'...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.'

So begins Look Homeward, Angel – in the view of some, the forgotten masterpiece of modernist literature. Welcome to Issue 5 of the 2PoundPaperback – your weekly dose of book-related insights, book news, and updates on my writing projects.

What I'm Reading:

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. (I'm actually reading Wolfe's second novel, Of Time and the River, but it makes more sense to start here).

Premise: This novel recounts the life of Eugene Gant – from his birth in 1900 to his flight from home at nineteen. Most of this happens in Altamont, a fictionalised Asheville, North Carolina. But this is a novel you read for poetry rather than plot. Hundreds of things happen but in a way nothing happens.

Points of interest: When I talk to most people about Thomas Wolfe, they assume I mean the guy who wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, also Thomas (Tom) Wolfe. This is also not helped by Virginia Woolf, Tobias Wolff, or Tobias Wolff's brother, Geoffrey Wolff (bizarrely, they were raised separately and didn't know they were brothers until adulthood).

The relevant Wolfe is, in many ways, the lost writer of the Lost Generation – despite being, in his time, as well as known as, and sharing an editor (Maxwell Perkins) with both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. (The film Genius is about his and Perkins relationship).

One reason for this, is that Wolfe is everything contemporary literature dislikes. He is a romantic, rather than a naturalist. He is long winded, rather than concise. He raves through 600 pages in a sort of gothic vision of prose poetry. He is hard work.

But he is also worth it.

What I'm Writing:

Manuscript.

Apart from plot/stylistic changes, I'm working on reducing the length of my novel by 20-thousand words. This comes from an impulse to follow Henry James's principle of selection and create the thing 'successfully foreshortened.'

That, or, all the industry talk about paper shortages has invaded my subconscious.