"The Folded Leaf" is a sustained piece of extraordinarily good writing; its sensitive and often beautiful prose re-creates accurately and illuminates warmly a whole complex of human experience—difficult, not often handled, yet deeply meaningful…. The events are the intense, simple, urgent ones of growth: friendship and jealousy and falling in love and waking to desperation.

They are the events which, in a sense, belong to every life. But not every writer is able to project in sharp detail the larger—indeed the almost universal—feeling which William Maxwell so constantly and easily evokes….

There is a kind of absolute rendering of the Nineteen Twenties here; the feeling is sound, the air is true. But convincing as the touches of the time surely are, an even deeper penetration is shown in the treatment of people and places throughout….

Within the limitations of its own subject, which admittedly furnishes...