What is the author's tone in A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin?

The book's overall tone is clearly related to its perspective and themes. Specifically, there is, in general, a sense of loss about the book, a sense of longing, not so much for the past as for what sustained the author IN that past - the hope, in all its blindness and intensity, that he experienced throughout the years of adolescence and youth the book chronicles. While the narrative never makes it explicitly clear why the author goes back to Brownsville, there is the unavoidable impression that he is searching ... for meaning, for insight, for revelation, but also, it seems, for something in his past that he hopes his "walking" through the streets and lanes of memory will reawaken, something missing in his present.