The Hills Beyond Book

Thomas Wolfe's "The Hills Beyond" is difficult to rate because unlike a novel written from start to finish by a single author this work takes portions of a larger manuscript and creates a fictional story about generations of a family in the Carolinas. How much of it is autobiographical and how much is created by the editor has been the subject of many articles and dissertations. If one tries to read it as a narrative moving toward a climax it can be disconcerting. I didn't feel that "Wolfe" was on top of his game, for example, until I paid less attention to the Joyner family's history and focused more on the quality of language being employed. While I typically knew the vocables that Wolfe used, at times they were so creatively construed that I was touched by his choice of words. To me that became the strength of this literature, that an author can work and rework language to the extent that it moves the reader both intellectually and emotionally. I would have rated the "novel" four stars for this reason alone. As a compelling narrative, however, the chapters were too disjointed, and the flow of the story was perhaps the best that the editor could create from the material he had available in manuscript form.