Eugene Gant, Thomas Wolfe's narrator in Look Homeward, Angel enters the theatre of human events in 1900, a new start at the foot of a page of dead heroes. The first noun in the novel is destiny. Five hundred lusty, overripe pages of family life with Eugene at the centre, ensue.
We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old. p. 33
Thomas Wolfe, Eugene, wrote himself large. In the womb he was already a man. For the next thirty-eight years he wrestles with it. He protests. He observes. He describes.
The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; p. 177
You could edit these five hundred pages down to five and there your Eugene Gant would be, stripped to yet unknown essentials.
He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad. p. 267
You could turn Thomas Wolfe into Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver into Thomas Wolfe.
Walled up in the great city of his visions, his tongue has learned to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. .... He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged to the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. p. 319
By page 482 Eugene Gant is nineteen. The Angel is in the rearview mirror.
But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of his blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning. p. 482
Oh but there was.
