You will die a hundred times before you become a man.
Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 classic chronicles a boy’s life of privation from infancy to independence in a manner so exacting that the reader practically relives each day as he felt it, when Time droned like a sleepy October fly. In a boarding house suffocating with meanness of purse and heart, Eugene Gant’s alcoholic father and image-conscious mother raise children blighted with anxiety, resentment, and criminality. Yet still, precocious Eugene indulges in childishly melodramatic daydreams en route to the usual rites of passage, culminating in adolescent heartbreak, the pointless death of a consumptive brother, and a clean break from home. Intensely autobiographical, this paragon of character study draws so keenly on Wolfe’s youth in Asheville, North Carolina that hometown acquaintances spurned him upon recognizing themselves in the sensational work—a situation posthumously revisited in You Can’t Go Home Again.
In scope and exactitude, this novel resembles Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage (reviewed here November 18th), but whereas Maugham’s dialogue-driven plot feels inspired by the stage, Wolfe’s work seems to draw on the arcades of his childhood. Drop a penny in the Mutoscope, turn the hand-crank, and peep through the spyhole as ordinary events scroll by in a flip-book simulation of life. How ironic, then, that his tale is more famous for its Pulitzer prize winning play-adaptation, excerpted here .
This is a heavy tome, not in style but in length and substance, for . . . the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in the probable—the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds treason in the dark. Therefore, it is more readily accessible in audio, at over 26 hours, than on paper, at 638 pages. If you only have one such Herculean effort in you and want to experience the legend that is Thomas Wolfe, I suggest skipping ahead to You Can’t Go Home Again.