What do you think?
Rate this book
You Can't Go Home Again
George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town he is shaken by the force of the outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and friends feel naked and exposed by the truths they have seen in his book, and their fury drives him from his home. He begins a search for his own identity that takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow. At last Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow, and hope.
Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1940
820 people are currently reading
13228 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Wolfe
410 books1,142 followersPeople best know American writer Thomas Clayton Wolfe for his autobiographical novels, including
Look Homeward, Angel
(1929) and the posthumously published
You Can't Go Home Again
(1940).
Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels and many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He mixed highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. Wolfe wrote and published books that vividly reflect on American culture and the mores, filtered through his sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. People widely knew him during his own lifetime.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan with Gap Creek; Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Wolfe influenced Ray Bradbury, who included Wolfe as a character in his books.
(from Wikipedia)
Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels and many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He mixed highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. Wolfe wrote and published books that vividly reflect on American culture and the mores, filtered through his sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. People widely knew him during his own lifetime.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan with Gap Creek; Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Wolfe influenced Ray Bradbury, who included Wolfe as a character in his books.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 452 reviews
December 18, 2007
Written in 1934, nothing has changed. People still fall in love, get hurt, have dreams, kill, lie and cheat. There was a total lack of respect for the earth then as now. Overbuilding and greed were rampant then, no worse and not better than now. Greed drives need.
Still, a good story of hope, perseverance and victory of the spirit.
Still, a good story of hope, perseverance and victory of the spirit.
October 30, 2023
You should stop what you’re doing, right now, and take up this book. You should put down the book you’ve been reading – that one that you’ve been meaning to finish for a while now – and begin reading this book. You should immerse yourself in this novel, commit yourself to it, until you finish it. Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again is that important. It is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
There is a decided pathos in knowing that Wolfe did not live to see the publication of You Can’t Go Home Again. The great North Carolina author was just 37 years old when he died, much too young, in 1938, leaving vast sheafs of unfinished manuscript behind him. You Can’t Go Home Again was assembled by editors from those pages and pages of manuscript, but one wouldn’t know it from reading the novel. This book seems every bit as organically complete in its craftsmanship as earlier Wolfe novels like Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935).
Everyone who has ever read anything by Thomas Wolfe knows that Wolfe’s work is highly, profoundly autobiographical. Wolfe’s own life experiences always formed the basis of his literary art; and You Can’t Go Home Again is no exception in that regard. Here, Wolfe’s stand-in is not the Eugene Gant of earlier novels, but rather George Webber, a novelist who has achieved his dreams of literary success and must live with the consequences, good and bad.
Wolfe’s many and devoted fans know the story of the dramatic social firestorm that unfolded in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, when Look Homeward, Angel was published. The real-life people on whom Wolfe had based his characters saw themselves in the novel, and did not like the way in which Wolfe had portrayed them. You Can’t Go Home Again recreates those aspects of Wolfe’s life, as George Webber returns to his hometown of Libya Hill for a family funeral. On the train to Libya Hill, the misanthropic Judge Rumford Bland asks George, “Do you think you can really go home again?” (p. 69); and, George’s denials notwithstanding, the question haunts him.
The publication of Webber’s debut novel Home to Our Mountains, with its realistic and unflattering portrayals of Libya Hill residents, causes a stir of just the kind that the real-life Look Homeward, Angel occasioned in Asheville in 1929. George gets anonymous letters like one that claims that “the crime that you have done is worse than Cain”, or another stating that “We’ll kill you if you ever come back here” (p. 261).
And when one of George’s best friends from Libya Hill, a part-Cherokee baseball player named Nebraska Crane, tells George that he can’t wait to read George’s book, because he’s heard that there’s a baseball player just like him in the book – “Said I’m in there so’s anyone would know me!” (p. 264) – George is saddened. He knows that he will never see his friend Nebraska Crane again – and that, if they ever do meet again, it will be as enemies, not friends. Literary success, it seems, has its price, and George truly cannot go home again to Libya Hill.
It is because of passages like these that I find You Can’t Go Home Again to be one of the most important American novels ever written – because of the ways in which it engages and interrogates the American Dream. We are all used to the mythologizing of the American ideology of achieving success through hard work, as in the novels of Horatio Alger; but like F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925), Wolfe asks the reader to contemplate the consequences of that success that we Americans are taught to lionize above all things else.
For modern readers, the portion of You Can’t Go Home Again that may hold greatest interest is Book VI, “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” The German translation of the title, “Nun Will Ich Ihnen 'Was Sagen”, is there for a reason – because this section provides a chilling look at Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. Wolfe, a longtime lover of the German culture that was part of his heritage, had visited Germany during the era of the Weimar Republic; but he returned to Germany after Hitler's seizure of power because of one of the Nazi regime's lesser-known laws: that foreign authors could gain access to their German royalties only by traveling to Germany and spending their royalties there. Therefore, Wolfe traveled to Germany; and because he died in 1938, before World War II broke out, his account of Webber’s frightening odyssey among the Nazis provides an exceptionally clear time-capsule view of history’s most hideous dictatorship.
“I Have a Thing to Tell You” sets forth the stages of Wolfe’s disillusionment with his once-beloved Germany. The initial glow of Webber’s literary fame in Germany, with rave reviews and love affairs, fades as he comes to sense the fear of friends who worry that a careless word, overheard by the wrong person, will get them a visit from the Gestapo and a one-way ticket to the concentration camps. And on the train out of Germany, when the train is stopped at the Belgian border, George sees Nazi officials stopping an acquaintance from his train ride – an attorney, who turns out to be Jewish, and whose “crime” consists of wanting to get out of Germany with enough money to live on for a time while making a new start.
One senses in this passage the agony that Wolfe felt on that train, watching the Nazis taking an innocent man into custody, and almost certainly to his death:
“As the car in which he had been riding slid by, [the attorney] lifted his pasty face and terror-stricken eyes….He looked once, directly and steadfastly, at his former companions, and they at him. And in that gaze there was all the unmeasured weight of man’s mortal anguish. George and the others felt somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. They all felt that they were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity; not to some pathetic stranger, some chance acquaintance of the voyage, but to mankind; not to some nameless cipher out of life, but to the fading image of a brother’s face.” (p. 540)
Webber in this novel, like Wolfe in real life, publishes an extended denunciation of the Nazi regime, knowing that the regime will respond by declaring him persona non grata anywhere in the German Reich. Exiled from his physical hometown of Libya Hill, George is now also exiled from his spiritual homeland of Germany. Like Thomas Wolfe – or like you, or like me – George Webber can’t go home again.
This vast, sprawling novel gives the reader Thomas Wolfe’s enormous, hyperbolic, chaotic, wondrous, disorganized genius at its finest. Wolfe may have been, in many ways, the closest thing we will ever have to an American Dickens; the literary canvas on which he painted was that broad. You Can’t Go Home Again is a book that everyone should read, in recognition of our shared status as exiles of one kind or another.
There is a decided pathos in knowing that Wolfe did not live to see the publication of You Can’t Go Home Again. The great North Carolina author was just 37 years old when he died, much too young, in 1938, leaving vast sheafs of unfinished manuscript behind him. You Can’t Go Home Again was assembled by editors from those pages and pages of manuscript, but one wouldn’t know it from reading the novel. This book seems every bit as organically complete in its craftsmanship as earlier Wolfe novels like Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935).
Everyone who has ever read anything by Thomas Wolfe knows that Wolfe’s work is highly, profoundly autobiographical. Wolfe’s own life experiences always formed the basis of his literary art; and You Can’t Go Home Again is no exception in that regard. Here, Wolfe’s stand-in is not the Eugene Gant of earlier novels, but rather George Webber, a novelist who has achieved his dreams of literary success and must live with the consequences, good and bad.
Wolfe’s many and devoted fans know the story of the dramatic social firestorm that unfolded in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, when Look Homeward, Angel was published. The real-life people on whom Wolfe had based his characters saw themselves in the novel, and did not like the way in which Wolfe had portrayed them. You Can’t Go Home Again recreates those aspects of Wolfe’s life, as George Webber returns to his hometown of Libya Hill for a family funeral. On the train to Libya Hill, the misanthropic Judge Rumford Bland asks George, “Do you think you can really go home again?” (p. 69); and, George’s denials notwithstanding, the question haunts him.
The publication of Webber’s debut novel Home to Our Mountains, with its realistic and unflattering portrayals of Libya Hill residents, causes a stir of just the kind that the real-life Look Homeward, Angel occasioned in Asheville in 1929. George gets anonymous letters like one that claims that “the crime that you have done is worse than Cain”, or another stating that “We’ll kill you if you ever come back here” (p. 261).
And when one of George’s best friends from Libya Hill, a part-Cherokee baseball player named Nebraska Crane, tells George that he can’t wait to read George’s book, because he’s heard that there’s a baseball player just like him in the book – “Said I’m in there so’s anyone would know me!” (p. 264) – George is saddened. He knows that he will never see his friend Nebraska Crane again – and that, if they ever do meet again, it will be as enemies, not friends. Literary success, it seems, has its price, and George truly cannot go home again to Libya Hill.
