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In Look Homeward, Angel, precocious 29-year-old Thomas Wolfe had written in such language as to make nostalgic readers feel he was writing about their own childhood and early youth. By the time he died at age 37, having written You Can't Go Home Again, he had grown up. But many of his readers then and now failed to grow up with him.
On Amazon.com, You Can't Go Home Again prompted this declaration from an obviously young reader: "I only read the first like ten pages. It was super boring so I stopped." But in the decade in which it appeared, many young readers did understand. In my first copy of that novel, a used Sun Dial reprint that cost me thirty cents, Ann Watkins, age 16, had, in 1946, written in her father's copy, "Very True!" beside this line: "Why, then, should any living man ally himself with death, and, in his greed and blindness, batten on his brother's blood?" (436). Young as she was, she recognized this ringing conclusion to the "This is man" passages as a summary of the novel's major theme (432-36).
It is from the perspective of a novelist, not a scholar, that I will make the case for You Can't Go Home Again as a more artistic novel than it has been considered to be. When I reread it in 1968, I was distracted by its reputed faults. Rereading the novel again in 1984, however, I felt that it was more of an achievement than most readers and critics have thought. That feeling having haunted me ever since, I am moved nearly thirty years later-on the occasion of the most recent reprinting of the novel1-to make a case for it as not only a better Thomas Wolfe novel than generally thought but as a fine work of fiction in its own right.
Reevaluating You Can't Go Home Again, one would do well not to overindulge in Wolfe's life story, but rather to pretend that one knows no more about Wolfe than one knows about Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, and to set aside the complex questions of what editor Edward C. Aswell did for and to Wolfe's manuscripts, and of how good You Can't Go Home Again is as compared...