I don't get it.Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" (YCGHA) currently enjoys a 4.04/5 rating on Goodreads and hovers near a 4/5 in Amazon. I don't understand why. The book (which can be hardly called a novel) is a disjointed, meandering, verbose effort, full of self-importance and navel-gazing. Unless the vast majority of readers just really like lots of adjectives, my guess is that most people rate this book highly because it's a "classic" and giving it a high score means that you "get it" because you're the sort of person who "understands classics." I make no claims to that lofty throne, and I don't really think particularly highly of literary critics, so I feel comfortable declaring that I didn't enjoy this book.It was my understanding that YCGHA is about a writer whose bestselling book draws from his own life and thus attracts the ire of his old friends who felt their lives were exposed. (I'm considering some similar projects myself, and thought this might provide some perspective.) This is, in fact, the plot of about 10-15% of the 638 pages, although if "plot" implies "resolution" then it's the improper word to use here. Wolfe, and his alter ego George Webber, don't see any of their stories through to the end. The same goes for other stories in the book - the detailed description of a Manhattan party, the life and family of Fox Edwards, etc - which go into great detail abotu characters that disappear only a few pages later and never reappear. As a novel, the book is simply a mess, and no first-year creative writing student would get away with it. The point of the book, of course, are probably not the stories in which "characters do things" - that's for the commoners to read. Wolfe just uses this book to pontificate on the changes in 1920s and 1930s America. No doubt this was a period of change, as urbanization alone radically altered the face of America. Wolfe offers some interesting descriptions of the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression (although less on either than I might have liked): the images of celebration and of despair are some of his best passages, even if they don't lead to any action. The problem is that Wolfe's "analysis" is shallow and self-absorbed. Businessmen are gamblers! Lawyers are dishonest! The good old days were better! That's roughly the extent of Wolfe's insight, and his predictive commentary isn't much more incisive. Yes, the changes to America (and the world) were big, but they weren't for the worse - the world is a better place now than it was then, including morally. Wolfe comes off more as a "kids these days" guy than a chronicler of a period of upheaval. I suppose Wolfe's appeal comes from lovers of beautiful language, which YCGHA has in stretches. There are some well-crafted sentences here, usually at their best when they're short and to the point: "Anyone is happy who confidently awaits the fulfillment of his highest dreams." "And women— well, they were women, and there was no help for that."Wolfe overreaches when he tries to talk about the human condition and the role of the artist within it (and he loves to talk about the artist):"It armed them with a philosophy, an aesthetic, of escapism. It tended to create in those of us who were later to become artists not only a special but a privileged character: each of us tended to think of himself as a person who was exempt from the human laws that govern other men, who was not subject to the same desires, the same feelings, the same passions— who was, in short, a kind of beautiful disease in nature, like a pearl in an oyster."At his worst, Wolfe is so wordy that I feel even William Faulkner would have told him to get to the point and Ernest Hemingway would have murdered him outright. Beginning writers are told "show, don't tell." Wolfe is not a beginner, and he reserves the right to tell whenever it suits him. He'll explain in great detail the thoughts and features of individual characters, groups they observe, and entire nations, rarely bothering to justify his conclusions. There is some good language here, but it comes at a high price. My experience with this book is best captured by a more efficient quote from the video game Road To The World Cup 1998: "A dull, goalless draw here, and it couldn't have ended soon enough as far as I'm concerned."
Re: _You Can't Go Home Again _ (1940) By Thomas Wolfe(I read to page 195 but did not finish the book.)Added 3/1/11.This is very dense reading, but I was floored by its beauty. I copied the following quote by hand, before the days of computers:=========================== "Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen. "The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change. "The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same. "All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever. "The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April."-Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again", p.40 of the Signet Edition=================================I didn't get much further than that in the book. The print was small the the prose was dense. (My notes show that I read to page 195.)I found the following quote of Wolfe's at Goodreads:**************************************"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."— Thomas WolfeFROM: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...*************************************Below is another quote copied from a newsgroup (It's actually a shortened version of the one above):~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"You can't go back home to your family--To a young man's dream of fame and glory,To the country cottage away from strife and conflict,To the father you have lost,To the old forms and systems of things,Which seemed everlasting but are changing all the time."--Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)_You Can't Go Home Again_ [1940]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Some day I should go back and try reading this book again... in larger print. :)
What do You think about You Can't Go Home Again (1998)?
