Look Homeward, Angel

This is perhaps one of the greatest of all American novels but I'm a Tarheel by birth and know the "Altamont" land well so my reasoning may be biased. There are elements in this novel which most overlook because mainly those folks are looking for a quick read. This is not a quick read and is not meant to be. The novel is rich in symbolism so take the time to read AND understand what Wolfe has written. Its about the joys and pains of growing up, the struggle between siblings, the desire to grow beyond one's home, the desire to journey, and the melancholy feeling of returning home at the end of the journey and beginning of another. If you are patient and willing to take Wolfe's adventure, you will see that we are all truly Gan't children in one way or another.

I loved it in 1968 as a college freshman and I love it today as a 52 year old prose lover, ex-hippie, and wage slave. While discussing the book with a classmate in college thirty years ago, He dissed Wolfe by saying that his writing was pretentious. I got seriously upset and wanted to slug him. Enamored I was and still am. After a hard day at work, you may not do better than get lost in the hill country of North Carolina. The characters are so real that you will be saying to your spouse or significant other, "Hey sweetie, listen to this" as you read passages of what seem to be your life. The book takes us places that we can see and feel. Intellectual? yes. Soulful? Hell yes! Settle in and read maybe twenty pages a day. You will be moved.

What sets this book apart from most 'coming of age' stories is the stunning combination of poetic language and monumental vision with which Wolfe imbues this tale of Eugene Gant's blossoming into manhood. No other American writer of novels has managed to utilize a voice so lush and exacting at the same time. The reader is literally seduced into the world that Wolfe creates and provided with an experience as rich as any in modern fiction.Thomas Wolfe was a large man, and he thought and acted in a large way. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, had to severly cut down the size of the gigantic text that he was given, and it is still a big book in all respects - in sheer size, breadth of vision, and thematic scope. This is one of those books I have to return to every few years just to see if it is still as good as I remember. While it is very much an adolescent book - in the sense that it storms the emotions with a 'Romantic' intensity - and I am much more critical than the young man who first read it - I find that I am still awed at Wolfe's talent and command.This is one of those 'must read' books for all who would be conversant with modern American fiction. It's type has been out of fashion for some time, but it can't be ignored as a substantial contribution that is uniquely its own thing.

I feel sorry for anyone who can't find echoes of their own youth in Wolfe's undeniably Romantic writing. You won't find clipped Hemingway-esque sentences, nor the pages-long obscure wanderings of fellow Southerner Faulkner, but Wolfe recreates his world so perfectly that filming it would be redundant. "Self-absorbed"? Yes, how else could anyone produce a literary translation of a life's experience? Cliched? Not when it was written, although as a "coming of age" novel it has many predecessors, none were so ambitious in scope or detail. Achingly, achingly nostalgic, beautifully written, TRUE to itself, sparing nothing of the author or his vision. Pretentious? Hardly, especially when set next to the Oprah-fied books on the best-seller lists today. This and its immediate succesor "Of Time and the River" are, to me, arguably the finest books ever written describing not just life in America but more importantly the sense of loss through time and distance of love, family, and home and the emotional maturation that follows. No, I couldn't recommend this to EVERYbody, but if you haven't become too sophisticated to remember what it was really like to be young, lonely, in love, or homesick, or to see though a child's eyes the wonder in a leaf, a stone, a door; to cry "Oh, lost!" over a memory, you will find much to cherish in this book.