Review: Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Why is it that so much great American literature post-Civil War ([b:Tobacco Road|59091|Tobacco Road|Erskine Caldwell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1369852920s/59091.jpg|1238780], [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1373572902p2/3535.jpg], etc.) arises from the desperate depths of imagined Southern depravity and hopelessness?

I love the flights into unnecessary detail, like [a:Herman Melville|1624|Herman Melville|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1361337904p2/1624.jpg] takes in [b:Moby-Dick; or, The Whale|153747|Moby-Dick; or, The Whale|Herman Melville|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg|2409320], into the battle art of an encyclopedia, and more,

I specially savored this baby Eugnene's point of view, crib-bound and precociously philosophic: "Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed, he thought quietly of many things before he dropped off to sleep?the interminable sleep that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a sense of having missed forever a day of sparkling life.  At these moments, he was heartsick with weary horror as he thought of the discomfort, weakness, dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he would have to endure before he gained even physical freedom.  He grew sick as he thought of the weary distance before him, the lack of co-ordination of the centres of control, the undisciplined and rowdy bladder, the helpless exhibition he was forced to give in the company of his sniggering, pawing brothers and sisters, dried, cleaned, revolved before them.

...He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language.  He indicated as quickly as he could his ravenous hunger for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him great books profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by cooing, shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing all the other things they understood in him.  He wondered savagely how they would feel if they knew what he really thought: at other times he had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous comedy of errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled their heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently against his will.  The situation was at once profoundly annoying and comic...

He saw that the great figures that came and went about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meagre communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding, but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice. His brain went black with terror.  He saw himself an inarticulate stranger, an amusing little clown, to be dandled and nursed by these enormous and remote figures.  He had been sent from one mystery into another..."

Then, there are passages of prose so poetic I think they must be a quote only to find them original an experience I have only also had with [a:Garrison Keillor|2014|Garrison Keillor|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1259697704p2/2014.jpg]:

"The Spring comes back.  I see the sheep upon the hill.  The belled cows come along the road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below the pale ghost of the moon.  But what stirs within the buried heart?  Where are the lost words?  And who has seen his shadow in the Square?"

I love that the life of the semi-autobiographical hero who finds life and purpose in literature, a classic education sought by Eugene and having a transformative and redemptive effect on him, points out some of the pieces worth exploring to us:

often Marc Antony's funeral oration, Hamlet's soliloquy, the banquet scene in Macbeth, and the scene between Desdemona and Othello before he strangles her.  Or, he would recite or read poetry, for which he had a capacious and retentive memory.  His favorites were:  "O why should the spirit of mortal be proud" ("Lincoln's favorite poem," he was fond of saying); "'We are lost,' the captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs"; "I remember, I remember, the house where I was born"; "Ninety and nine with their captain, Rode on the enemy's track, Rode in the gray light of morning, Nine of the ninety came back"; "The boy stood on the burning deck"; and "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward."

I was really disappointed in the end, though. This hallucinatory choreography of moving angel statues and conversations with his deceased brother Ben was very anti-climactic and weak, to me.



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