Customer Reviews

The Web and the Rock

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(3)
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I am astounded that such a moving, powerful, and lyrical book is out of print. Wolfe writes with such a commanding and passionate love of language. His prose *is* poetry. There are passages in this book that rank with the most romantic and ethereal ever written. The sense of place in NYC is virtually unparalleled. George Webber's love for Esther Jack--the lost half of the broken talisman--remains one of the more beautiful and moving of interpersonal relationships set down in print. That such hackneyed, commercial tripe as "The Bridges of Madison County" goes through multiple printings while this gem languishes out of print is beyond me.

Preface: I would give this book ten stars if I could.

Thomas Wolfe was a [woefully underrated] master of the English language and character development. The Web and the Rock, perhaps the finest of his works, invites you into the tortured mind of George Webber without any sort of forceful literary entry. His forays into Webber's psyche are never contrived, never as dissonant as the failed attempts of other writers to accomplish the same sort of candor. The alternating ebb and flow of George's dialogue and inner monologue feel as natural as inhaling and exhaling, and the text takes on a sort of organic quality in that sense. Though some criticize Wolfe's writing for its convoluted streams of consciousness and tangents, these are the things that make his characters so intense and tangible to the reader.

There is an unapologetic candor to Wolfe's bildungsroman, an innate willingness to open up a secret world to the reader, one of mental anguish, feelings of inadequacy, and the passion that can simultaneously electrify and destroy a man's life. There is nothing forced about his philosophical asides--they are natural progressions of Webber's inner monologue and some of the most deliciously probing prose I have ever had the pleasure to read.

I will leave you with two of the most compelling quotes of the novel--and, perhaps, some of the most honest, candid passages in all of American literature:

"So all were gone at last, one by one, each swept out into the mighty flood tide of the city's life, there to prove, to test, to find, to lose himself, as each man must--alone" (272).

"The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out from the palpable and passionate integument of life and fellowship, and of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand, enter it by a door, possess it with a word--a word that, somehow, he could never speak, a door that, somehow he would never open" (170).

Why there are not enough reprints of Wolfe's books are a mystery to me. He's without doubt one of America's finest writers, and one of the most gifted in the English language

Wolfe tells his coming of age story with extensive, descriptive passages that sometimes get in the way of the plot and the reader's ability to actually develop an attraction to the characters themselves. With Wolfe, it seems to be more about the thrill of putting words together than actually telling a story.

If you have enjoyed any of his other books, this one will not disappoint; same beautifully fictionalized memoir, same lyrical touch.

There are many arresting passages in this dense "goat-cry" of a book, and there are many which are rendered in simply demotic English. While his power over the language was prodigious his finesse was not tantamount by any means. Faulkner rated him highly 50 years ago (as the greatest among American writers) but he was greater--even in his last years. Monk's exchanges with Esther Jack are at times enough to make you chew your arm off, for their bathos and mawkishness. And while she is "rosy" and "cheerful" one never really gets a sense of what this 40 year-old looked like, though her spirit certainly is manifested.
The episodes about the Brobdingnagian mother and her impassive butcher husband, and the black Army vet explosing into violence are compelling and really drivethe first half of this book. The end is puzzling, rather an epilogue concerning his European travels after he dumps the comely Jewess; it recalls "A Cool Million" though the latter is rtendered with greater tragi-comic effect. Wolfe is seldom funnty when treating plot developments involving Monk, but Monk's reminiscences are certainly very funny.
I'm on "You Can't Go Home Again", the last of the four. The first three have all been good, but I hesitate to call him the greatest or even to compare him with Faulkner, the "master craftsman".

This book is best described as a kind of bildungsroman. Unfortunately Thomas Wolfe has been overshadowed by that other more modern writer sharing his name. It would be safe to say that that other writer was more revolutionary. Thomas Wolfe is not doing much new, he is a story teller, and one not to all tastes. Tom Wolfe you read for his place in literary history, Thomas Wolfe you read more for its description of the second quarter of the twentieth century and New York.

He rambles a lot. He repeats himself. Sometimes it's hard to tell where he's going with something, and sometimes it's very obvious we're dealing with roman a clef, or what Wolfe wished his life to have been. It's more a collection of incidents, until he meets his "gal". I get the feeling Wolfe was striving after that elusive "Great American Novel", and its whole look at life is very American. It concerns the boy from the small town south (thinly veiled North (? South) Carolina), symbolically coming together with the North (including his girlfriend who is an epitome of the North). But it's difficult to see much more depth than that, that's not to say it isn't there, but there isn't much sign of it.

If you keep on at it, it's not a bad read, but it's not the best read I've had either. His style makes for fairly slow reading and it drags a little a third of the way through.