Rating: 
Summary: Look to this book
Review: A very well-read, highly educated person, with whom I had a passing acquaintance, mentioned one day that "Of Time and the River," by Thomas Wolfe, was her all-time favorite book. Very shortly after that, I read somewhere that "Of Time and the River" was the actor Anthony Quinn's favorite book. Okay, now this title, previously unbeknownst to me, was somewhat "following me around," and my reader's curiosity was piqued, and I went to investigate. I discovered that "Time and River" was a sequel to "Look Homeward, Angel," which is how I wound up reading this book. Did I feel about this book the way my acquaintance (and Mr. Quinn) felt about its sequel? Not by a long shot, but still this book is a MUST-READ. Why? Even though parts of it are dull, Wolfe has a brilliant capacity for poetically explaining certain types of situations and behaviors that I have oft found incomprehensible. If I'm compelled to underline sentences and paragraphs, as I was with this book, then I'm also compelled to recommend this book and rate it even half a star higher than it deserves. (It doesn't really deserve a full four stars, because it took me FOREVER to finish, which is never a good sign.) Well, now I'm off, to begin the much-anticipated sequel, "Of Time and the River."
Rating:
Summary: The world's most annoying genius
Review: Calling Thomas Wolfe a literary genius is like calling your wife a dynamite telephone caller; it may be true, but it doesn't tell you much.
After all, when we think of literary genius, we tend to think of a gift of words exercised in the service of something big, like truth or beauty or human potential, don't we? We may disagree about whether some genius accomplished great work, but it seems as though geniuses at least try to tackle something larger than themselves.
Well, if Thomas Wolfe was a genius (and I'm not _entirely_ convinced), he seems to have used his abilities mostly to let everyone know just what a special, unique, amazing, unappreciated and put-upon soul Thomas Wolfe was. Some may call that an accomplishment; I call it whining.
Mind you, "Look Homeward, Angel" is a very accomplished whine. In all honesty, too, that's not all it is. This book was one of the earliest examples of American realism as it came to prominence between the World Wars, a movement that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and all those other guys trying to shake loose from the Victorian romantic tradition. This means that Wolfe devoted considerable effort to descriptions of Southern small-town life around the turn of the century in all its details, including the ones that respectable people preferred not to think about. As such, it's a convincing job.
Structurally, this is pretty straight narrative, which means that whatever was innovative about it had to come through Wolfe's writing style. "Look Homeward, Angel" concerns the history of Eugene Gant, Wolfe's alter ego, from a few years before his birth in North Carolina to his departure for graduate school at Harvard University.
He grows, learns to deal with an alcoholic force of nature for a father, a semi-delusional miser for a mother, and a bunch of half-crazed older siblings. He explores the town from its wealthiest mansions to it most degraded poverty and racism. He goes to school and shows early promise, reads incessantly and fancies himself the hero of the grand drama that is his life. He falls in love two or three times, sometimes platonically and sometimes not. He attends college, finding it difficult at first, but soon makes a place of prominence for himself there. Finally, upon coming home, losing a favorite brother to tuberculosis and discovering the joys of alcohol, he confronts his family's collective sickness and littleness of mind, and heads north.
None of this is terribly unusual. Indeed, any young person with any soul at all has probably gone through similar phases and stages, including the conviction that no one has ever gone through anything remotely like this before (ah, I remember the attitude well). That's what makes "Look Homeward, Angel" such an unbelievable pain in the rear; Wolfe apparently never grew up enough to realize that his experiences are universal, and so throughout his book he insisted on couching Eugene's (or his own) smallest experiences in the imagery of glorious Homeric adventure, with language to match.
Sometimes this actually works. When, for instance, Wolfe describes the opening of a day in the Gant household with its boisterous flow of energy and alarming quantities of breakfast, the inflated language sucks you right in, makes you want to grab a plum from the Gants' table and chow down. The town, the people and the life are so vivid that it's no wonder people believed in them. Some found the sensuality so overwhelming they seemed to regard Wolfe as a threat to public morals.
Elsewhere, though, particularly when showing us Eugene's inner life, the whole edifice falls apart like used Kleenex. Which may be appropriate considering the tears Wolfe obviously expects us to shed for Eugene, but it's hardly pleasant or inspiring. Surely it was possible, for instance, to give us Eugene's melodramatic love for a boarder in his mother's hotel without making him seem quite so pathetic? This is a boy and a slightly older girl in a run-down boardinghouse in North Carolina, after all, not Lancelot and Guinevere in noble but doomed love at Camelot, but you'd never know that from the language Wolfe uses.
There was something I found disrespectful in Wolfe's utter inability to judge what tone to take with regular people and their lives. Such things are without question worthy of attention and respect; that's the whole idea of America. Wolfe's writing at these moments made me wonder if he was really attending to his characters and their experiences, or whether he was just using the whole thing to show off how fancy his writing could be. Made me want to reach into the book and slap him. Twice.
