O Lost

I'm skeptical of attempts to cut out the middleman of an editor by releasing an “author's cut” (aka an early unfinished draft) of a work with an established reputation like Look Homeward Angel. So I read LHA in its more common version, but afterwards checked this out from the library out of curiosity, and read the prologue and skimmed some of the rest. I'm not going to reread the whole thing, but if I had it to do over my sense is that I may have enjoyed this version more, if some of the cuts in the 20s were out of concern for contemporary sensitivities on sex and religion. The editors of this version are being a little self serving by saying their own work is superior to the originally published one, but alas, they may be right.

At the same time when I read LHA I never wished for it to be longer. Approach with caution, I guess. From having also read Proust, my sense is that Wolfe falls short of the same sort of project (but kudos to his ambition, at least), and suffers today from being less readable than Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Fitzgerald, and in comparison with the greater body of work of Faulkner, but also generally from how Americans today don't read a lot of literary books, period (including myself). And while occasionally the descriptions of “Niggertown” read like Wolfe merely describing the scene of his own childhood with a clear eye, on plenty of other occasions the racist ugliness is quite clearly Wolfe's own.