It is because of passages like these that I find You Can’t Go Home Again to be one of the most important American novels ever written – because of the ways in which it engages and interrogates the American Dream. We are all used to the mythologizing of the American ideology of achieving success through hard work, as in the novels of Horatio Alger; but like F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925), Wolfe asks the reader to contemplate the consequences of that success that we Americans are taught to lionize above all things else.
For modern readers, the portion of You Can’t Go Home Again that may hold greatest interest is Book VI, “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” The German translation of the title, “Nun Will Ich Ihnen 'Was Sagen”, is there for a reason – because this section provides a chilling look at Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. Wolfe, a longtime lover of the German culture that was part of his heritage, had visited Germany during the era of the Weimar Republic; but he returned to Germany after Hitler's seizure of power because of one of the Nazi regime's lesser-known laws: that foreign authors could gain access to their German royalties only by traveling to Germany and spending their royalties there. Therefore, Wolfe traveled to Germany; and because he died in 1938, before World War II broke out, his account of Webber’s frightening odyssey among the Nazis provides an exceptionally clear time-capsule view of history’s most hideous dictatorship.
“I Have a Thing to Tell You” sets forth the stages of Wolfe’s disillusionment with his once-beloved Germany. The initial glow of Webber’s literary fame in Germany, with rave reviews and love affairs, fades as he comes to sense the fear of friends who worry that a careless word, overheard by the wrong person, will get them a visit from the Gestapo and a one-way ticket to the concentration camps. And on the train out of Germany, when the train is stopped at the Belgian border, George sees Nazi officials stopping an acquaintance from his train ride – an attorney, who turns out to be Jewish, and whose “crime” consists of wanting to get out of Germany with enough money to live on for a time while making a new start.
One senses in this passage the agony that Wolfe felt on that train, watching the Nazis taking an innocent man into custody, and almost certainly to his death:
“As the car in which he had been riding slid by, [the attorney] lifted his pasty face and terror-stricken eyes….He looked once, directly and steadfastly, at his former companions, and they at him. And in that gaze there was all the unmeasured weight of man’s mortal anguish. George and the others felt somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. They all felt that they were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity; not to some pathetic stranger, some chance acquaintance of the voyage, but to mankind; not to some nameless cipher out of life, but to the fading image of a brother’s face.” (p. 540)
Webber in this novel, like Wolfe in real life, publishes an extended denunciation of the Nazi regime, knowing that the regime will respond by declaring him persona non grata anywhere in the German Reich. Exiled from his physical hometown of Libya Hill, George is now also exiled from his spiritual homeland of Germany. Like Thomas Wolfe – or like you, or like me – George Webber can’t go home again.
This vast, sprawling novel gives the reader Thomas Wolfe’s enormous, hyperbolic, chaotic, wondrous, disorganized genius at its finest. Wolfe may have been, in many ways, the closest thing we will ever have to an American Dickens; the literary canvas on which he painted was that broad. You Can’t Go Home Again is a book that everyone should read, in recognition of our shared status as exiles of one kind or another.
June 14, 2016
I finally finished this 704-page tome. It took me almost a year: I kept putting it down--sometimes for weeks at a time--and picking it back up again. Every time I started reading it again I was always glad, though, because I really liked his writing. There were a couple of chapters that I thought were overly long, and possibly 100 or so pages could have been cut entirely without leaving the novel lacking. However, I'm glad he rambled on because he led me to some beautiful places. Thomas Wolfe really had a talent for getting to the heart of situations, thoughts and feelings that are difficult to express in such a way that a reader knows exactly where the writer is coming from. His characterizations of people were so vivid that I feel as if I know these people he described so well and with so much heart and feeling. Usually with books this long, I keep thinking, "Let it be over already!" I thought that while reading this book, too, but at least I thoroughly enjoyed where Thomas Wolfe took me and how he got me there.
read-partially
September 25, 2018Re: _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 Wolfe
FROM: 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. :)
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018:
I watched the movie, "Genius" (2016)
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1703957/...
"A chronicle of Max Perkins's time as the book editor at Scribner, where he oversaw works by Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others."
Stars: Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman
(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 Wolfe
FROM: 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. :)
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018:
I watched the movie, "Genius" (2016)
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1703957/...
"A chronicle of Max Perkins's time as the book editor at Scribner, where he oversaw works by Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others."
Stars: Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman
November 7, 2016
A ponderous, sprawling, autobiographical novel of America and Europe in the 1920’s and ‘30’s that reveals acute observation on the human condition at the time. All of Thomas Woolfe’s novels seem to be drawn from real life. They are largely plot-less, character focussed and disjointed, and stitched together by painstaking editing that included the writing of whole sections by the editor to hold the disparate parts together.
In this seven-part tome, each part labeled a book—carved out a larger body of unpublished work left at the time of the author’s early death that resulted in two posthumous novels and a collection of shorter pieces—Wolfe covers the fallout from the publication of his first novel and the success he achieved with his second, with travels through the chasm of the seven intervening years when he toiled in the dark through the Great Depression, fighting his own demons and the ones he had unleashed in public.
In Book 1, his fictional alter ego, George Webber, returns home to Libya Hill in the deep south for his aunt’s funeral and visits a community caught up in a bubble economy of real estate speculation; success and happiness are standard expectations of the time. George likens the Company President addressing his sales organization to Napoleon or General Grant speaking to their troops. Companies, George observes, create needs, they do not satisfy them, and salesmanship is the enemy of truth.
Book 2 is one big party in a wealthy house, the lady of which is George’s lover, ten years his senior. George paints a disparaging picture of the rich: they pick on their servants’ dishonesty while ignoring their own. He concludes that privilege and truth are strange bedfellows and that he needs a break from his lover in order to salvage his art. A fire in the building levels the playing field between the have and have-nots and gives George his out.
Book 3 sees the Crash of 1929 realize his fears expressed in Book 1. His first novel is also published, an exposé of his small town, and brings out a storm of hate aimed at him, partly inflicted by the bursting of the property bubble, partly inflicted by him. The literati in New York lap up his book and he falls into the company of rich men and women who want to be seen in his company. But success is an illusion, he realizes, when his millionaire sponsor dumps him for coming second in a literary prize contest.
Book 4 is his down and out life in Brooklyn where he paints a cross section of interesting characters, from debutantes to the downtrodden. This section is full of essays on the city, on the state of man, on the distinction between creators and academics: “creators absorb and extract the truth and convert it to art, while intellectuals absorb nothing.” There is also an extended character sketch of his trusted editor Fox - not sure how it fits into the novel, but editors were important to Webber (and to Wolfe), to help shape his amorphous barrage of content into coherent structures for the benefit of readers.
Book 5 takes us to England where George with the help of his landlady, Mrs. Purvis, absorbs the social life of that nation. He concludes that the 10% of Big People have all the wealth in the land, leaving the balance 90% of Little People with nothing, and that the man who moves to the countryside from the city is a failed intellectual. Through his misadventure with the famous visiting American writer McHarg, he realizes that the fame he is chasing is a pyrrhic victory.
Book 6 is set in Germany and is comprised mainly of a long train journey in a compartment with a cross section of that country’s society, including a fearful Jew. The evils of the Nazis, and the fact that Nazism could also take root in America, where the “dog-eat-dog” culture of commerce acts as a catalyst, is brought sharply home to George. It is ironic, for at this time his second book has been published and has finally brought him the fame he has desired. He leaves Germany realizing that just as in his home town, he can’t go home again.
Book 7 is a confessional letter to his editor Fox in which he retraces his life into childhood and to some of the wrong turns he took. I am not sure how this section fits into the novel, for it is more a postscript. And yet given the fact that Webber (and Woolfe) had such symbiotic and tumultuous relationships with his editors, I guess his editor felt it worthy of inclusion.
In conclusion, I felt that even though Woolfe makes some penetrating observations on humanity, writes beautiful prose, and draws some fine characters, this book could have been edited further. For example, the detailed descriptions of Fox and the Jack family ( Book 2) could have been shaved considerably. And yet, though I skipped several of the overwritten passages, I continued to read, for the novel possesses narrative thrust and provokes intellectual curiosity.
All in all, an unwieldy but penetrating book. Read it if you have time on your hands, and time to think.
In this seven-part tome, each part labeled a book—carved out a larger body of unpublished work left at the time of the author’s early death that resulted in two posthumous novels and a collection of shorter pieces—Wolfe covers the fallout from the publication of his first novel and the success he achieved with his second, with travels through the chasm of the seven intervening years when he toiled in the dark through the Great Depression, fighting his own demons and the ones he had unleashed in public.
In Book 1, his fictional alter ego, George Webber, returns home to Libya Hill in the deep south for his aunt’s funeral and visits a community caught up in a bubble economy of real estate speculation; success and happiness are standard expectations of the time. George likens the Company President addressing his sales organization to Napoleon or General Grant speaking to their troops. Companies, George observes, create needs, they do not satisfy them, and salesmanship is the enemy of truth.
