Books: You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe

My reading list is a odd mélange, and at any given time, someone I know will roll his eyes at what I'm reading. The list is comprised of the following: Modern and Postmodern Classics (i.e. books I personally want to read), Canonical Classics (books I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't read), and recommendations (whatever anybody whom I remotely respect suggests, which lately occasionally includes Slate's book reviewers, but is generally limited to living, breathing people that I know personally, or at least correspond with online fairly regularly). You Can't Go Home Again is a recommendation from my mom, who claims to have read quite a bit in her day. I sort of believe her, even though I haven't seen her ever get past page four of any book in my lifetime. She's a non-linear reader. About once a month, when she gets the urge, she cracks a book on Bob Dylan or Paul Gauguin open to a random page, reads a paragraph or two, becomes inspired, and goes off to make a cup of tea and draw in her journal.

My mom mentioned this book and then expressed shock that I hadn't read it; she told me I just had to. She did not tell me what it was about. Having it in my possession, I hadn't started it and still had no idea what it was about when, stopping at my favorite Chelsea bakery for a second petit déjeuner and a bit of reading, I bumped into an old landlord/friend (a writer whose Chelsea apartment my boyfriend and I had sublet our first two months in New York, which tiny, lovely apartment came equipped with one neurotic cat, one giant terrace that regularly flooded in heavy rains, and one wall completely lined with books - many of which, my boyfriend and I decided, had never been read). We hadn't spoken in months - maybe a year - so we did a bit of catching up; he told me that he had completed his first novel and that it was out at agencies; I told him that contrary to popular belief I was not depressed. He asked what I was reading and I showed him You Can't Go Home Again. "You're certain you're not depressed?!" he insisted.

The week has passed; I've finished the book; I don't know why my mother insisted that I read it, and I don't know why reading it would signify depression. It's not a very emotional book. It's neither dark, nor decadent, nor existential. It's not Hecht, and it's not Pessoa. It's actually rather plain. A good portion of it (the first four of seven books) reads like something assigned for high school summer reading, describing America just before and then during the Great Depression. It's filled with long passages that "sing" the "song" of "America" in a way that we can blame on Whitman. At times it's quite insightful, and at times it's embarrassingly didactic; at times it is uncomfortably old-fashioned, and at times it appears to have been written just last year. It's not well-balanced. The phrase "you can't go home again" is over-repeated and over-addressed by the narrator. It is misrepresented by the summary on the jacket.

I had planned to write a more thorough treatment, but I just cannot bring myself to bother. It's not that there isn't anything in it to discuss, but Wolfe's handling is so stilted (so green for a last novel) that looking through the book again for specific passages is just too tedious. I don't even have the motivation to summarize it, except to say that the protagonist is a young writer, and this may be the first novel about a writer writing that didn't knock my socks off.