Discovering the Unfound Door
Books that Changed my Life: Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel”
This is the first in an occasional series on books that shaped me as a reader, a writer, and a human being. Trust me, it’s not going to be as snooty as that sounds.
It’s perhaps a little strange to declare a specific book “life changing” when you can barely describe the plot after reading it 30 years ago. But in the case of Look Homeward, Angel, what the novel means to me is less about what I read in the book and more about the fact that I even read it.
This all starts way back during my sophomore year at Washington and Lee University, taking an English course on Southern American literature. Despite being a journalism major, a part of me wanted to be an English major. It would make sense — I’d always wanted to be a writer of some sort and I was an insatiable bookworm from the time I learned to read. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel occupied a prime spot on the syllabus.
Unfortunately, I allowed myself to be intimidated by my far more well-read and experienced classmates, many of whom came from private schools (or well-funded public schools) that gave them deeper skills in close reading of difficult texts. At my rural high school, with my class of about 130 people from all of Caldwell County, there were no AP literature courses or small-group classes delving into the works of, say, William Faulkner.
(I need to insert a brief ode to my high school teacher Jerry Hensley, who put a lot of effort into me as a student and writer. He opened my eyes to many new things. He’s the one who diagnosed one of my flaws as a student, which would bite me in the ass in college: I read so early and so much, I’d conditioned myself to read only for fun. I had no patience for books that bored me and why should I? There were so many other books out there to take their place. That’s not a formula for success in the close reading of difficult texts. That I even had a shot at trying is in large part due to Mr. Hensley.)
Anyway, in my English classes I struggled with close reading and analysis. I sat in class trying to keep up while other students would expound on language, meaning, and symbolism as if they were born to it. I recall in an earlier course, the professor started a discussion of a poetry assignment joking that he’d once had a student who thought “scanning” a poem was reading it very fast.
I was too embarrassed to ask what it actually meant so I turtled into myself.
After that sophomore year, I gave up on that part of me that wanted to major in English. College had already been a rude enough awakening after I breezed through elementary, middle, and high school with little effort — I didn’t need English grades to further destroy my confidence. I ended up minoring in history, where I flourished reading literature in historical context (Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Gogol’s Dead Souls gave me my weakness for Russian classics).
But as for capital-L Literature, I gave up. Many of the books remained half-read at best, and misunderstood at worst, as least according to the C’s on my essays.
Skip ahead a decade.
I do not throw away books. I still have most of my college texts from all my classes (except for math and sciences, that’s another trauma memory), plus most of the books from my childhood and teens. In the mid-90s, I found myself living with a friend in a large Columbia Heights townhouse he’d bought and I suddenly had not only room for bookcases but actual bookcases built into the house. My books could escape the boxes and see the sun. Though not direct sun, I’m not crazy.
Seeing all the books lined up on antique bookcases framing an ornate fireplace, it felt like I had a real library (even if the house wasn’t mine). It occurred to me, while looking upon my collection, that I hadn’t actually read those novels that I associated with literary shame and terror. So, I decided to give them another go.
First up: Look Homeward, Angel.
I remembered the novel from class as boring, plodding, and difficult to discern a plot. It’s a bildungsroman! Sure, but when is something going to actually bildung? Because I ceded the ground to the rest of the class and lacked confidence in myself, I missed it.
Reading Wolfe outside the confines of a classroom and with 10 years of “adult” experience under my belt — sarcasm quotes because my 20s were not my most mature decade — I saw and felt the novel in a completely new way. I felt like Captain America discovering the culture he’d missed.
It clicked.
As I said, I don’t truly recall much of the novel decades later, although Wolfe’s signature enigmatic phrase — “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door” — has always stuck with me. There are different ways to interpret and analyze that phrase but I don’t go too crazy with it, focusing on it as “home, wandering, and the potential of new experiences.”
I said the novel clicked, not that I became a student of Lacan and Derrida.
With Look Homeward, Angel enjoyably consumed, I moved on to Wolfe’s final novel, You Can’t Go Home Again and the experience repeated. I felt as if I’d cracked a code and a whole new world had opened up. I still loved my genre reads, my Stephen King and Clive Barker and Anne Rice, but I had something new to explore.
Without Look Homeward, Angel, I wouldn’t have attempted Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August (that’s a true banger). I wouldn’t have read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and I would have been the worse for it. I definitely wouldn’t have embarked on another novel that will be gracing this list soon enough, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, one of my favorite novels ever, even if it is in a period of cultural backlash.
So, Look Homeward, Angel gave me the experience I missed in college. It gave me back my confidence as a reader, which lead directly to my getting back on the path to writing professionally (like I said, my 20s weren’t my most mature years, though they were the most fun). I believe that books and literature can make us better people, in understanding our fellow humans and using our empathy to experience things beyond ourselves. In that sense, Look Homeward, Angel made me a better man. I may have forgotten some specifics of the novel but I’ll never forget that.