Book 2 is one big party in a wealthy house, the lady of which is George’s lover, ten years his senior. George paints a disparaging picture of the rich: they pick on their servants’ dishonesty while ignoring their own. He concludes that privilege and truth are strange bedfellows and that he needs a break from his lover in order to salvage his art. A fire in the building levels the playing field between the have and have-nots and gives George his out.
Book 3 sees the Crash of 1929 realize his fears expressed in Book 1. His first novel is also published, an exposé of his small town, and brings out a storm of hate aimed at him, partly inflicted by the bursting of the property bubble, partly inflicted by him. The literati in New York lap up his book and he falls into the company of rich men and women who want to be seen in his company. But success is an illusion, he realizes, when his millionaire sponsor dumps him for coming second in a literary prize contest.
Book 4 is his down and out life in Brooklyn where he paints a cross section of interesting characters, from debutantes to the downtrodden. This section is full of essays on the city, on the state of man, on the distinction between creators and academics: “creators absorb and extract the truth and convert it to art, while intellectuals absorb nothing.” There is also an extended character sketch of his trusted editor Fox - not sure how it fits into the novel, but editors were important to Webber (and to Wolfe), to help shape his amorphous barrage of content into coherent structures for the benefit of readers.
Book 5 takes us to England where George with the help of his landlady, Mrs. Purvis, absorbs the social life of that nation. He concludes that the 10% of Big People have all the wealth in the land, leaving the balance 90% of Little People with nothing, and that the man who moves to the countryside from the city is a failed intellectual. Through his misadventure with the famous visiting American writer McHarg, he realizes that the fame he is chasing is a pyrrhic victory.
Book 6 is set in Germany and is comprised mainly of a long train journey in a compartment with a cross section of that country’s society, including a fearful Jew. The evils of the Nazis, and the fact that Nazism could also take root in America, where the “dog-eat-dog” culture of commerce acts as a catalyst, is brought sharply home to George. It is ironic, for at this time his second book has been published and has finally brought him the fame he has desired. He leaves Germany realizing that just as in his home town, he can’t go home again.
Book 7 is a confessional letter to his editor Fox in which he retraces his life into childhood and to some of the wrong turns he took. I am not sure how this section fits into the novel, for it is more a postscript. And yet given the fact that Webber (and Woolfe) had such symbiotic and tumultuous relationships with his editors, I guess his editor felt it worthy of inclusion.
In conclusion, I felt that even though Woolfe makes some penetrating observations on humanity, writes beautiful prose, and draws some fine characters, this book could have been edited further. For example, the detailed descriptions of Fox and the Jack family ( Book 2) could have been shaved considerably. And yet, though I skipped several of the overwritten passages, I continued to read, for the novel possesses narrative thrust and provokes intellectual curiosity.
All in all, an unwieldy but penetrating book. Read it if you have time on your hands, and time to think.
February 15, 2019
Several months ago I was listening to an OTR (old time radio) show called NBC university theatre which does a condensed version of a classic/celebrated books into a radio play, and I heard an interesting ending of a train scene. At the end of the show, they announced it was Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. What peaked my interest in reading the book was this scene where some man was trying to escape Germany & was captured. I did not understand what the story was about nor who the author was but it was enough for me to find out the whole story. I found out that this scene is only a small portion of what the novel was trying to say. When reading this book which is pretty close to an autobiography but in a fictionalized sense, meaning that the author took from his life & people he knew to write a story. So the Jewish man trying to escape from Germany but since he was a Jew was not allowed to travel especially taking money out of the country, this was witnessed by Wolfe when he visited Germany in 1936. Throughout his life he was a frequent traveler to Europe & meet many people he was friendly with in Germany, so he wanted to visit this country again in 1936 during the Olympics. He noticed a big change from the last visit 5 years earlier, not just in his friends but many things he witnessed during his stay that disturbed him. When he came back to the USA, he wrote a story in The New Republic called "I Have a Thing to Tell You." His books were soon banned in Germany as well as himself. He died at age 38 in 1938 from complications of miliary tuberculosis of the brain from pneumonia. This novel was written posthumous as also "The Web and the Rock". Many authors were influenced by Wolfe, Ray Bradbury & Jack Kerouac being a few. You Can't Go Home Again is a story about George Weber a first time writer & wondering if he will ever be able to write a second book & his want of fame. There is a lot that parallels his life & people he knows. He writes about a vast amount of people he meets from 1920-1930 & there concerns and his observations. What makes this book really interesting is he is living during pre stock market crash, the Depression & rising of Hitler in Germany. He has an unique way that he philosophies his life, others & the world around him. You get a different taste of despair of The Depression different than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. His hometowns mania before the crash & after, the trivialities of certain wealthy in NYC, hopelessness & suicide of countless many but a man jumping out of an hotel window sill's description is unforgettable. In the end you come out with a better understanding of being someone that lived during those times. One chapter shows that classics are out & an nonentity considered intelligential of the times was something of art because a person of class deems so but in reality it was a farce. He see everyone including himself in a microscope which shows all of the positive & negative aspects of humanity. In the end you can't go back to life as you were young or even back to your hometown without things being different & to change what needs to be change for the betterment is always something to strive for even if you are a fatalist.
Some excerpts-
"There came to human image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all-man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all- engulfing night.""Life had recently become too short for many things that people had once found time for. Life was simply too short for the perusal of any book longer than two hundred pages. As for 'War and Peace'- no doubt all 'they' said of it was true- but as oneself - well, one had tried, and really it was quite too- too-oh, well, life simply was too short. So life that year was far too short to be bothered by Tolstoy, Whitman, Dreiser, or Dean Swift. But life was not too short that year to be passionately concerned with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls."
"Here a town of fifty thousand people who had so abdicated every principle of personal and communal rectitude, to say nothing of common sense and decency, that when the blow fell they had no inner resources with which to meet it. The town almost literally blew its brains out.""It is only now, as I look back upon those years, that I can see in true perspective the meaning of what was happening to me then. For human nature is, alas, a muddy pool, too full of sediment, too murky with the deposits of time, too churned up by uncharted currents in the depths and in the surface, to reflect a sharp, precise, and wholly faithful image. For that, one has to wait until the waters settle down. It follows, then, that one can hope, however much he wishes that he could, to shed the old integuments of the soul as easily and completely as a snake sloughs off its outworn skin."
NBC University Theatre December 18, 1949
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...
Some excerpts-
"There came to human image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all-man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all- engulfing night.""Life had recently become too short for many things that people had once found time for. Life was simply too short for the perusal of any book longer than two hundred pages. As for 'War and Peace'- no doubt all 'they' said of it was true- but as oneself - well, one had tried, and really it was quite too- too-oh, well, life simply was too short. So life that year was far too short to be bothered by Tolstoy, Whitman, Dreiser, or Dean Swift. But life was not too short that year to be passionately concerned with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls."
"Here a town of fifty thousand people who had so abdicated every principle of personal and communal rectitude, to say nothing of common sense and decency, that when the blow fell they had no inner resources with which to meet it. The town almost literally blew its brains out.""It is only now, as I look back upon those years, that I can see in true perspective the meaning of what was happening to me then. For human nature is, alas, a muddy pool, too full of sediment, too murky with the deposits of time, too churned up by uncharted currents in the depths and in the surface, to reflect a sharp, precise, and wholly faithful image. For that, one has to wait until the waters settle down. It follows, then, that one can hope, however much he wishes that he could, to shed the old integuments of the soul as easily and completely as a snake sloughs off its outworn skin."
NBC University Theatre December 18, 1949
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...
March 15, 2010
This is another thing about whether you can go home. When I was little my father disowned us from both sides of our family. Only very recently, a year or two ago did I start seeing my mother's two sisters. I've been invited to a birthday for one of them this weekend, at which I would see oodles of my mother's side of the family, really all there would be to see. Do I go? Every time I think about it, I can't help saying to myself You Can't Go Home, but maybe you can? Maybe? If you suddenly for the first time, in effect, see all these people you might have spent your life with and didn't, is that like going home? I don't know....Does it work? Or will I just feel like I should have left things just as they were.
---------------------------------------------
I’ve always known the truth of this, you can’t go home again. Yet, as I’ve spent more time in Adelaide, my home town, over the last few months than I have collectively since I first left in the mid-eighties, I’ve found it even more painful than I expected. For the first time in so many years I’ve started taking buses again and reverting to childhood, sitting at the back, like a young love is going to magically appear next to me and…
I’ve started going to the shopping centre local to my mother again and just stepping into the place makes me want to cry. I don’t want to, please don’t make me go in there, I keep saying to my mother, it’s too big, I get lost, since I can’t tell her why. It, like the buses, is a time machine that takes me right back to my teens, right back to that heady time when everybody in the world loved you and you didn’t even notice, right back to a time where, in the tree of analysis, you took a move that determined your life from that point, but you are back there again, and this time, maybe, you could take that other move and maybe…
If you want to be in the place, the very place you are right now, if that is where you want to be, then everything that came before it, even the miserable, even the fucked-up-what-on-earth-were-you-thinking-about, every bit of it has brought you here.
