This one was a perplexing book for me. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe was overall a very intriguing, captivating novel, but unfortunately there were gripping, page-turning chapters followed by obtuse, esoteric ramblings, which slightly soured the experience for me, if in just a small way.
The novel starts out following Gant. I can’t even remember his first name, because he is larger than life and throughout all of the book he is known simply as Gant. He’s a bit of an adventurer and doesn’t want to settle down, but after his first marriage is a disaster, his second wife convinces him to put down roots and start a family. He is a drinker and a bully, and cows his family under his heel. His wife Eliza puts up with it, but always gets her way, including hoarding every dollar the family makes and buying property around town as investments. By the end of the book, she has amassed a sizable amount of valuable land, but continues to live a simple life, working hard, and acting like the downtrodden (and making sure everyone knows it).
This book is really about their youngest son, Eugene, which you don’t realize until the second of three parts of the book. Eugene is the 5th or 6thchild, and while those before him had to deal with the fighting parents, the all-powerful father and the guilting mother, he is raised as the one bright hope to break the cycle. Brother Ben tells Gene to take everything he can get from their parents, leave, and not look back. Sister Helen dotes on him but makes sure he knows his place. Gant wants Gene to be the first to go to college, and after the family begs Eliza to let go enough money to send Gene to a private school for 3 years, they ship him to college at the early age of 16.
Part 3 is his college years. Sheltered for much of his life, and younger than everyone at college, he is a bit unprepared socially, but he finally pulls it together. Whereas many of his peers are enlisting for World War I, Gene is left behind to find his way. Despite Ben’s advice, at one point he spends the summer living on his own, basically homeless and penniless, carelessly spending every dime he gets his hands on.
Gant is diagnosed with cancer. The doctors say he doesn’t have long, but as stubborn as he is, Eliza says he will outlive them all. The family is indeed shaken though, the book describes them astonished and uncomprehending. For them, it is no different than if they were told God was dying, as to them, Gant is God. He does survive though, in fact outliving the free-living Ben two years later, who succumbs to pneumonia near the end of the novel. Gene’s first real look at death, this seems to be the jolt he needs to set his own course in life, and not pursue those plans his parents wished for him.
Wolfe admitted this book was semi-autobiographical. The “story” of the novel, that I have described, is written extremely well and urges you to speed through it, to see what happens next. Unfortunately there are plenty of moments of nearly “stream of consciousness” writing, where ideas are just haphazardly thrown together. At those times, I found myself speeding through just to get back to the story. Wolfe was undoubtedly a great writer, I’m sure much of these sections were just too deep for me to get into without serious thought, and I still enjoyed the novel as a whole.
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