Rating: 
Summary: Good Coming of Age Story
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Great classic!
Review: OKay, I think my title pretty much sums up the book. But I suppose I should elaborate. In general, I do not like coming-of-age stories because all the author does is reflect on his youth without any plot. The main characters are always flawless heros, in a struggle against a cruel world that cannot understand their genius. Of course, no character in a book can be flawless. The authors just use the novel format as an excuse to lament on the cruel injustices that happened in their youth. I was punished in school when I didn't deserve it! I had to work at a job I didn't like! Boo hoo, poor me! No one is as smart as me! I have really deep thoughts! It's me against the world! Yep, arrogant, self-indulgent, and self-pitying all the way. Wolfe's writing is also particularly bad and cliched. "Negroes" are always snoring "through blubbering lips." When they are awake, they do everything "sleepily." You never see Eugene's mom without her pursing her lips. You never see his brother without him saying "damn!" The bad descriptions wouldn't be so intolerable if they didn't happen over and over again. And for the record, I like description, and I don't judge novels for racism that was considered politically correct in their day. I love Conrad, for example. But this is pretentious and generic and bad. Avoid at all costs.
Rating:
Summary: Look Homeward, Angel
Review: Thomas Wolfe's first novel, the autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel, reveals Wolfe as a writer with unusual gifts. His sensory equipment appears to have been marvelously sensitive, and he can recount convincingly the things that he touched and saw and smelled as a small boy. He is attuned to the seasons, and much else at the same time:
"Yes, and in that month when Prosperpine comes back, and Ceres' dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife."
That's just one example. Seemingly few seasons pass without comment during the years spanned by this novel.
Wolfe is also attuned to character, and he writes at length about the members of his family and many of the people he knew during his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina. The father of Eugene Gant, the Wolfe character in the novel, is lionized as a "great man" with larger-than-life passions and appetites, including a lifelong thirst for alcohol. His mother, a real estate speculator and boarding house operator, is described in rather unflattering terms, and a high school teacher eventually becomes Eugene's spiritual mother. Wolfe gives carefully drawn accounts of his siblings as well, including Grover, "a gentle peering face, a soft caressing voice, unlike any of the others in kind and quality," who dies of typhoid when Eugene is a toddler. His sister Mabel (Helen in the novel), with a great maternal nature, often cares for their father or for Eugene in the novel. But it is his brother Ben, a kind man with a diamond-hard exterior, who has the closest bond with Eugene.
The plot takes us through the familiar events of a boy's life. Many of these events are related with great wit; they are all written, in Wolfe's words "in innocence and nakedness of spirit." Anyone who has had a paper route will respond to Wolfe's accounts of prowling about the town in all seasons, on the job, before the rest of the world awakens. From the other paper boys, he learns to smoke:
". . . in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth."
At a tender age, Eugene goes off to college; he comes to know corruption and grief; he finds his way in the world. In a climactic scene with his brother Ben, Eugene understands the meaning of his journey so far, but there is no resolution or end in sight. The book leaves Eugene when he is 18, still an unformed man.
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