He will grope his way toward a foreign soil

Current book: Look Homeward, Angel
Pages read: 332-431

Contrary to the rest of my posts about this book, I actually have something to say in this one. I think it's because Eugene is finally growing up and becoming interesting. ("Was that an implication that children are boring?" you may be asking yourself. Yes. Yes, it was. Seriously, I don't know how people put up with them. I was at the library today, picking up, among other things, Women In Love for the Project, and there was a little boy waiting for the elevator with his mother. The mom said, "Ok, the elevator's almost here," and the little boy responded in the whiniest, most annoying, edge-of-a-tantrum voice possible, "I don't want to take the elevator! We always take the elevator!" That was all my tiny glimpse allowed me to witness, but I'm fairly sure it went on afterward. If I'd been his mother, I'd have said, "Why don't you whine about it some more? That'll make me change my mind. Or, when we get home, you can go to your room for an hour and think about how much worse that is than the elevator. Also, die in a fire." The problem with children is that sarcasm is lost of them. Little toads.)

Anyway, Eugene is learning lots at college (and by lots, I mean how to sleep with prostitutes and fudge his grades). Well, it's not quite that bad, but he does fall in with a rough crowd for a while. His professors also do a great deal to disillusion him, proving to him by their teaching and grading habits that hard work is a poor substitute for conformity and ass-kissing. He comes home at the end of freshman year to spend the summer back in Altamont, where he falls into first love with a woman named Laura. Eugene, being an early bloomer, is still only sixteen, and Laura is twenty-one. She raises this objection to their relationship, but Eugene denies her, claiming that true love is unaware of such paltry details. (He's right. But it doesn't matter, because it isn't really true love, as we'll see.) When she leaves for the Fourth of July holiday, she writes to tell him she's been engaged to be married all along and won't be returning as promised. He's completely crushed and returns to school jaded and world-weary, which, of course, makes him popular among the sophomores and solves all his social problems. At Christmas, home again for the break, he makes the mistake of drinking his father's stash of alcohol and fully realizing the horrors of his possible inheritance of alcoholic tendencies. After this episode, he tells his family that all they've ever done is hold him back and he wishes to be free of them forever. (Go, Eugene! It's about damn time!) He goes back to college for the second semester, during which World War I starts. When he reaches summer break, he decides to head north to Virginia, where Laura's married household is located, to try to reclaim her. He doesn't find her, though, and instead ends up taking a summer job as a foreman overseeing the manufacture of large machinery.

That's where I am, but what I've failed to mention is that during all this Eugene has had sex with a couple of prostitutes and flirted with three different other women, in addition to his doomed love affair with Laura. That does not, in itself, seem important. However, Laura was 5 years older than him, the prostitutes were both in middle age, the three other women he flirted with were all middle-aged or older, and at least one of them had been widowed. Normally, I would be the last person in the world to call attention to a pattern like this and call it an indication of an Oedipus complex, but I'm forced to do so because of the fact that Thomas Wolfe directly discusses the Oedipus story and Eugene's personal fascination with it at the end of one of the chapters. I want to forget that he did it, but I just can't. So Eugene has a thing for his mom, which he expressed by pursuing older women. There. Happy?

Oh, also, the elder Gant, though he's been threatening it for 200 pages, has still not managed to bite it. Alas.