The book has some beautiful moments, but to find them you have to wade through endless description of minutiae. Every scene is so dense with detail, that you begin to feel that his objective in writing this novel was to hone his ability to convey the aesthetics of a situation and the thought processes of his characters. He is eloquent and has a flawless eye, but in my view the description detracts from the story, which develops at an excruciating pace. If you are more oriented towards beautiful language, or enjoy stories that seem to be told as though you are looking through the lens of a camera, then you will love this book. But if you are looking for a novel that moves forward with pace and tension, whose characters you will be invested in before page 295, you might reconsider reading this one.
—Michael
At page 454, I am abandoning this text, at least for a while. *You Can't Go Home Again* is such an influential work, especially within American literature, that I had to continually remind myself that what struck me as "old hat" or cliche, was, in all reality, fairly innovative; the passages that reminded me of Kerouac, were, in fact, the passages that inspired Kerouac. This work has some exceptionally beautiful and affecting passages--I'm thinking, most recently in my reading, of the suicide scene at the Admiral Drake hotel in Brooklyn, which I especially loved for its narrative shift, in which the narrator latches on to a detail as minute as the name of the hotel from which this victim leapt to his death, and begins to address Sir Francis Drake directly in an attempt to explain the history of modernity through this single event. In other words, the "story" behind the "news".This is Wolfe's strength. He is able to look at individuals and seemingly unique events--someone or something that piques his literary interest--and execute an analysis of these singularities in such a way that they are rendered universal. The guy selling tobacco and newspapers on a lonely street corner; the pompous actor throwing an extravagant party amidst the stock market crash; the unmarried sister whose oddness cements her spinsterhood; the impoverished author living in squalor in the basement of a brownstone in Brooklyn; each of these characters embody "America" and the struggle that we call "life" in the America of the late-20s and early-30s. For this, I give Wolfe a tri-stared rating.What Wolfe does not grasp is brevity. Admittedly, my favorite works of literature are often large-scale novels--think Joyce, Pynchon, Dickens. All I require from a text, when you really get down to it, is insight in theme or plot--be it wholly innovative, or merely a universal problem shed in "new" light--or fabulous writing, be it orginative, quirky, or just solid. If a text possesses an abundance of even one of these traits, I am generally satisfied. Of course, my favorite texts (*Ulysses*, *V.*, *Bleak House*, to echo the authors above) contain a delightful combination of them all.Wolfe does not, in my opinion, possess much of any of these traits, thus, entailing that *YCGHA* is, ultimately, long, boring, and inconsequential, in my opinion. He is certainly eloquent--when writing of his home in Asheville, NC, he executes marvelous description, as the text was just as I experienced when I was there a few months ago--but his writing, as a whole, is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact, it's rather plain. And he's really not insightful. When, in the text, George Webber very proudly claims that he is not an intellectual, it is all-too-obvious that he is acting as the mouthpiece for Wolfe himself. Not that writers need to be endowed with a monstrous intellect, but if one's writing is commonplace and unalluring, I at least hope that reading their plain script will prove affectingly insightful. I, sadly, did not find this to be the case here.
—Cody
So beautifully written. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:"All things belonging to the earth will never change. . . the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dustof lovers long since buried in the earth - all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever." ". . . there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.""Discovery in itself is not enough. It's not enough to find out what things are. You've also go to find out where they come from, where each bricks fits in the wall."
—Kitty
