Look Homeward, Angel [Paperback]

LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL is probably the ultimate southern stream-of-consciousness book, taking its cue from Joyce and Faulkner, but without all the convuluted sentences and mayhem. Don't get me wrong--there's plenty of "difficult music" in this tome, but it's nowhere the hard read that something like LIGHT IN AUGUST or even ULYSSES is. No, this is accessible literature on the hightest level. The only other book I've come across that has this much depth is Jackson McCrae's THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD.

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"
...

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.