So why the four stars? Well, because the man could actually write, dammit. He could write so well that even his purplest passages fascinated me. And at the end, as callow as Eugene Gant remains and as unaware of how ridiculous his moans of ecstasy and woe can be, I couldn't help liking the jerk. If I came across someone like him in real life, I'd think he was going to be a very worthwhile man one day, after a good kick in the pants or two.
Thomas Wolfe didn't live long enough to benefit from such a kick in the pants, but his books show what he might have made of himself, so the air of melancholy about his prose feels earned somehow. And he certainly helped deliver a very useful kick to American literature, booting it right out of its leftover 19th-century politeness. For that alone, "Look Homeward, Angel" deserves our gratitude.
Benshlomo says, God save me from a genius who knows he's a genius.
Rating:
Summary: The Goods and The Bads
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Goods and The Bads
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: I fell in love with Raskolnikov and Eugene
Review: Dostoevsky used to be my fave. A high-school junior, I fell in love with the killer, Raskolnikov, from "Crime and Punishment." At 19 I discovered Thomas Wolfe, and fell in love all over again With Eugene. What is being "pretentious?" As a writer, I think pretension is a good thing, a stretching of oneself and one's talent. I find "Look Homeward Angel" to be achingly beautiful and hi-larious, in equal measure. It is a slow, tough read and I don't know whether it will continue on in the canon becuase it is very dense. If I go back to school and do my master's in American Literature, I think I am going to concentrate on Wolfe. By the way, what's the weird thing of people in book clubs not liking this book?
Rating:
Summary: YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN
Review: EXCERPTED FROM "GOD'S COUNTRY" BY STEVEN TRAVERS... A class of writers stepped up and opposed the kind of bigotry that reared its ugly head in the 1920s. Southern writers became a breed unto themselves. Erskine Caldwell described the hardscrabble life of "Tobacco Road". William Faulkner wrote about violence and sin in the Old South, although his verbiage is very difficult to follow. Thomas Wolfe infuriated Southerners with his rejection of their ways, but ultimately his work in "Look Homeward, Angel" pays ironic homage to his roots. H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, became a leading voice of crabby intellectual conservatism, ridiculing prejudice and ignorance. Robert Frost wrote poems that put readers in New England autumns. STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
...
Rating:
Summary: Sprawling, epic, brilliant
Review: EXCERPTED FROM "GOD'S COUNTRY" BY STEVEN TRAVERS... A class of writers stepped up and opposed the kind of bigotry that reared its ugly head in the 1920s. Southern writers became a breed unto themselves. Erskine Caldwell described the hardscrabble life of "Tobacco Road". William Faulkner wrote about violence and sin in the Old South, although his verbiage is very difficult to follow. Thomas Wolfe infuriated Southerners with his rejection of their ways, but ultimately his work in "Look Homeward, Angel" pays ironic homage to his roots. H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, became a leading voice of crabby intellectual conservatism, ridiculing prejudice and ignorance. Robert Frost wrote poems that put readers in New England autumns. STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
...
Rating:
Summary: Thirty years later and still in love
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A point of clarification
Review: I loved this book. And I was rather bothered by 'Lindsay's review (below), calling this work 'self-indulgent, self-pitying, pretentious, and cliched'. Isn't ALL good literature all four of these things? I mean sure it's a good old coming-of-age story, which are pretty common, but Wolfe embues the whole book with such a glorification of the normal plight of Man that one can't help but at least respect the writer, even if one doesn't appreciate the book itself. I don't mean to attack someone personally, it's just that I despise the way some think it is 'intellectual' to diss famous books. Not liking the novel is one thing, but it is utter pretension to assume any book that people dig is garbage just because it didn't fit into a close-minded veiw of what literature should be.
Now the book: I thought it was bloody brilliant. As I said before, it's a coming-of-age story. But there is so much innocence and wonder in the book, as well. And the last 10 pages or so make the whole entire book worth it. They (and, in turn, the rest of the book leading up to these last pages) sum up in it's entirety the plight of every young romantic fool on the edge of the soon-to-be-discovered 'real world', looking back over their shoulder at shadows and angels and hoping there is glory to be found somewhere in the world. Trust me, it's great.
Rating: 
Summary: Major Cool Points
Review: It's Ok. I didn't quit reading it or anything, but I think this book still exists in the "canon" because reading the book is such a challenge, and people are scared to say they didn't dig it because they fear that they failed some deeper understanding of it. You'll need a dictionary to get through it, and once you actually complete the book, it's cool to be able to say "I've read 'Look Homeward, Angel'." I know I definitely have it on my bookshelf where everyone can see it. I prefer Tobias Wolff whose books are right next to Thomas' on the Barnes and Noble bookshelves.
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