[New York Evening Post, Saturday, November 16, 1929]

A First Novel of Vast Scope
"Look Homeward, Angel" an American Saga in Southern Setting

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. By Thomas Wolfe. Scribner's. $2.50
Reviewed by Kenneth Fearing

For any variation in the few elementary patterns from which the majority of contemporary novels are cut, there is apt to be stirred in the reader, depending upon his conviction to such things, a feeling of either gratitude or annoyance. And because even a little variation is felt as extraordinary, the gratitude or annoyance will perhaps be exaggerated beyond a point merited by the performance in itself.
"Look Homeward, Angel" is such a performance, an unusual novel, almost an eccentric one. The author, Thomas Wolfe, is an amateur, partly in the sense that "the artist is always an amateur," and partly in the sense that he has written a thing innocent of structural perfection. He has attempted to give life to a vast, illusive American experience, using whatever language or form he was able to devise to meet the moment's need, rather than adhering throughout to a simpler, neater, but less ambitious formula. And this is not to say that "Look Homeward, Angel" is wholly an original. The book is closely related to a familiar genre, the family saga, and in its writing shows influences that are well known, notably those of James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson.

The story is of the Gant family, Oliver and Eliza, and of their seven children, Eugene Gant in particular. Back of them is the story of the town of Altamont, in North Carolina. And in back of Altamont, the story is of the whole South from the latter part of the nineteenth century until the present. Oliver Gant, the Wanderer, driven by savage appetites and by dreams only half-understood, settled at last in Altamont and married the stolid, property-loving, patient, half-shrewd Eliza Pentland, and there began a life-long battle between them. "Eliza came stolidly through to victory. As she marched down these enormous years of love and loss, stained with the rich dyes of pain and pride and death, and with the great wild flare of his alien and passionate life, her limbs faltered in the grip of ruin, but she came on, through sickness and emaciation, to victorious strength."

But her victorious strength, if it sustained Oliver and herself and the children, at the same time blighted them all. Eliza's blindness to everything save the need for property and money drove the children into harsh, incessant contacts with the world at early ages, and in the home the struggle between Eliza and Oliver, assuming insane proportions, dulled or humiliated or embittered all feeling of the family relationship.

Of them all, Eugene Gant is the only one of the children to escape in the end, partially at any rate, the Gantian struggle and seeming spiritual self-destruction. Here the novel becomes two novels. With the adolescence of Eugene, "Look Homeward, Angel" gradually ceases to be a family saga, and becomes slowly the semi-autobiographical story of a sensitive youth. This, too, is closely related to a familiar type, but the author is still extraordinarily lavish, in the fullness with which he portrays Eugene's life, in the scope of the background and in his own interjections, taking the form of ironic, romantic or realistic comments that sum up the given situation, and suggest some Gantian relationship with the universe as a whole. "Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?…O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!…" Such writing may come uncomfortably close [to] becoming merely fine writing, but it is sincere, and suggests the author's ambitious attempt, sustained in the book as a whole by the far reach of the actual story.