Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301240225
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT RIVENBARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WOLFE'S 1937 NOVELLA IS FINALLY UNABRIDGED
THE LOST BOY. By Thomas Wolfe. Edited and with an Introduction by James W. Clark Jr. University of North Carolina Press. $16.50.Thomas Wolfe readers will find much to admire in "The Lost Boy," his 1937 novella, published now for the first time in its unabridged form.
The book is actually a cycle of four prose poems about Wolfe's deceased older brother, Grover, told from the points of view of four members of the semiautobiographical Gant family Wolfe made famous in "Look Homeward, Angel."
In Wolfe's family, Grover was always first in his mother's affections. Wolfe, her youngest son, ranked a distant second, as the novella's introduction reveals. When she got word that Wolfe had died of tuberculosis of the brain in 1938, the mother reverted immediately to memories of Grover, expressing them much as Wolfe does in Part II of his novella: "Child, child, it was so long ago, but when I hear the name again, it all comes back . . . I can see him just the way he was, the way he looked . . ."
"The Lost Boy" abounds in hero worship of Grover (he is given his real-life name in this semifictional account), mingled with wistfulness and resentment for Wolfe's own secondary place in his mother's affections. Wolfe's emotional stake in the material produces passages of great lyrical beauty. In Part I, for example, Grover at age 12 expresses rapture about his North Carolina home town: "Just say it was America, it was the South; familiar as man's flesh and blood - familiar as raw winds in March - as a raw throat or a running nose - red mired clay and desolation - or April, April, and wild loveliness - just say it was all this - raw, cakey, desolate, lovely, lyrical, and full of wonder . . ."
Such passages convey the mystery, preciousness and irrevocable loss of a dead son. Unfortunately, Wolfe's emotions often drive him to resort to overheated hyperbole, producing overwritten sections that undermine the effectiveness of his best passages.
In Part II, Grover, aged 11 and traveling through Indiana on a family train trip, puts a black family retainer in his place for venturing into the white section from the Jim Crow car. Grover's antiquated racial sentiments may offend contemporary readers, but his mother's pride stems not from them, but from his moral "rectitude" in upholding the principle of racial separation that prevailed in 1902 America.
Wolfe maintains a detachment from the incident, letting his mother recount it in her own words, perhaps to emphasize the absurdity of her preference for Grover.
In Part III, Grover's sister offers scatterbrained perceptions that reveal little about Grover. Part IV, related by Wolfe's alter ego Eugene Gant, recounts a trip Wolfe made years later to the St. Louis house where Grover died of typhoid at 12. The section ostensibly chronicles Gant's wistfulness for his lost brother, but its poetic power raises it to a universal lament for the grief and loss we all must bear in life.
Robert Rivenbark is a Blacksburg freelance writer.\