So, I’m thinking I should spend some months with my mother, just move back to Adelaide for some months, why not, I’m living out of a suitcase anyway and she’d have a nice time and there really isn’t a reason it should hurt me, I love going for visits, it’s just a long visit, but. Usually I don’t go on a bus there. I never step foot in the shopping centre. You can’t go home, this won’t be going home because it can’t be. I shouldn’t be scared of this, should I.
---------------------------------------------
I’ve always known the truth of this, you can’t go home again. Yet, as I’ve spent more time in Adelaide, my home town, over the last few months than I have collectively since I first left in the mid-eighties, I’ve found it even more painful than I expected. For the first time in so many years I’ve started taking buses again and reverting to childhood, sitting at the back, like a young love is going to magically appear next to me and…
I’ve started going to the shopping centre local to my mother again and just stepping into the place makes me want to cry. I don’t want to, please don’t make me go in there, I keep saying to my mother, it’s too big, I get lost, since I can’t tell her why. It, like the buses, is a time machine that takes me right back to my teens, right back to that heady time when everybody in the world loved you and you didn’t even notice, right back to a time where, in the tree of analysis, you took a move that determined your life from that point, but you are back there again, and this time, maybe, you could take that other move and maybe…
If you want to be in the place, the very place you are right now, if that is where you want to be, then everything that came before it, even the miserable, even the fucked-up-what-on-earth-were-you-thinking-about, every bit of it has brought you here.
So, I’m thinking I should spend some months with my mother, just move back to Adelaide for some months, why not, I’m living out of a suitcase anyway and she’d have a nice time and there really isn’t a reason it should hurt me, I love going for visits, it’s just a long visit, but. Usually I don’t go on a bus there. I never step foot in the shopping centre. You can’t go home, this won’t be going home because it can’t be. I shouldn’t be scared of this, should I.
June 28, 2007
Faulkner called Wolfe the best of their generation, "the finest failure."
I admire most the scope of Wolfe's writing. It seems at times that he was trying to capture all of America in a single novel, and if he didn't quite make it he comes very, very close.
And he was, at his heart, hopeful: Wolfe believed in the possibility of religious transcendence and he believed in America, and the possibilities it had. Those twin optimisms, to me, lie at the heart of the very best moments of this novel.
And, as a bonus, he offers plenty of useful tidbits for aspiring writers:
"It all boiled down to this: honesty, sincerity, no compromise with truth - those were the elements of any art - and a writer, no matter what else he had, was just a hack without them."
I admire most the scope of Wolfe's writing. It seems at times that he was trying to capture all of America in a single novel, and if he didn't quite make it he comes very, very close.
And he was, at his heart, hopeful: Wolfe believed in the possibility of religious transcendence and he believed in America, and the possibilities it had. Those twin optimisms, to me, lie at the heart of the very best moments of this novel.
And, as a bonus, he offers plenty of useful tidbits for aspiring writers:
"It all boiled down to this: honesty, sincerity, no compromise with truth - those were the elements of any art - and a writer, no matter what else he had, was just a hack without them."
July 14, 2008
I was hooked from the first page and really savored the whole 700+ page experience. Wolfe is spookily insightful, cutting right to the quick of human nature, and our many pretentions. Wolfe describes so many different types of people and you recognize every one. The book has a very timeless quality to it. From overspeculation in the real estate market to the media's bizarre fixation with celebrities... this book could have been written yesterday, and yet it was written in the 1930's. Wolfe's powers of observation, incredible ear for dialogue and dialect and every kind of verbal nuance are astounding. This autobiographical epic deserves a very special place in American literature.
January 14, 2021
"Does one ever really learn from others till one is ready for the lesson?"
I really liked this book, it definitely left me thinking although at some points the level of details and description we're almost unbearable, in other parts that same detailed description was so beautiful and rich that you didn't want it to end.
I thought of this as George's journey and his appreciations of it that were so accurate and relatable and the characters he met in the way too.
it could have been 200 pages shorter, but it would have lost what made this a great book
I really liked this book, it definitely left me thinking although at some points the level of details and description we're almost unbearable, in other parts that same detailed description was so beautiful and rich that you didn't want it to end.
I thought of this as George's journey and his appreciations of it that were so accurate and relatable and the characters he met in the way too.
it could have been 200 pages shorter, but it would have lost what made this a great book
September 13, 2007
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.
*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.
June 21, 2011
"You Can't Go Home, Again" is really not so much a work of fiction as an autobiography in which the names of characters have been changed. Wolfe seemed unapologetic about the baldly autobiographical nature of his work. However, some may perceive his autobiography as evidence of a certain lack of creative reach and an aversion to creative risk-taking on his part. Wolfe's life was so deeply and richly lived in a relatively short period and so lyrically written that his autobiography reads as vibrantly as fiction. There are moments when Wolfe is brilliant and dazzling in describing moments of almost biblical epiphany. I suppose it's a good thing for Wolfe that he dove so deeply into his own life as it was tragically brief but intensely experienced and elegantly articulated: he managed to cram a great deal into his short lifespan. Wolfe reads quite a bit like Proust and in this novel the sentences in some places are nearly as long as the syntax of Proust. Wolfe could well be considered the Proust of the American South. Writers will especially value this work and it pays to read to the end as Wolfe's last novel is particularly revealing in its power and optimism and lyricism at its close: "What befalls man is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way. Mankind was fashioned for eternity." In the end Wolfe finds a comfortable home upon a promontory point in America's literary landscape. To understand the life of the writer in America at the outset of the 20th century during a Golden Age for the novel I recommend this worthy and enduring gem of that era.
January 8, 2020
This is it. Wolfe is my new favorite author until I read another of his books that are worse or something else by someone else that is better. Imagine that Proust was American and not such a pansy, still super-observant but not such a victim.... Imagine (insert great british author) had an equivalently powerful command of language, but didn't care about class and The Queen and what is Good and Proper... Imagine that Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky explored the inner reaches of humanity and you didn't have to learn Russian or rely on a translator... …. …. So aside from that, you should read this if you want every chapter to feel like a really good short story with great character development and psychology. Skip it if you need a really cool plot (I hear there are good super-hero movies you can watch to fulfil this urge). Oh, and did I mention that he was dead before the USA entered WWII at the age of 38, but he pretty much predicted the whole 20th century? And this was while America was Making America Great Again (TM) and thinking Nazis were cool and/or thinking the Soviets had it figured out. Wolfe. Wolfe. No wonder Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson (who stole "Fear and Loathing" from him) , Sinclair Lewis, Ray Bradbury, etc couldn't get enough. Even Faulkner, a contemporary (who I still haven't read anything good by) was awed. Ok. Behold The Man. This is it, until further notice. Also. apparently he wrote standing up on top of a refrigerator, which you must admit is cool. And his books were often 1000s of pages long until his editors intervened. I need to get my hands on an uncut version.
March 2, 2014
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."
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."
September 5, 2008
Thomas Wolfe (NOT TOM WOLFE!) is from Asheville, NC. I was in Asheville when I bought this book, and it was later that day...still in Asheville...that I got appendicitis. So I have that association.
Anyway, I started reading this book while recovering and just now finished...that was around May 15th I guess, and its now September 4rd, so that's roughly 110 days...and the book is 704 pages so that's almost 7 pages a day. Hm.
My point is, this is a long, long book but I've never read so feverishly, wanting to have more of the...landscape be revealed to me. Its a complex scene he weaves, of growing...of learning...of feeling and expressing feeling, and also of being critical of what one sees...its about America, what it is and isn't, and what we ought to believe it can be. Its about honesty, vision, perception, and courage.
Its hard to say. Its really, really, good. The language feels complete, you feel like he paints everything there is...Proustian in that sense, but also Emersonian...
Maybe its too soon to say any more, but this book comes highly recommended!
Anyway, I started reading this book while recovering and just now finished...that was around May 15th I guess, and its now September 4rd, so that's roughly 110 days...and the book is 704 pages so that's almost 7 pages a day. Hm.
My point is, this is a long, long book but I've never read so feverishly, wanting to have more of the...landscape be revealed to me. Its a complex scene he weaves, of growing...of learning...of feeling and expressing feeling, and also of being critical of what one sees...its about America, what it is and isn't, and what we ought to believe it can be. Its about honesty, vision, perception, and courage.
Its hard to say. Its really, really, good. The language feels complete, you feel like he paints everything there is...Proustian in that sense, but also Emersonian...
Maybe its too soon to say any more, but this book comes highly recommended!
December 29, 2019
I picture Thomas Wolfe as a precocious 15-year-old kid on the playground, carrying around a 2000-page magnum opus in his lunch pail and shoving other kids aside as he surveys vast soccer fields, and watches clumsy Philistines dangling like cherubs from the monkey bars.
