“Straight from the heart - the truest “American” novel, February 17, 2000
Reviewer: Mark Shanks (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
I feel sorry for anyone who can’t find echoes of their own youth in Wolfe’s undeniably Romantic writing. You won’t find clipped Hemingway-esque sentences, nor the pages-long obscure wanderings of fellow Southerner Faulkner, but Wolfe recreates his world so perfectly that filming it would be redundant. “Self-absorbed”? Yes, how else could anyone produce a literary translation of a life’s experience? Cliched? Not when it was written, although as a “coming of age” novel it has many predecessors, none were so ambitious in scope or detail. Achingly, achingly nostalgic, beautifully written, TRUE to itself, sparing nothing of the author or his vision. Pretentious? Hardly, especially when set next to the Oprah-fied books on the best-seller lists today.
This and its immediate succesor “Of Time and the River” are, to me, arguably the finest books ever written describing not just life in America but more importantly the sense of loss through time and distance of love, family, and home and the emotional maturation that follows.
No, I couldn’t recommend this to EVERYbody, but if you haven’t become too sophisticated to remember what it was really like to be young, lonely, in love, or homesick, or to see though a child’s eyes the wonder in a leaf, a stone, a door; to cry “Oh, lost!” over a memory, you will find much to cherish in this book.”