A review by alisonjfields
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

3.0

Someone in one of the reviews on this page remarks that this book hasn't aged well. That may be true, though, to my mind, it doesn't seem anymore antiquated than most of its peers. What's more true is that this book hasn't aged well for me, personally. I read it when I was fifteen, a high school student in Asheville, living a couple of miles, as the crow flies from Wolfe's Old Kentucky Home. Which is sort of surreal experience. My neighborhood was referenced in the book (albeit by a different name) and I had a very keen sense of the geography. In 1991, downtown Asheville was still early in the process of revitalization that would turn a city largely unchanged from 1931 into the uber-trendy resort town it since become (and I hardly recognize). I'd spent hours of my childhood sitting on the porch of the Wolfe House, while my mother sketched its windows from the bench on the sidewalk out front. I knew the ladies that ran the museum and I went through the house so many time I could draw you a map from memory. When you're from Asheville and have even the most remote literary aspirations, it is assumed that you will get around to reading Wolfe, specifically "Angel." And it will mean something to you. Just as it is assumed that you may get to a point when you can't go home again either.

At fifteen, I thought this book was brilliant and meaningful, an assumption helped by the fact that the first love of my life also loved this book. At thirty-three, I think "Look Homeward Angel" is a little purple, definitely overwrought and should have been cut by half in its current form. But "Angel" is definitely a young person's book. And I almost think the very things I find most taxing about it now are the things I loved the most about it when I was a kid.