Fast forward a few years, and he's found a generous and encouraging editor, he's traveled widely, dabbled in play writing, and now carts around a wheelbarrow with his unpublished masterpiece balanced like a paper pyramid, still observing the human beings in his vicinity critically and sniffing out myths and legends, legacies and crumbling empires, between the close-printed lines of newspaper articles...
Look Homeward, Angel was a very powerful book. It influenced me at the time I read it. I felt myself utterly convinced by Wolfe's skewed Romanticism. Right away, You Can't Go Home Again comes off as the same kind of novel, or possibly, another chapter from the same vast novel.
This novel encapsulates Wolfe's mind, or seems to, in all of its labyrinthine wanderings. This book is an especially good example of his eccentricities. The characters are downright caricatures, cartoonish, amusing mash-ups. George Webber, the protagonist, is no less vain or self-serving at times. He fritters away countless hours scaling the obelisks of his imagined destiny. The scenes are transparently autobiographical, or attain that effect through manipulation.
Luckily, there are many side characters, all of them charming, each exemplifying a certain downfall of forthright American monsters. Nonetheless, the texture that is woven through these absurd descriptions and even absurder soliloquies was almost painfully beautiful to me at times. I don't easily tire of Wolfe's sprawling nature.
Reading his books is like sailing a sea. You glimpse glittering treasures beneath the surface, and legions of sea monsters, but the tides carry you along and you must leave them behind.
So you see this brilliant America vanishing as you turn the pages. If you look up from the words, true life appears all of a sudden bland. There is a certain mesmerism at work in the rhythm of his words, perhaps, unlike anything else in literature. At least, you won't easily find a book so captivating, in such a plethora of ways, so angelically bound by its own laws of passion, that it sabotages your sense of proportion and glues your eyes to the page.
Fast forward a few years, and he's found a generous and encouraging editor, he's traveled widely, dabbled in play writing, and now carts around a wheelbarrow with his unpublished masterpiece balanced like a paper pyramid, still observing the human beings in his vicinity critically and sniffing out myths and legends, legacies and crumbling empires, between the close-printed lines of newspaper articles...
Look Homeward, Angel was a very powerful book. It influenced me at the time I read it. I felt myself utterly convinced by Wolfe's skewed Romanticism. Right away, You Can't Go Home Again comes off as the same kind of novel, or possibly, another chapter from the same vast novel.
This novel encapsulates Wolfe's mind, or seems to, in all of its labyrinthine wanderings. This book is an especially good example of his eccentricities. The characters are downright caricatures, cartoonish, amusing mash-ups. George Webber, the protagonist, is no less vain or self-serving at times. He fritters away countless hours scaling the obelisks of his imagined destiny. The scenes are transparently autobiographical, or attain that effect through manipulation.
Luckily, there are many side characters, all of them charming, each exemplifying a certain downfall of forthright American monsters. Nonetheless, the texture that is woven through these absurd descriptions and even absurder soliloquies was almost painfully beautiful to me at times. I don't easily tire of Wolfe's sprawling nature.
Reading his books is like sailing a sea. You glimpse glittering treasures beneath the surface, and legions of sea monsters, but the tides carry you along and you must leave them behind.
So you see this brilliant America vanishing as you turn the pages. If you look up from the words, true life appears all of a sudden bland. There is a certain mesmerism at work in the rhythm of his words, perhaps, unlike anything else in literature. At least, you won't easily find a book so captivating, in such a plethora of ways, so angelically bound by its own laws of passion, that it sabotages your sense of proportion and glues your eyes to the page.
March 25, 2009
I'd forgotten about this till it came up in the quiz.
My senior year of high school, I had some sort of comp lit class, and we had to do a major paper on one book, and I did it on this.
And my paper was all about the theme of interlocking webs of some sort. I think 3 layers of, um, webbing.. like himself; his community; and the country or something. I'll have to look it up again.
I really liked it, enjoyed the complexity, and felt a certain resonance because going home was exactly what I planned to do after high school- leaving the East Coast to come back home to the UofM.
Since then I've bounced back and forth because - "It Was True!" - the place I came back to was entirely different, and I'm entirely different; but also - "I WON!" because some things are the same sometimes - the seasons, the value systems (on a good day), occasionally how a certain summer day smells, the blond-ness (very much not in New Haven), the tall-ness, my whole history here, the River, proximity to Chicago, wastelandness (according to the rest of the country), lack of fetish over current clothing styles (especially in the winter), etc..
So, I've been really involved with this book, and now it's a distant not-even-memory. Must re-read! Perhaps closer to end of my daughter's senior year of high school, then I can cry a lot too, the poignancy of it all (past and present) and all that. I need a Date-to-Read field now!
P.S. I got a relatively bad grade on the paper, like a 'D' or an 'F'. Basically my teacher didn't follow at all, what I'd created was a thing much more complex than the assignment. And could have gone off on excessive tangents and been self-indulgent etc.., but I know we were on totally different wavelengths, and I got what I wanted out of the experience.
My senior year of high school, I had some sort of comp lit class, and we had to do a major paper on one book, and I did it on this.
And my paper was all about the theme of interlocking webs of some sort. I think 3 layers of, um, webbing.. like himself; his community; and the country or something. I'll have to look it up again.
I really liked it, enjoyed the complexity, and felt a certain resonance because going home was exactly what I planned to do after high school- leaving the East Coast to come back home to the UofM.
Since then I've bounced back and forth because - "It Was True!" - the place I came back to was entirely different, and I'm entirely different; but also - "I WON!" because some things are the same sometimes - the seasons, the value systems (on a good day), occasionally how a certain summer day smells, the blond-ness (very much not in New Haven), the tall-ness, my whole history here, the River, proximity to Chicago, wastelandness (according to the rest of the country), lack of fetish over current clothing styles (especially in the winter), etc..
So, I've been really involved with this book, and now it's a distant not-even-memory. Must re-read! Perhaps closer to end of my daughter's senior year of high school, then I can cry a lot too, the poignancy of it all (past and present) and all that. I need a Date-to-Read field now!
P.S. I got a relatively bad grade on the paper, like a 'D' or an 'F'. Basically my teacher didn't follow at all, what I'd created was a thing much more complex than the assignment. And could have gone off on excessive tangents and been self-indulgent etc.., but I know we were on totally different wavelengths, and I got what I wanted out of the experience.
November 10, 2012
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.
September 21, 2020
მაგარი კაცია თომას ვულფი. ჰმ, თუ ჯორჯ ვებერი?
January 1, 2015
The paperback version of this novel is 711 pages long. This novel is a saga about George Webber, a prototype for the author, Thomas Wolfe. The novel depicts events at least three levels: George Webber's struggle to write novels and gain acceptance by other novelists and publishers; America's transformation from the go-go 20's to economic ruin and depression in the 1930's; and how Webber seeks salvation by sailing to England and Germany in the mid 1930's, a few years before the start of World War II.
Wolfe has an unsurpassed talent to “theatrically” present unforgivable scenes. The beginning of the book describes the tenements of New York and Webber’s iconoclastic Japanese neighbor. Later as Webber takes the train out of New York , the book transforms the reader to the hometown denizens on the train as Webber temporarily returns home. A hundred pages later, Weber attends a party on the Upper East Side held the evening of October 29, 1929 . The decadence and greed of the people at the party is a stark contrast to people in Brooklyn literally starving several short years later.
Unfortunately, there is not enough space to extol the virtues of this novel. Reading this book requires time and patience. However, the reader will be rewarded with a truly great American novel."
Wolfe has an unsurpassed talent to “theatrically” present unforgivable scenes. The beginning of the book describes the tenements of New York and Webber’s iconoclastic Japanese neighbor. Later as Webber takes the train out of New York , the book transforms the reader to the hometown denizens on the train as Webber temporarily returns home. A hundred pages later, Weber attends a party on the Upper East Side held the evening of October 29, 1929 . The decadence and greed of the people at the party is a stark contrast to people in Brooklyn literally starving several short years later.
Unfortunately, there is not enough space to extol the virtues of this novel. Reading this book requires time and patience. However, the reader will be rewarded with a truly great American novel."
March 3, 2019
A young author writes a best seller but meets with hostility in his home town. He travels to Germany and experiences the rise of Nazism.
This book is being edited by Distributed Proofreaders Canada and it will be available at FadedPage.
This book is being edited by Distributed Proofreaders Canada and it will be available at FadedPage.
December 27, 2012
I love the way books come to me sometimes - this one as a yellowed, tattered edition sold at a market stall for €1. I've wanted to read it for ages. The text is very dense but Wolfe's eye is keen, especially when it comes to observations about people, though I feel like his judgements can be a bit arrogant and unkind here and there. Still, I feel like this book merits recommended reading status, especially for a girl like me, who mislaid her ruby slippers somewhere along the road, sometime back.
March 9, 2021
"You Can’t Go Home Again, novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1940 after heavy editing by Edward Aswell." ~Encyclopaedia Britannica
I really got hooked on Wolfe's writing. Every time I see something written about Thomas Wolfe, all of the words he has written come flooding back to me! I rush to the world wide web and dig for more gold.
