Finished: Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe). Oh my, what a laborious book! This is actually an old book I own that has my maiden name scrawled on the pages in my high school writing. Was this an assigned reading book in high school for me?? If so, I know that I never read it. I can't even imagine reading this book in high school. It is soooooo long and, though it has some moments of very nice writing, so very difficult to really sink into and enjoy. Laborious...that is the word that I keep coming back to! It's not even on the list of the top 100 books that I'm going to try to tackle, yet when I looked it up it was definitely considered a "classic."

Anyway, Look Homeward, Angel is basically an autobiographical tale of the author, Thomas Wolfe. The primary family of the book is the Gant family, and the main character is the youngest son, Eugene Gant. Eugene is born in 1900, six years after his last sibling, into a dysfunctional, highly eccentric, whacko family. Do all those words mean the same thing? lol. Eugene's mother, Eliza, is a child of the Civil War of the south. She remembers vividly the days and years with no food and terrible hardship. Therefore, even though she appears to make pretty good money by running a boarding house and accumulating property in their North Carolina town, the family lives like they're on their last dime...and she always, always squawks about not having money! Oliver Gant, Eugene's father, is a combustible, self-centered, stone-cutter. He does love his wife and children, but he's a wander-lusting eccentric, and a drunk. His fits of manic alcohol-induced rage are cringe worthy, as we witness the whole family when the children are young, subject to these fits.

Oldest son, Steve, becomes a worthless, bad-check-writing drunk as well. Oldest daughter, Daisy, marries young and moves away to have her own family. Youngest daughter, Helen, is "just like her father" and is the only one, even at a very young age, who can talk him down from his alcoholic rages. She becomes his caretaker for the rest of his life, even after she marries. Twins, Grover and Ben are rambunctious boys, but the family is changed forever when Grover dies of typhoid fever at the age of 11. Ben, really the only person who Eugene is close to, is loved around town, but is a chain smoker who works mostly doing odd newspaper jobs. He doesn't talk much, but when he does, people listen. He's sickly for years "in the lungs", so doesn't pass the physical exam to enlist when America enters WWI. Luke, the next to the youngest after Eugene, is a likable salesman with a funny walk and a stutter. It is important to him to be liked by all. With Steve and Daisy moved away, Helen and Luke seem to commiserate together the most, thinking that Eugene is the one who is given the most. This is because at a very young age, Eugene shows his brilliance and he is groomed for college. None of the other children ever feel a love from the parents or a respect...yet, they have plenty of good family Christmases, etc. They just happen to show their gut-raw emotions at all these gatherings as well, and many times that leads to knock down, drag out fights.

So...the majority of the book deals with Eugene's complex thoughts and emotions. He goes off on so many tangents about what the true meaning of life and death and living are that I get lost. He lives in a fantasy world made up of most of the literary characters that he reads about. He is successful in college, and by the end of the book has graduated at 19 and is headed to Harvard for grad school. The climax of the book is the death of beloved brother, Ben, at the age of 26 from pneumonia. We watch as he suffers an agonizing death. The entire family is devastated, and Eugene is lost. The only person who he felt a connection with, who would tell him like it is, was gone. This part of the book was very moving and read fast. Other parts of the book, not so much.

I can't possibly say that it's anywhere near a favorite book, but I'm so glad I finally read this book that has been staring at me from my high school years. I marked only one passage to write down because I thought it was pretty genius, or at least it showed the early genius of Eugene himself. It is when Eugene is born and his thoughts about the world around him after he is placed in his crib alone.

    And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he 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 any one, 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. 

Yes, lordy, that's how the whole book was! And those were just his thoughts as an infant! Imagine reading his thoughts as an adolescent...well, I did. :-) So....on to something not so wrought with introspective angst this time?