remembering Tom Wolfe

The novelist-reporter reads like the caffeinated peak of every writer’s ninth espresso and never comes down or crashes

RATHER THAN MAKE UP FANTASY, WOLFE SOPPED UP THE DETAILS OF THE ENVIRONMENTS THAT APPEALED TO HIM MOST.

Idon’t mean for this to sound like “I had a vision” or anything, but when I cracked the decidedly beige-looking spine of The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby one afternoon at a bar in the heart of Victoria, British Columbia, I was so startled and bewildered by the very first sentences that the influence of that effervescent prose took literally months to shake.

I was on-site to draft the kind of dryly amusing weekend feature I’d written so many times before, the sort of quasianthropological peeled-eyeball survey of alien strangers meant to show off my powers of observation and wit from a distance, when I encountered this paragraph from the introduction to Tom Wolfe’s collection of generation-defining essays from the mid-60s:

“Anyway, I went to the Hot Rod & Custom Car show and wrote a story that would have suited any of the totem newspapers. All the totem newspapers would regard one of these shows as a sideshow, a panopticon, for creeps and kooks; not even wealthy, eccentric creeps and kooks, which would be all right, but lower class creeps and nutballs with dermatitic skin and ratty hair. The totem story usually makes what is known as “gentle fun” of this, which is a way of saying, don’t worry, these people are nothing.” So forcefully did this sentiment and style impress itself upon me that I immediately changed the direction of my prospective article.

Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction reads uniformly like the caffeinated peak of every writer’s ninth espresso and never comes down or crashes no matter how long he sustains it: 50-page reports on niche California subcultures or fake-grinning teen idols or whatever novel dance craze supplanted the debutante ball simply rocket ahead from the first word to the final period like air-force test pilots bearing down the Bonneville salt flats to break the sound barrier. And he raced this fast with the insouciant literary flair of someone just sort of dashing it off, a martini in one hand, a pen in the other, no big deal.

It was infectious, that energy paired with that attitude — a prizefighter cracking wise between rounds or a daredevil tightrope walker lighting up a Marlboro casually while teetering on the line. Simply glimpse at a few characteristic Wolfeian ledes, each in its own way representative of the author’s nonpareil journalistic exuberance: “Picasso’s Goat! Little Alexander, with a glass of Scotch whisky in one hand, lolls on the base of Picasso’s immortal bronze goat.” Or try this: “The well-known American writer… but perhaps it’s best not to say exactly which wellknown American writer… they’re a sensitive breed!” Here’s a juicy one: “O Mother O’Hare, big bosom for our hungry poets, pelvic saddle for our sexologists and Open Classroom theorists — O houri O’Hare, who keeps her Perm-O-Pour Stoneglow thighs ajar to receive a generation of frustrated and unreadable novelists.” And they go on like that! All of them! That last one, incidentally, heralds a sober essay about the decline of fascism.

Wolfe’s project with these whooping, bounding, gleefully curling exercises in sparkling reportage was to “fearlessly flagellate the ‘70s,” as the back-cover ad copy declares with brio on my beaten-up paperback of Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. The collection includes such typical fare as “Funky Chic,” “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” and one essay titled, merely, “Pornoviolence.” But as one continues to chug through the Wolfe non-fiction corpus, the great un-fluctuating flamboyance of his approach starts to look increasingly like a gimmick, or more maybe precisely like a coping mechanism cultivated by a writer who plainly didn’t like to be a journalist in the traditional sense of that term.

Much has of course been made over the years of Wolfe’s associations with the era’s so-called New Journalism — a brand of high-style literary non-fiction whose looseness and laxity makes it vaguely unethical by the standards of classical journalistic integrity, but whose vivacity and tone of irrepressible mirth made it wildly popular among glossy magazine writers for more than a decade. But in retrospect, it’s obvious that

Wolfe did not have designs on reconfiguring the landscape of American journalism so much as he didn’t want to be an American journalist, at least not the kind of American journalist who had to file straightforward copy that stuck more or less inflexibly to the facts and contained on principle a minimum of exclamation marks and fashionable French phrases like “tout le monde.” He yearned to abandon journalism, not change it. His most famous and acclaimed work of long-form reporting, The Right Stuff, is 436 pages long and reads exactly like every other shorter piece of Wolfe’s writing.

