any of the romantic melodramas which have been stimulated by the war.

There are episodes in "The Folded Leaf"—incompletely imagined or dramatized—which sometimes keep it from being quite rounded out. The opening sequence of...