Perhaps you can go home again. A strange and lovely return indeed, for which much thanks to the enterprising Bruccolis.
The famous first version of Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Wolfe’s titanic debut novel that had been whipped into publishable shape by Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins.
At least that’s the standard version—now challenged by the Bruccolis, who have “established” this “new” text (published to commemorate Wolfe’s centenary) and restored 60,00 words Perkins cut from the original manuscript. It’s a commonplace that anyone who encounters Wolfe’s soaring, rhapsodic autobiographical tale in adolescence can’t possibly reread it in adulthood. Well, yes and no. The story of authorial surrogate Eugene Gant’s struggle to emerge from the inhibiting shadows of his grandiose alcoholic father and puritanical mother, as well as from the roughhewn provincialism of his North Carolina origins, should still strike responsive chords even in readers understandably put off by Wolfe’s efforts to elevate even his characters’ pettiness and bawdry to heroic, if not mythic, proportions. As Matthew Bruccoli’s (slightly defensive) introduction justly observes, the more generous expanse of O Lost offers richly detailed background information that makes Eugene’s “artistic” temperament more credible, and its comparative sexual frankness goes a long way toward explaining the Gants’ luridly heightened passions. This most Wordsworthian of all American novels is a very literary book as well, and the restoration of Wolfe’s numerous allusions and imitations (to and of Eliot, Conrad, and Joyce, among others) is at best a mixed blessing. Perkins was neither butcher nor prude: perhaps it’s fair to say he saw Wolfe as a brilliant regional autobiographical writer, not as a cosmopolitan intellectual attempting a truly encyclopedic “novel of inclusion.” This unabridged version is lumbering and ungainly. It’s also filled with gorgeous incidental visionary writing (“Spring was coming on again across the earth like a light sparkle of water spray: all the men who had died were making their strange and lovely return in blossom and flower”).
Perhaps you can go home again. A strange and lovely return indeed, for which much thanks to the enterprising Bruccolis.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2000
ISBN: 1-57003-369-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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