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164 of 175 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Straight from the heart - the truest "American" novel, February 17, 2000
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.
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58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A prose poem, March 23, 2000
"Look Homeward Angel" is undeniably a young man's story and as such, I wonder if it appeals to men more than it does to women. It's hard to imagine how the novel's countless aches and awkward blunders would fail to resonate with any man's youthful recollections. When readers in Woolfe's hometown castigated him for his venial characterization of the people he grew up with, Woolfe pointed out that none of his characters represented any one particular person. Instead, their qualities were so real and so vivid that readers felt they instantly recognized them. And so it was with me, although I was born decades after Woolfe's death and raised in a different part of the country. The dialog, drama, and emotional undercurrents of "Look Homeward Angel" were strangely and overwhelmingly recognizable. This is the genius of Woolfe. My favorite parts of the novel vary considerably. I love the prose poem in the very beginning of the book. I also love the protagonist's descriptions of seemingly ordinary activities such as walking through a pasture on a fall evening. Such passages have the unnerving quality of being accessible yet somehow ineffable. A part of you is walking through the field with Eugene Gant taking in the cold wind, the smells of smoke and cow manure under the grim sky. Another part of you is asking why that experience feels so real and immediate even though you've never had it before. Woolfe took a microscope to ordinary people and somehow rendered them great. He did not accord them the stature of epoch heroes or contemporary celebrities. Instead, he rendered their feelings and actions as immediate as their surroundings. You probably would not want to be any of the people in "Look Homeward Angel" and you might not even like them that much. But you will come away from the book with the sense of knowing those people intimately. For this reason, it is impossible to finish "Look Homeward Angel" without a having profound emotional response.
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46 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You Can Read Wolfe Again, April 17, 2006
I was much taken with LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL when I read it as a young man, particularly the chapter on the death of Ben Gant. It was one of the most moving things I had read at the time and I never forgot it. With more years behind me than in front of me, I was curious to see what effect this novel would have on me on a rereading. I found this tome this time to be long, wordy, at times bombastic, with far too many "O Lost's." Mr. Wolfe never misses an opportunity to do long lists, often sounding like Walt Whitman on a bad day. And why on earth would he name Chapel Hill, North Carolina "Pulpit Hill" in the novel? On the other hand, sometimes Wolfe writes pure poetry; and the novel pulses with life. He has captured a town (Asheville, North Carolina early in the 20th Century) with all its prejudices, idiosyncrasies but hopes as well and has created a family we will never forgot, the Gants. Anyone who knows anything about Thomas Wolfe understands that they are a thinly veiled version of his own family: the bigger-than-life patriarch of the family Gant who has bouts with the bottle; his wife Eliza, obsessed with making a dime at whatever cost; and their children-- Daisy, Helen, the sailor Luke, the twins Grover and Ben and Eugene, based on Wolfe, himself. These characters are as much of the literary history of the United States as Willie Loman, Rabbit Angstrom, the Compson family et al. Yes, Wolfe's account of the death of Ben Gant at the age of 26 of double pneumonia will tear your heart out. After the Gant family members have spent excruciating days at his deathbed, Eugene has this beautiful words: "We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death--but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door." LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, for all its shortcomings, remains an American classic.
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