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Title: Look Homeward, Angel
Author: Thomas Wolfe
Genre: Literary coming-of-age
Thingummies: 1.5
Synopsis: Arrogant kid grows up at the turn of the last century in a Podunk town as part of an incredibly dysfunctional family.
Thoughts: I understand that this book is considered to be deeply influential to a number of respected 20th century writers. And I realize that a number of the passages are experimental and ground-breaking.
That said, my god, this is the one of the most over-written, purple, maudlin, and pretentious things I've read in some time.
There's essentially no plot. As far as I can tell, none of the characters have an arc to speak of. I think the fact that all of the family members are contradictory is supposed to make them nuanced, but they're just caricatures. He's a fluent drunkard, she's cruelly mothering, and so on. Every single person is bitter. Our protagonist claims to have been manipulative and desperate to escape from infancy onward. The idea that this is somewhat autobiographical is horrifying from the perspective that a child grew up in an environment like this, but also that the author seems to think that his conduct makes him admirable in any way. Eccentricity is not automatically a mark of genius--a tendency to bray in people's faces just makes you an ass.
And if I had to read the phrases "o lost!" or "a stone, a leaf, a door" one more time, I think I would have hurled the book at the wall.
The author mistakes wordiness for wisdom and misanthropy for profundity. Really, a waste of time.
Author: Thomas Wolfe
Genre: Literary coming-of-age
Thingummies: 1.5
Synopsis: Arrogant kid grows up at the turn of the last century in a Podunk town as part of an incredibly dysfunctional family.
Thoughts: I understand that this book is considered to be deeply influential to a number of respected 20th century writers. And I realize that a number of the passages are experimental and ground-breaking.
That said, my god, this is the one of the most over-written, purple, maudlin, and pretentious things I've read in some time.
There's essentially no plot. As far as I can tell, none of the characters have an arc to speak of. I think the fact that all of the family members are contradictory is supposed to make them nuanced, but they're just caricatures. He's a fluent drunkard, she's cruelly mothering, and so on. Every single person is bitter. Our protagonist claims to have been manipulative and desperate to escape from infancy onward. The idea that this is somewhat autobiographical is horrifying from the perspective that a child grew up in an environment like this, but also that the author seems to think that his conduct makes him admirable in any way. Eccentricity is not automatically a mark of genius--a tendency to bray in people's faces just makes you an ass.
And if I had to read the phrases "o lost!" or "a stone, a leaf, a door" one more time, I think I would have hurled the book at the wall.
The author mistakes wordiness for wisdom and misanthropy for profundity. Really, a waste of time.
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Date: 2013-09-11 08:52 pm (UTC)From:And no, I wouldn't particularly recommend the source material. Unless you really want to have a half-abandoned/half-spoiled brat muttering "o lost!" at you every other chapter.
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Date: 2013-09-11 09:39 pm (UTC)From:Crowley basically uses a lot of those same narrative vocal ticks in his writing, but his protagonist, while a serious sad sack, is not as spoiled as Wolfe's sounds. Crowley is also doing some clever stuff with meta-story and identity conflation and the nature of human memory which transcends the somewhat plodding way that the books meander through the plot. I think it's possible he didn't know where the story was going. It has a lot elements (John Dee figures heavily in a sort-of reverse frame-story) and is in some ways what Crowley talks about a fictitious author doing in his earlier Little, Big which is that it's a reexamination of themes from his previous work with a broader scope over a lot more pages.
I really enjoyed the books for their somewhat dreamlike quality, but I admit, that like some Patricia McKillip books, what really stayed with me were the details and the relationships, and not so much the plot. I may someday attempt an end-to-end reread, since I read them over the course of some 15 years as they came out.