Book review: Look elsewhere, reader

For reasons known to at least some of my readers, I've been busy with bildungsromaner lately. It occurs to me I should probably write up small reviews of them as I read. Here goes.

Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel



On this business of bildungsromaner, it seems impossible to avoid Thomas Wolfe. According to the back cover, Look Homeward, Angel's "largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers." It is "rich with lyrical prose".

Here's some. It's part of his description of the protagonist as an infant.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, he felt unfathomable loneliness and sadness creep through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never. (p. 32)

Not just never, but five never. The reader is powerfully reminded of terrible poetry. Generally, the quality of the prose is acceptable, but I'm tempted to say that overall, Look Homeward, Angel manages to capture everything that's bad in American literature.

First, there's a terrible mania with family history. I don't know if it's because the United States has such a short history of its own, but for some reason many American writers are obsessed with totally trivial family histories. Mostly it must reflect the mania with family and heritage that so many Americans have. In keeping with this, Thomas Wolfe starts his story with the protagonist's father's early days. We're given a detailed account of his business dealings, his alcoholism, his marriage and his property deals, not to mention the construction of his house.

I need to digress for a moment, because there may be some younger people reading this. In the old times, before digital cameras, after a vacation you had to take the film from your camera to be developed in order to get your holiday snaps. There were two options you could pick from. Normal people got them developed into, well, photos. If, on the other hand, your sole thought in taking the pictures in the first place was the future torment of your friends and relatives, you got slides. These could be loaded up into a projector and shown to hapless guests ad infinitum. It was a form of torture, sure, but you have to remember this was centuries before the Geneva convention.

Reading Thomas Wolfe's chronicle of his protagonist's family, like nearly all other American authors' similar chronicles, is exactly like looking at someone's vacation slides. You want to stand up and shout: "I don't care!" The first three chapters of Part One are dedicated to the mind-numbing tedium of the Gant family. Matters of business and property, family history, and especially money, are dealt with in suffocating detail. This chronic overexposition stretches to cover food, too; there are endless lists of foodstuffs and desriptions of eating, cooking and of the food itself. None of this has any conspicuous literary merit, or any storytelling purpose: the author just seems to be convinced that it's vitally important for us to know what kinds of fruit the Gant family ate for its own sake. At one point, there's a multi-page list of the smells the young protagonist has encountered. Smells.

This might not be so bad, but it's combined with another problem of American literature: flowery prose and pathos. The great, overflowing emotions fairly gush off the page in paragraph upon paragraph of "oh, woe is me". Wolfe indulges in entire paragraphs where he lets the pen fly and describes, in his own pseudo-poetic style, the terrible angst and pathos of his characters, from the drunk father to the frightened mother and even, as quoted above, the entirely implausible existential angst of a year-old child. One expects the baby's first words to be an eloquent lament to the sky on the crushing misery of the human condition.

In short, the book is rich with lyrical prose in the same way that nuclear waste is rich with radiation: true, but you sure don't want any on you. The syrupy prose, gushing adjectives, endless exposition of inanity and interminable lists combine for a reading experience "rich" enough to induce vomiting.

My recommendation? I don't know. I couldn't be bothered to finish it. The book is massively long and tremendously boring. About a hundred pages in I still didn't care about any of the characters, or feel like suffering through another "stream of consciousness" narrative or account of a land deal. I predict most other people won't, either. Give this one a miss.