Book Review: You Can't Go Home Again

No worries, Gentle Readers. Your e-books are still in the computer, assuming they arrived in a format the computer can read. (Many Kindle e-books didn't, or if they did the computer can't read them any more.) I have just been too busy in the real world to make the time to read them. I will be working on this and will try to post more reviews of books that might suggest Halloween costumes, to go with Karen McSpade's newest (look for it on the 28th of October). More wet days like this one--as long as the cables hold up!--will bring more new book reviews. For today, here's the announcement of a classic:

Title: You Can’t Go Home Again

Author: Thomas Wolfe

Date: 1938, 1992

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-080986-8

Length: 576 pages

Quote: “I mean do you think you can really go home again?”

He can (and does) and he can’t; that’s the point of this novel.

Could George Webber’s sense of having lost and found “home” have been explained in fewer than 576 pages? Yes, but then readers would lose all the sketches of the people he meets in his travels. Wolfe’s talent was such that, even though most of these people appear in just one short vignette apiece, the book as a whole would be poorer without their stories. They’re good sketches; you just might recognize your grandfather in one of them.

Having been written in the 1930s, Wolfe’s stories of what Americans call the Great Depression are clear-eyed, with no “good old days” sentimentality. Life was hard for many people. Too many things had changed too quickly to suit many people. Neither Wolfe nor his character would be likely to have lapsed into “the world’s falling to pieces because all you younger people are fools” maunderings if they’d been alive in 1992. (Actually, as I recall, most people of their age hadn’t really got there even in the 1960s, when many of my generation were, however, too busy yelling about hair lengths and curfews to notice.) One gets the impression that if Wolfe were still around, he’d recognize his characters in the styles their kind of people are wearing today.

This is not a very plotty novel. Many of the characters aren’t shown doing anything; some are “caught” at the time of their deaths. Webber moves rather passively through a gallery of snapshots, noticing everything, doing little. He’s a writer—when fired up to action he sits down and writes something (which is seldom shared with readers). He sees, hears, feels, and sometimes empathizes, and gradually, although Webber is not a teenager and You Can’t Go Home Again is not usually classified as a young adult novel, he grows up. He does not solve a mystery, commit or prevent a murder, make or lose a fortune, have a mental breakdown, or even have sex under conditions Wolfe deems relevant to his story, although he watches other people doing these things. He just travels, meets people, and ponders the question of where a novelist from a small town in North Carolina can live.

Political correctness as we know it hadn’t been invented in 1938. Webber is not a hater, but he is politically incorrect; he talks about people the way many men of his age and type actually did. He feels sympathy for neighbors whom he knows by name as well as by the then p.c. collective term “Negroes,” then feels cheap contempt for strangers whom he classifies by the illiterate variant from of “Negroes.” His wife is Jewish, yet he professes revulsion for “the rouged lips of Jewesses.” I don’t like this, didn’t like it when Webber’s generation were talking this way, but all I can say about it in this book is that Wolfe has the dialect down. People that age who weren’t haters would casually use the vocabulary of hate speech to describe people different from themselves whom they happened not to like. 

(Some of my generation learned the habit, and, if particularly unintelligent, still have it. Talking to an employee who is unmistakably triracial, threatening a neighborhood where some of the people who belong don't even have to tell people they're Black, our Professional Bad Neighbor tried to threaten to "sell to n*s." The man's brain rot spreads daily. He wasn't born that way--another point for glyphosate. Still, the point clearly being made was that he didn't mean the illiterate-variant-form-of-"Negroes" for whom he was expressing cheap contempt to include local Black people--presumably he meant the slum dwellers that have been imported into Kingsport, wholesale, contagious diseases and all.)

In 1938 it would not have been realistic for Webber, or for Wolfe, to have been confronted with this vestige of institutionalized bigotry or asked to change it, yet Webber does have to confront hate in the way his generation did. For Webber the confrontation is more close and personal than it might have been for our grandparents; he goes to Germany and sees what increasingly extreme forms of hate look like, he feels his alienation from people who might otherwise have been his friends when he sees them conforming to the pressure to become serious haters. It’s this shock treatment, this exposure to the viciousness hate can produce, that empowers Webber to work out where his home is and reconcile himself to his own people.

Without spoiling whatever suspense the novel has, let’s just say that it has, historically, satisfied liberal readers—if they weren’t completely alienated from the book by the minor and temporary ugliness of Webber’s alienation.