Wolfe wrote his first novel in 1987, when he was nearly 60 — a lifetime into a career he wasn’t suited by disposition to succeed in but had proven ludicrously triumphant at nevertheless. And it hardly surprised anyone that the author of such fervid works as Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing With the Flak Catchers and From Bauhaus to Our House turned out to be even more exhilarating on the pages of a full-blown novel than he had been (ostensibly) confined to the limits of newspaper or magazine margins. The Bonfire of the Vanities was the kind of intergalactic mega-hit that permeates the popular imagination, leaving an indelible impression on the public consciousness and emerging as a nearuniversal reference point for an entire generation: Donald Trump himself could scarcely grace the society pages in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s without some sub-editor deeming his antics a “real-life Bonfire of the Vanities,” and the hapless exploits of Sherman McCoy are still invoked regularly today at the sight of anything like a media circus or class-based cause celebré.

Updike used to distinguish between the writer as critic and the writer as novelist as between a man in suit and tie, sober and dignified, and a man free to be himself, loose and limber: between two hard covers, the novelist was liberated of the conventions of form and the propriety of a venerated station. Wolfe never dressed up that way; he always came as he was, and he always wrote like a maniac, following whatever creative impulse occurred to him at the time. There was no liberating effect felt in Bonfire, because he was liberated to begin with.

Curiously, for a writer prone in nonfiction to invent or embellish, if Wolfe’s novels were notable for one quality other than their liveliness, it was their level of evident research. Wolfe felt that it obliged novelists to go out into the world and report on what they found there. Rather than make up fantasy scenarios from the ether of pure imagination, Wolfe wanted to study institutions and learn about trades, to sop up the lived-in detail of environments that appealed to him. Bonfire takes place chiefly on the sales floor of the Wall Street high-rise where a millionaire bond trader works his magic, and in the halls of the courthouse where an Assistant District Attorney plies his lowly trade. Wolfe, naturally, spent time on Wall Street at the bond desk of Salomon Brothers and sat in on cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The reporters and society women and politicians who people the periphery of the book, Wolfe had no doubt met in some form in real Manhattan along the way.

Bonfire of the Vanities is an outrageously funny and occasionally quite boring novel, owing partly to its unwieldy scope (not just 700 pages but a half-dozen protagonists, intertwining plotlines and elaborately realized dimensions of social satire and Dickensian commentary) and partly to Wolfe’s insatiable tendency to go broad for a punchline and go ecstatic to land a joke. It’s rather tiresome in its non-stop exuberance, in other words, despite moments of calculated lunacy capable of provoking no less than full-on belly laughs.

I prefer Wolfe’s follow-up, A Man in Full — an 800-page comic behemoth that, like its predecessor, aspires to the condition of the sweeping, all-encompassing Great American Novel and delights greatly as it fails to get there. A Man in Full concerns the downfall of the well-meaning, sub-mental billionaire real-estate mogul Charlie Croker in the fractured lap of Atlanta. It spans a jailbreak, a horse-mating ritual, a suicidal freezer unit, an earthquake and a marathon aerobics class for middle-aged divorcées – among other wild episodes. It’s a great deal of fun and inevitably exhausting, though the former feeling prevails.

A Man in Full was nearly as successful as The Bonfire of the Vanities. That novel’s successor, however, was received in all quarters as a disappointment, and indeed I Am Charlotte Simmons languishes at the bottom of the oeuvre today like the runt of the litter. Perhaps it’s a matter of incredibly coincidental timing — the novel takes place at a liberal arts college campus among the dorm rooms of first-year students in 2004, exactly when I left my smalltown home to begin my university tenure as the hero does — but Charlotte Simmons resonates with me on a personal level, and I admire its precision in representing academic life for a generation both raised on rap music and reality TV and unfamiliar yet with iPhones or Facebook. Its deficiencies it mostly shares with the other Wolfe novels; it also includes an unforgettable — you could even say notorious — incident involving a young woman’s deflowering and a male member likened inexplicably to a ball-peen hammer.

And yet, it includes some shimmering beauties of Wolfe-ian brilliance, just the visions of truth, exquisitely rendered, that made his writing so valuable. Charlotte Simmons, book-smart but streetbenighted Ivy League freshman, getting a taste of campus life — her experiences are some of the most ravishing, and for me, most relatable depictions of higher education in all its unanticipated ugliness ever committed to the page. And these he devised in his 70s! We will miss Wolfe for his capacity to trawl any depth and resurface with something luminous and genuine, something that glimmers with the essence of the real.

We will miss Wolfe for passages like this, in which Simmons has been exiled from her dorm room in the middle of the night to appease the demands of her bullying sex-crazed roommate:

“Loneliness wasn’t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt… it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone. She had a roommate who froze her out in order to remind her daily what an invisible nonentity Charlotte Simmons, the erstwhile mountain prodigy, really was — and to underscore it by throwing her out when she felt like it in the dead of the night. Out to where? To a public lounge… which also burned with lust and sexual fear… in the dead of the night.”