I wanted to like To the Lighthouse a lot more than I actually did. As a work of art and a formal experiment, I admire it and the skill Wolfe displays in writing it, but as a novel I simply couldn’t connect with it. Everything about it is so relentlessly internal, a rushing river of thoughts from the first mountaintop dribbles along the many winds and tributaries of its watershed to the final languid delta where the waters meet the sea.
Virtually everything that happens, happens in the characters’ heads. Outside of these musings, the plot is (by design, admittedly) so trivial that just describing it sounds like I’m insulting it. A boy and his mother want to go visit a lighthouse but can't; later the boy does but the mother is dead. A man tells a lady that women can’t paint pictures but then she paints one and it’s pretty good. As far as external conflict goes, that’s about all you get.
Wolfe’s prose is rich and evocative, and her characterization is effective even when the characters themselves do little. I don’t deny it’s a good book, perhaps even a great one, but it wasn’t for me.