I really got hooked on Wolfe's writing. Every time I see something written about Thomas Wolfe, all of the words he has written come flooding back to me! I rush to the world wide web and dig for more gold.
June 16, 2022
More than 700 pages, beautifully written but could have been cut down by half. To be fair, this last work of Thomas Wolfe was published posthumously from a truckload of manuscript and notes compiled by his editor. When a talented guy dies guess you hate to not use every last bit you can..
But geez. Lots of good and interesting characters here, and accounts of brief parts of their lives. The good editor, suffering in a household full of women...5 daughters, servants, wife, constantly coming home to find remodeling going on, rooms painted different colors than when he last left
.. he does hit the nail on the head: women like to do these sorts of things and men really hate it when they come home to find their furniture moved around and blue walls where white ones had been...they find this disturbing and confusing....
And the account of a mad impromptu road trip with the feverishly hyperactive write McHaig and a terrified chauffeur was very colorful. Lost on a stormy night in the English countryside, for the protagonist George (I'm guessing a thinly disguised Wolfe) the episode is exhausting, baffling and as always an opportunity for the author to narrate reams of philosophical musings, all artfully presented, some stimulating, but eventually mind numbing in quantity.
Except for a very good portrayal of his housekeeper in London, Wolfe's female characters tend to be rather 1 dimensional. Which is not the turnoff it could be. As mentioned before I believe this book is highly autobiographical and if that's how he saw women, fair enough.
Well worth reading, and now must go back and reread his earlier work, Look Homeward Angel, which apparently set his hometown on it's ear and caused many of its not-so-fictional models for characters out for his head.
But geez. Lots of good and interesting characters here, and accounts of brief parts of their lives. The good editor, suffering in a household full of women...5 daughters, servants, wife, constantly coming home to find remodeling going on, rooms painted different colors than when he last left
.. he does hit the nail on the head: women like to do these sorts of things and men really hate it when they come home to find their furniture moved around and blue walls where white ones had been...they find this disturbing and confusing....
And the account of a mad impromptu road trip with the feverishly hyperactive write McHaig and a terrified chauffeur was very colorful. Lost on a stormy night in the English countryside, for the protagonist George (I'm guessing a thinly disguised Wolfe) the episode is exhausting, baffling and as always an opportunity for the author to narrate reams of philosophical musings, all artfully presented, some stimulating, but eventually mind numbing in quantity.
Except for a very good portrayal of his housekeeper in London, Wolfe's female characters tend to be rather 1 dimensional. Which is not the turnoff it could be. As mentioned before I believe this book is highly autobiographical and if that's how he saw women, fair enough.
Well worth reading, and now must go back and reread his earlier work, Look Homeward Angel, which apparently set his hometown on it's ear and caused many of its not-so-fictional models for characters out for his head.
August 23, 2023
"So you're going down to bury her." It was a statement, and he said it reflectively, as though meditating upon it; then - "And do you think you can go home again?"
Nie sądzę, by Thomas Wolfe wiedział dokładnie, co go czeka. Jednak You Can't Go Home Again, jego finalna i wydana pośmiertnie powieść brzmi jak ostatnie słowo i ostatnia wola. Jest zarówno pożegnaniem, jak i wyzwaniem rzuconym tym, którzy zostaną. To wiadomość od autora: zostawiam za sobą taki świat i się martwię.
You Can't Go Home Again to ostatnie słowa Wolfe'a ku czytelnikom, a ja po raz pierwszy poczułam, że być może tej książki już drugi raz nie przeczytam.
Stany Zjednoczone, późne lata 20. XX wieku. George Webber spełnia swoje marzenie - jego pierwsza powieść zostaje wydana. Młody człowiek przygotowuje się na tryumf, lecz nie może przewidzieć konsekwencji swych słów.
For it was one of the qualities of this time that men should see and feel the madness all around them and never mention it - never admit it even to themselves.
Nie wiem, jak dokładnie wyglądał proces redaktorski przy tej książce, jednak sprawia ona o wiele lepsze wrażenie niż The Web and the Rock. Słowa Wolfe'a wydają się niczym nieograniczone i wraca do czytelnika uczucie, że to rzeczywiście autor do nas mówi, ponad czasem, a nie jest to tylko niewyraźne, pozrywane i zaszyte nagranie. Jeśli mowa o prowadzeniu narracji, bogactwie stylistycznym i fabule, stawiam You Can't Go Home Again na równi z Of Time and the River i uważam te powieści za najlepsze dzieła autora, porażające pięknem i intensywne.
Tylko, że Thomas jeszcze dojrzał. W You Can't Go Home Again po raz pierwszy tak głośno i nieustraszenie wypowiada się na tematy społeczne i polityczne; nigdy nie sądziłam, że ujrzę go w takiej kreacji, a jaka jestem szczęśliwa. Rozdział o weteranach I wojny światowej, czarnym czwartku czy księga poświęcona sytuacji w hitlerowskich Niemcach to praca wybitna. Thomas doświadcza zmiany światopoglądu, systemu wartości i postawy wobec drugiego człowieka. Tak jak sam przyznaje, jest inną osobą niż twórca Look Homeward, Angel. Widzi się to, jak po raz pierwszy od dawna Wolfe dostrzega innych ludzi i empatycznie reaguje na ich obecność oraz dzieje. Autor żegna się też tutaj z wieloletnim redaktorem i przyjaciele Maksem Perkinsem, na łamach powieści. Choć bałam się tej części, to zaimponowała mi szacunkiem, szczerością, otwartością i... naturalnością. Koniec był łagodny. Tak po prostu się dzieje, miłość nie umiera.
W You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe wraca do swych korzeni, próbując wytłumaczyć nam, dlaczego podjął takie, a nie inne decyzje. Zrozumiałam i poczułam ulgę.
Chociaż formalnie jest to kontynuacja The Web and the Rock, to jednak zdaje się odpowiadać na pytania postawione w Of Time and the River.
I never knew a man like you before, and if I had not known you, I never could have imagined you. And yet, to me you are inevitable, so that, having known you, I cannot imagine what life would have been for me without you.
Thomasie, nie mogę wiedzieć, co się później stało i czy teraz tam jesteś. Jeśli tak, to mam nadzieję, że patrzysz na świat z odrobiną zmartwienia, ale też sercem przepełnionym nadzieją. Rozumiem, czego chciałeś.
Nie możesz wrócić, ale spójrz ku domowi, aniele.
Wczoraj po przeczytaniu ostatniego zdania została mi tylko cisza.
We are "the hollow men, the hollow men"? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.
Nie sądzę, by Thomas Wolfe wiedział dokładnie, co go czeka. Jednak You Can't Go Home Again, jego finalna i wydana pośmiertnie powieść brzmi jak ostatnie słowo i ostatnia wola. Jest zarówno pożegnaniem, jak i wyzwaniem rzuconym tym, którzy zostaną. To wiadomość od autora: zostawiam za sobą taki świat i się martwię.
You Can't Go Home Again to ostatnie słowa Wolfe'a ku czytelnikom, a ja po raz pierwszy poczułam, że być może tej książki już drugi raz nie przeczytam.
Stany Zjednoczone, późne lata 20. XX wieku. George Webber spełnia swoje marzenie - jego pierwsza powieść zostaje wydana. Młody człowiek przygotowuje się na tryumf, lecz nie może przewidzieć konsekwencji swych słów.
For it was one of the qualities of this time that men should see and feel the madness all around them and never mention it - never admit it even to themselves.
Nie wiem, jak dokładnie wyglądał proces redaktorski przy tej książce, jednak sprawia ona o wiele lepsze wrażenie niż The Web and the Rock. Słowa Wolfe'a wydają się niczym nieograniczone i wraca do czytelnika uczucie, że to rzeczywiście autor do nas mówi, ponad czasem, a nie jest to tylko niewyraźne, pozrywane i zaszyte nagranie. Jeśli mowa o prowadzeniu narracji, bogactwie stylistycznym i fabule, stawiam You Can't Go Home Again na równi z Of Time and the River i uważam te powieści za najlepsze dzieła autora, porażające pięknem i intensywne.
Tylko, że Thomas jeszcze dojrzał. W You Can't Go Home Again po raz pierwszy tak głośno i nieustraszenie wypowiada się na tematy społeczne i polityczne; nigdy nie sądziłam, że ujrzę go w takiej kreacji, a jaka jestem szczęśliwa. Rozdział o weteranach I wojny światowej, czarnym czwartku czy księga poświęcona sytuacji w hitlerowskich Niemcach to praca wybitna. Thomas doświadcza zmiany światopoglądu, systemu wartości i postawy wobec drugiego człowieka. Tak jak sam przyznaje, jest inną osobą niż twórca Look Homeward, Angel. Widzi się to, jak po raz pierwszy od dawna Wolfe dostrzega innych ludzi i empatycznie reaguje na ich obecność oraz dzieje. Autor żegna się też tutaj z wieloletnim redaktorem i przyjaciele Maksem Perkinsem, na łamach powieści. Choć bałam się tej części, to zaimponowała mi szacunkiem, szczerością, otwartością i... naturalnością. Koniec był łagodny. Tak po prostu się dzieje, miłość nie umiera.
