Customer Reviews

Look Homeward, Angel

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Wolfe is definitely a master of prose and words, at times hisdescriptions and observations of life are captivating and inspiring.However, the book did move very slowly at times, as his level of detail and character development was almost unparalled compared to others authors I have read. This was good and bad, at times it was really boring, no matter how intellectual I wanted to be, and it was difficult to keep going, however you really do get a sense of the characters. For a true look at small town American life at this point in history, there is no equivalent that I have come across. The last half of the book is especially poignant, and the most interesting development of the book for me was to witness Gene's transformation from child to a wanderlust stricken youth. There are no happy endings here, there are no unbelievable revelations, only a family and its tumultuous journey through this strange travel that we call life. You will either love this book, or you will hate it, but if you have the patience to persevere through Wolfe's long-winded prose, it is well worth the time.

Look Homeward Angel is a rather lengthy and rather wordy coming of age story. Centered around Eugene Gant, a character modeled on Wolfe himself, the story is an exhaustive and detailed account of his life all the wayh from birth to his leaving for Harvard in his 20's.

I found this book to be an overall enjoyable read but I also found it to drag in some parts,the tone was a bit too sentimental and it was unfocused in parts. So much time is spent on details and wordiness that the book becomes bogged down at points. It takes close to 300 pages for Eugene to turn 12. I didn't think it was possible to find 300 pages worth to write about young childhood. Wolfe did apparently but none of it was really all that compelling to read. The tone of it is more than a little sentimental. Sure the whole point of the book is nostalgia but it gets too weepy for my tastes. The novel was also unfocused and uneven at times. Too much time was dedicated to his young life, and not enough to his adolescence and young adult life. A lot of the time the story focused not on Eugene, but his myriad of sibblings and his parents. And I wished Ben would stop saying "oh jesus" every sentence.

Wolfe does succeed however in capturing the feel of small town life, and he does present a somewhat enjoyable read. If the novel was shorter and more focused, it would have been much better. I recommend Of Human Bondage by WS Maugham or A Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce as better coming of age stories. Of Human Bondage is more focused and deals more with his later and mature life, and Joyce's novel deals mostly with adolescence and should be read for his groundbreaking style.

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.

Description:
A child (Wolfe's fictitious double) born around 1900 grows up in a town in the mountains of North Carolina. The story follows the story of the boy, Eugene Gant, from his ancestors' immigration to America to his graduation from the University of North Carolina.

The Good:
Wolfe is an excellent writer and his heavily descriptive style works. By the end of the book, many of the characters feel like family. There are times when Wolfe departs from his descriptions to make beautiful philosophical observations you'll want to copy or underline for later reference. The final chapter is a masterpiece, and well worth the 513 pages of text leading up to it.

The Bad:
Wolfe's romanticism is grating to modern sensibilities--repeated phrases like "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!" seem more like the lamentations of a histrionic drama student than a top-notch writer. His characters, for the most part, don't undergo any radical changes or exhibit any interesting incongruities of behavior that hint at "depth," something audiences nowadays have come to expect in a novel. Sometimes his references to other texts (generally quotes intended to represent Gant's literary thought processes) get annoying, and sometimes his attempts to describe scenery or occurrences, especially through the medium of Eugene's thoughts, can be a little bit messy or fall short of their targets.

The Verdict:
Even though it was published on the verge of the Great Depression, Look Homeward, Angel feels like a work from the nineteenth century . . . Dickens, Whitman, and Emerson seem to be influences. Most of the problems with the text that I mentioned simply take a period of adjustment to get used to. All things considered, it's an incredible piece of literature. I highly recommend it.

I love the sprawl of this novel; it has an organic energy, an enormous scope and vitality, and a sensuality, a feeling on each page. The novel is large in more than just page count. Wolfe's story portrays the spiritual and pscyhological growth of Eugene Gant--an autobiographical character. The image that remains is unforgetable. Wolfe's intelligence is that of the fox, uncanny in depth and range.
If you like to read novels that create a world, create an irony and have a passion, I'd recommend this one. I can see the debt that Wolfe has with previous writers. He owes something to Dreiser in creating the enormous vitality in his prose. But Wolfe doesn't care about the naturalistic forces like Dreiser does, its powers and drives. For Wolfe, it is more important to live life to the fullest, completely alive. In this sense, I think that Walt Whitman's poetry parallels Wolfe's fictive prose. Whitman and Wolfe wrote about the people, the families, the bodies, the minds, connecting and disconnecting, all vitally alive and all eventually passing away.
To me, what makes this novel most worthwhile to read is the final chapter: haunting, lyrical, amazing. I doubt if Wolfe will be read with a wider audience in this day because his race references can easily be construed as racism. Push past that, though, and read it for its heart, not the age in which it was written. Wolfe needs to be read long into the future.

I can easily see why Look Homeward, Angel is an American classic.

The story is rambling and diverse, with a host of characters who are strong-willed and self-assured yet deeply flawed. This strongly reflects the character of the American people, as well as the nation itself.

But the strength of Look Homeward Angel is in the prose. Wolfe's writing brings to light those passing moments in time that stay with us forever but which we don't recognize at the time as significant - the glory of the air in an early spring morning, the sensual stimuli that are all around us walking down a dark street late at night, and many other unforgetable scenes. His writing has the power and vitality of Faulkner, without the sometimes impossible sentences that cause one to lose track. It is challenging and rich. Look Homeward, Angel is a masterpiece of place, time, and style.