Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

had to give this one up after part one. started a little bit of part two, but the book was still very racist and anti-semitic and i still have no idea what the story is about.

a shame, since my grandmother always said we were related to thomas wolfe

Some people go through a second childhood, for me it’s more like a second adolescence, going back to read books that impressed some of my high school friends.
This thick novel, a defiantly autobiographical Bildungsroman about a budding writer named Eugene Gant, was more readable than I expected, despite the pathetic exclamations and long grocery lists of description, as well as the echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, and other writers. The author is intoxicated by life and by language, and seems intent on fixing the entirety of both in a towering stack of paper. Some passages strain credulity, as when the author describes the protagonist’s infancy, whether in cataloguing the smells of his childish world for page after page, or recording his precocious intuition, while playing with alphabet blocks, that language was the key to unlocking the world.
Beyond the wild profligacy of language, so often justly commented upon, are hard little carefully-crafted insights such as this: “he forgave, for it was necessary to forget.” It was these, as well as the telling, original descriptions littered throughout the book that kept my attention more than the events of Eugene’s life. Then there’s another awkward matter: although I’m no fan of revising the canon on the basis of our current ideas of political correctness, the misogyny and racism were hard to me to get with, even if those particular aspects of the book might not have bothered many of Wolfe’s Asheville contemporaries. Oh the other hand, it’s understandable the author couldn’t go home again: he had used friends, relatives, and neighbors transparently for his incisive, unflattering caricatures.
At times it felt as if the book would go on forever, but the narrative pace picked up as the climax, the death of the protagonist’s brother Ben, approached. In describing the death scene itself, all the traits Wolfe had already established for the members of the Gant family interact in an extended way under the strain, the mingled love and hate acutely observed. This scene, followed by a richly imaginative denouement, are among the strongest of the entire book.
On balance, this is a book with flashes of towering genius, with enough rewards to balance out the flaws. On my scale, three stars is shorthand for a good read, although this rating can apply to a book of skillful, consistent workmanship as well as an unbalanced product of greatness. Look Homeward, Angel is for me an example of the latter. ( )

The content-order of the four major novels:
Look Homeward, Angel (O Lost - complete)
Of Time and the River
The Web and the Rock
You Can't Go Home Again ( )

NA

Evocative of May 25, 1990 visit to Asheville, North Carolina which included the Wolfe boarding house (NB before a later fire there).