W You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe wraca do swych korzeni, próbując wytłumaczyć nam, dlaczego podjął takie, a nie inne decyzje. Zrozumiałam i poczułam ulgę.
Chociaż formalnie jest to kontynuacja The Web and the Rock, to jednak zdaje się odpowiadać na pytania postawione w Of Time and the River.
I never knew a man like you before, and if I had not known you, I never could have imagined you. And yet, to me you are inevitable, so that, having known you, I cannot imagine what life would have been for me without you.
Thomasie, nie mogę wiedzieć, co się później stało i czy teraz tam jesteś. Jeśli tak, to mam nadzieję, że patrzysz na świat z odrobiną zmartwienia, ale też sercem przepełnionym nadzieją. Rozumiem, czego chciałeś.
Nie możesz wrócić, ale spójrz ku domowi, aniele.
Wczoraj po przeczytaniu ostatniego zdania została mi tylko cisza.
We are "the hollow men, the hollow men"? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.
December 12, 2019
It was a very hard hitting novel after returning from Morocco. I related a lot to the nostalgia references Wolfe put in throughout the novel. Also very interesting to hear how he was describing Asheville in the 1930s and thinking about them now as a newcomer in the city.
“The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of strange, and so familiar -- and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.” pg. 85
“The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of strange, and so familiar -- and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.” pg. 85
October 8, 2021
The original sin of much of 21st century literature – its nakedly, explicitly autobiographical nature - turns out to have its roots ensconced much deeper than I would have imagined. With this novel, I can officially trace it back to Thomas Wolfe, whose own life he happily wrote down with in a series of novels, all the while barely remembering to change his characters’ names. This might sound like hyperbole, and perhaps it is, but not by much. Of course, I know that autobiographical fiction is even older than Wolfe, but the way in which he flirts with the line between reality and fiction does have a sort of ostentatious theatricality about it.
Wolfe’s first novel, the quintessential bildungsroman “Look Homeward, Angel,” is about the childhood and adolescence of Eugene Gant in a city called Altamont. In it, he criticizes Altamont as an isolated place full of parochialism and small-mindedness, alcoholism, loneliness, and racial segregation. It should come as little surprise that Eugene Gant is generally thought to be a thinly veiled version of Wolfe himself, and Altamont to be Wolfe’s own childhood birthplace of Asheville, North Carolina. “You Can’t Go Home Again” was published in 1940, two years after Wolfe’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 37. It tells the story of George Webber, a disaffected writer who has written a novel of his hometown which has been sorely received back home. This time home isn’t Altamont, but Libya Hill. The death threats and general disgust that he gets about the novel send him into an existential crisis, which culminates in Webber’s journey to set out and “find himself.”
He travels to New York City, where he attends a ball where he meets Piggy Logan (a fictionalized version of Alexander Calder) and Esther Jack, a woman with whom he has an on-again-off-again affair. He then goes to London where he meets some expatriates. Then he lands in Berlin, on the cusp of Hitler’s rise to power. He finally returns home in the United States, realizing that you can’t “go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … away from all the strife and conflict of the world … back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.”
Webber (and, consequently, Wolfe) is desperately sincere. He wants nothing more than to portray the truth and reality as he perceives it. But despite the commercial success that his book has, the threats and bitterness he receives from the residents of Libya Hill give him only disillusionment and the stereotypical angst of the artist. But despite Webber’s poignant earnestness, it’s perhaps clearer here in this 700-page novel than in any of his other works, that Wolfe simply doesn’t know how to craft his writing.
There are chapter-long digressions that have little to nothing to do with where the novel is going, and don’t really add to roundness or fullness to either the plot or the characters. Wolfe’s themes – America’s stifling materialism and lack of society’s inwardness and reflection – are not just expressed in his characters. They run amok, letting those characters become caricatures to the point where no one is a fully developed human being, but rather just some grotesque Dickensian distillation of pure Greed, Goodness, Humility, or Venality.
In the end, “You Can’t Go Home Again” is a magnificent failure, but as the saying goes, it fails magnificently. Its hopes and ambitions are sky-high and its honesty lays itself bare. But Wolfe’s repeated shopworn digressions about greed, money, materialism and the way they slowly work away at people (not to mention an entire society) are not the subtlety wrought observations of a Trollope or Fitzgerald. They are, as I said, painfully honest and sincere, but there comes a point at which the tenth blow to the horse will render it no more dead than the ninth did.
This could have easily been a Great American Novel, giving novels like “The Great Gatsby” a run for their money. Even their major themes are the same: the crushing smallness of people, their dishonesty, overconsumption, their worship at the Cult of Mammon. But Wolfe is unable to cordon off his concerns with subtlety and artistic discipline. He reminds of a garrulous seven-year-old who wants to tell you every single detail of his day and having decided on his two or three favorite, repeats them ad infinitum at the dinner table, without his enthusiasm ever waning in the least. It’s a novel I’m glad I read, but also one that I can honestly say I would never recommend to anyone.
There’s something to be said for the passionate enthusiasm of the young artist, but part of becoming a novelist is knowing that you can’t say – or show or write – it all. Every time I think of “You Can’t Go Home Again,” I’ll think of the writer Wolfe might have been had he not died so young and actually had a chance to take that lesson to heart.
Wolfe’s first novel, the quintessential bildungsroman “Look Homeward, Angel,” is about the childhood and adolescence of Eugene Gant in a city called Altamont. In it, he criticizes Altamont as an isolated place full of parochialism and small-mindedness, alcoholism, loneliness, and racial segregation. It should come as little surprise that Eugene Gant is generally thought to be a thinly veiled version of Wolfe himself, and Altamont to be Wolfe’s own childhood birthplace of Asheville, North Carolina. “You Can’t Go Home Again” was published in 1940, two years after Wolfe’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 37. It tells the story of George Webber, a disaffected writer who has written a novel of his hometown which has been sorely received back home. This time home isn’t Altamont, but Libya Hill. The death threats and general disgust that he gets about the novel send him into an existential crisis, which culminates in Webber’s journey to set out and “find himself.”
He travels to New York City, where he attends a ball where he meets Piggy Logan (a fictionalized version of Alexander Calder) and Esther Jack, a woman with whom he has an on-again-off-again affair. He then goes to London where he meets some expatriates. Then he lands in Berlin, on the cusp of Hitler’s rise to power. He finally returns home in the United States, realizing that you can’t “go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … away from all the strife and conflict of the world … back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.”
Webber (and, consequently, Wolfe) is desperately sincere. He wants nothing more than to portray the truth and reality as he perceives it. But despite the commercial success that his book has, the threats and bitterness he receives from the residents of Libya Hill give him only disillusionment and the stereotypical angst of the artist. But despite Webber’s poignant earnestness, it’s perhaps clearer here in this 700-page novel than in any of his other works, that Wolfe simply doesn’t know how to craft his writing.
There are chapter-long digressions that have little to nothing to do with where the novel is going, and don’t really add to roundness or fullness to either the plot or the characters. Wolfe’s themes – America’s stifling materialism and lack of society’s inwardness and reflection – are not just expressed in his characters. They run amok, letting those characters become caricatures to the point where no one is a fully developed human being, but rather just some grotesque Dickensian distillation of pure Greed, Goodness, Humility, or Venality.
In the end, “You Can’t Go Home Again” is a magnificent failure, but as the saying goes, it fails magnificently. Its hopes and ambitions are sky-high and its honesty lays itself bare. But Wolfe’s repeated shopworn digressions about greed, money, materialism and the way they slowly work away at people (not to mention an entire society) are not the subtlety wrought observations of a Trollope or Fitzgerald. They are, as I said, painfully honest and sincere, but there comes a point at which the tenth blow to the horse will render it no more dead than the ninth did.
This could have easily been a Great American Novel, giving novels like “The Great Gatsby” a run for their money. Even their major themes are the same: the crushing smallness of people, their dishonesty, overconsumption, their worship at the Cult of Mammon. But Wolfe is unable to cordon off his concerns with subtlety and artistic discipline. He reminds of a garrulous seven-year-old who wants to tell you every single detail of his day and having decided on his two or three favorite, repeats them ad infinitum at the dinner table, without his enthusiasm ever waning in the least. It’s a novel I’m glad I read, but also one that I can honestly say I would never recommend to anyone.
There’s something to be said for the passionate enthusiasm of the young artist, but part of becoming a novelist is knowing that you can’t say – or show or write – it all. Every time I think of “You Can’t Go Home Again,” I’ll think of the writer Wolfe might have been had he not died so young and actually had a chance to take that lesson to heart.
