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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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