What is the author's style in The Far and the Near by Thomas Wolfe?

For roughly the first half of the story, Wolfe paints an idealistic picture of a railroad engineer who has built up a silent relationship with two women. The reader is led to believe that this is going to be a positive story, since even negative events like the deaths the engineer has witnessed are tempered by his idyllic vision. However, a little more than halfway through, the mood. or emotional quality of the story, starts to change: "Everything was as strange to him as if he had never seen this town before."