Want to read
January 6, 2026Annotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One
June 20, 2018
Thomas Wolfe's masterpiece is Look Homeward, Angel that I have read and reviewed. I give this book 4 stars only in relation to the 5 stars of the earlier work. This book also draws on Wolfe's personal experience but is more a look at the world of the late 1920's and 1930's with Wolfe's philosophy. That philosophy empathizes with the little guy, the pursuit of wealth blinding to reality those who achieve it.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book for its ability to take me back to the early 20th century, immersing me in the time through the interactions of the characters of all types as they trade slang and speak of the the things on their minds. What of capitalism, communism, socialism, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the execution of the Rosenbergs? How are blacks and Jews viewed? What is it like to be very wealthy and content or thrown on the street by the Depression? In a small Southern city, how easy it is to abandon conservatism to join the speculators who win big overnight and Wolfe makes you feel that urge.
Behind it all are the technical advances, primarily that of the railroad, but also electric lights and elevators, skyscrapers and the traffic jams (an advance?) of New York City. Even exotic air travel is briefly mentioned. You've probably heard Woody Guthrie's song, The City of New Orleans about the end days of train travel. Here, Wolfe gives a vivid portrayal of train travel in its glory days, so good I dog-eared the page.
Throughout the book, we follow the life of George Webber, a writer who happens to find a very sympathetic, humanitarian man for a publisher whose confidence in Webber's ability leads to the success of his first novel. This brings a backlash from the home folks who resent their scarcely disguised portrayals in the book, ousting Webber from the psychological comfort of belonging in his home town.
The unexpected literary success leaves Webber with the funds to examine life by going where he pleases, deliberately leaving the love of a wealthy woman and the secure entry it would give him to high society in order to explore the world, gathering material for his next book. His exploration is driven by his desire to define his outlook on modern life. In the noise and confusion of modernity, after exploding as it did in the boom 1920's, he struggles to find meaning as he takes in the views of the many he meets.
With a variety of characters, Wolfe takes us from the high society of New York City to the depths of destitution of the street people of Brooklyn. We take part in a wonderfully entertaining party for the elite as they gather in a spacious NYC private apartment to watch a wire puppet circus, the talk of the town, only to be dismayed when the supposed savant running the thing turns out to be a bumbler. We feel the excitement of real estate speculation just before the crash of 1929 and we experience the anxiety in Germany of 1936 as Nazism secures its grip on the German people.
This book had special meaning for me because my father was born in 1898, two years before Thomas Wolfe and, just like Wolfe, went to Germany between WW1 and WW2 and developed a fondness for the German people while already having great respect for German cultural achievements in history. I was a typically callow youth of 21 when my father died and I have always regretted not having an adult-to-adult conversation with him about many things, but particularly about Germany in light of his fondness for the place and people in contrast to the horror that arose after he had visited.
After the great panorama presented in this large book, Wolfe helpfully puts everything into place in the last three chapters, should any reader have missed the philosophical points made in the earlier text. A prolific writer, Wolfe died of TB at the age of 38 before this book was published (and before the outbreak of WW2 which he was expecting), leaving it up to the publisher to edit the huge manuscript.
Standing out in You Can't Go Home Again is a chapter titled "The Hollow Men" that takes for a theme the suicide of a man, anonymous, who is given the name "C. Green" in the tiny back page newspaper account of his death. Wolfe takes literary flight to examine American society by going into detail on the suicide; of the body shattered on the pavement, of the people on the scene who were walking down a sidewalk of NYC only to have mortality literally splash them. This one chapter is a marvel that can be read apart from the book by anyone who wants to know what mastery of the English language and an incomparable imagination can achieve. I was awed by Wolfe's ability to say it all about a society building from a news item that said almost nothing about an individual in that society. I would place this chapter with the best literature I have read.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book for its ability to take me back to the early 20th century, immersing me in the time through the interactions of the characters of all types as they trade slang and speak of the the things on their minds. What of capitalism, communism, socialism, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the execution of the Rosenbergs? How are blacks and Jews viewed? What is it like to be very wealthy and content or thrown on the street by the Depression? In a small Southern city, how easy it is to abandon conservatism to join the speculators who win big overnight and Wolfe makes you feel that urge.
Behind it all are the technical advances, primarily that of the railroad, but also electric lights and elevators, skyscrapers and the traffic jams (an advance?) of New York City. Even exotic air travel is briefly mentioned. You've probably heard Woody Guthrie's song, The City of New Orleans about the end days of train travel. Here, Wolfe gives a vivid portrayal of train travel in its glory days, so good I dog-eared the page.
Throughout the book, we follow the life of George Webber, a writer who happens to find a very sympathetic, humanitarian man for a publisher whose confidence in Webber's ability leads to the success of his first novel. This brings a backlash from the home folks who resent their scarcely disguised portrayals in the book, ousting Webber from the psychological comfort of belonging in his home town.
The unexpected literary success leaves Webber with the funds to examine life by going where he pleases, deliberately leaving the love of a wealthy woman and the secure entry it would give him to high society in order to explore the world, gathering material for his next book. His exploration is driven by his desire to define his outlook on modern life. In the noise and confusion of modernity, after exploding as it did in the boom 1920's, he struggles to find meaning as he takes in the views of the many he meets.
With a variety of characters, Wolfe takes us from the high society of New York City to the depths of destitution of the street people of Brooklyn. We take part in a wonderfully entertaining party for the elite as they gather in a spacious NYC private apartment to watch a wire puppet circus, the talk of the town, only to be dismayed when the supposed savant running the thing turns out to be a bumbler. We feel the excitement of real estate speculation just before the crash of 1929 and we experience the anxiety in Germany of 1936 as Nazism secures its grip on the German people.
This book had special meaning for me because my father was born in 1898, two years before Thomas Wolfe and, just like Wolfe, went to Germany between WW1 and WW2 and developed a fondness for the German people while already having great respect for German cultural achievements in history. I was a typically callow youth of 21 when my father died and I have always regretted not having an adult-to-adult conversation with him about many things, but particularly about Germany in light of his fondness for the place and people in contrast to the horror that arose after he had visited.
After the great panorama presented in this large book, Wolfe helpfully puts everything into place in the last three chapters, should any reader have missed the philosophical points made in the earlier text. A prolific writer, Wolfe died of TB at the age of 38 before this book was published (and before the outbreak of WW2 which he was expecting), leaving it up to the publisher to edit the huge manuscript.
Standing out in You Can't Go Home Again is a chapter titled "The Hollow Men" that takes for a theme the suicide of a man, anonymous, who is given the name "C. Green" in the tiny back page newspaper account of his death. Wolfe takes literary flight to examine American society by going into detail on the suicide; of the body shattered on the pavement, of the people on the scene who were walking down a sidewalk of NYC only to have mortality literally splash them. This one chapter is a marvel that can be read apart from the book by anyone who wants to know what mastery of the English language and an incomparable imagination can achieve. I was awed by Wolfe's ability to say it all about a society building from a news item that said almost nothing about an individual in that society. I would place this chapter with the best literature I have read.
June 26, 2017
If there has been a perfect writer it was Thomas Wolfe. A writer who can describe emotions, feelings, people and places in a way that the reader would live through every sentence written in his books. Wolfe writes “…and when they laughed, there was no warmth or joy in the sound: high, shrill, ugly, and hysterical, their laughter only asked the earth to notice them…” and you can imagine, understand and see those people described by one sentence. Or he can describe a person’s gaze by an inner monologue of the person: "Child, child," it said, "have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul--but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them--but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way--but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savoured all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us--we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.” And the reader would live through this person’s life in just one paragraph.
Wolfe writes in a way that I can physically feel his sentences tickling my brain, and believe me that tickle is one of the greatest feelings for a reader. It is hard reading Thomas Wolfe because his books are emotional rollercoasters, in one paragraph he can throw you into the abyss of sadness and solitude and then raise you to the top of the world. It is exhausting for a reader and you need breaks in order to cope with all the feelings and emotions thrown at you by Wolfe.
However, no matter how hard it is to read Thomas Wolfe, I always read him (literally all the time). "You can't go home again" is a book that is always on my night stand no matter where I live and where I go. Every time I lose interest in reading, I just open a random page in his books, read and the thirst of reading more comes back to me immediately. Whenever I feel emptiness inside, whenever I read a bad book, whenever I want to feel something, I open Thomas Wolfe to enjoy literature in its purest and the most beautiful form.
Wolfe writes in a way that I can physically feel his sentences tickling my brain, and believe me that tickle is one of the greatest feelings for a reader. It is hard reading Thomas Wolfe because his books are emotional rollercoasters, in one paragraph he can throw you into the abyss of sadness and solitude and then raise you to the top of the world. It is exhausting for a reader and you need breaks in order to cope with all the feelings and emotions thrown at you by Wolfe.
However, no matter how hard it is to read Thomas Wolfe, I always read him (literally all the time). "You can't go home again" is a book that is always on my night stand no matter where I live and where I go. Every time I lose interest in reading, I just open a random page in his books, read and the thirst of reading more comes back to me immediately. Whenever I feel emptiness inside, whenever I read a bad book, whenever I want to feel something, I open Thomas Wolfe to enjoy literature in its purest and the most beautiful form.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 452 reviews