"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."
Author Thomas Wolfe prefaces his novel, "Look Homeward, Angel," by musing on the nature of the human condition. Everyone is born a mystery waiting for his or her own uncertain fate. Wolfe uses protagonist Eugene Gant, trapped in his knotty teenage years, to illustrate this concept.
A solitary boy who feels smothered beneath an unyielding father's gaze, Eugene shares an isolation many have known. He has a penchant for books - if only for an hour's solace.
Yet, what makes him different from most is not his introspective nature, but his eccentric family.
Eugene's father, referenced merely as "Gant," is a habitual drunkard, a failed stonecutter and an abusive parent. Gant never so much as hugs his son, so Eugene grows up accustomed to a frigid household and silent dinner tables.
His mother, Eliza, is a purse-lipped, opinionated woman consumed by the desire to acquire land. In fact, when there is a schism in her marriage with Gant, she rents a large manor, christens it "Dixieland" and rents it out to tourists who frequent the rolling hills of Eugene's small North Carolina hometown, Altamont.
Nestled in this close-knit town, alone with Eugene and his parents, are Eugene's three siblings --two of which only exacerbate Eugene's melancholy nature.
He starkly conflicts with his brother, Luke, because Luke feels like he, a haughty businessman, is morally superior to the less charismatic Eugene. His sister, Helen, sleeps interminably beneath father Gant's wing, so she has developed a natural hatred for Eugene, too.
Ben, Eugene's other older brother, gets along best with him. But, as fate would have it, Ben moves out of the house at an early age to seek work. He is a laconic man who gives Eugene more coins of money than words of advice.
I could go on recounting the book's scenes, but the truth is it's virtually plotless. Little happens in Altamont. Most of the novel's action -- moral dilemmas, romantic conundrums and cold bursts of realization about daily life -- erupts in Eugene's own psyche.
Wolfe's strengths lie in his poetical diction and in his artfully crafted characters, though there are many universal concepts in "Look Homeward, Angel" that are impossible to ignore. Eugene's candid voice tinges the book's pages with a legacy of family tears; young heartache; awkward, budding sexuality and inexplicable isolation.
Each time I read "Look Homeward, Angel," my woes dissolve in the liquid-smooth fiction. I walk with Eugene along streets of his rolling hometown, framed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, even as I walk again along the pastoral hills of my West Virginia youth. The two realms are one and the same.
Wolfe haunts and needles me with his words, an astutely woven Appalachian patchwork stitched with the fabric of my own childhood memories.
"Look Homeward, Angel" is a story of sadness, a poetic waxing dipped in pathos and a collection of assorted words that evoke something in the reader which whispers, "This is you. I am he. And our differences from everyone else are what comprise anything alluring in the universe."
Eugene's face is mine -- the face of a boy who feels thought-bitten and estranged from the world around him. I am sure that many would feel the same way.
"Look Homeward, Angel" is an indispensable book for every teenage boy, Appalachian and fan of poetic prose. Eugene's coming-of-age spurs in the hearts of young boys their first emotional growing pains.