Tom Wolfe

I’m a big Tom Wolfe fan.

My favorites are The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, and I have no patience for the boosters (oh, sorry, “experts”) of modern art of the all-black-painting variety or modern architecture of the can’t-find-the-front-door variety who can’t handle Wolfe’s criticism.

I also enjoyed Bonfire of the Vanities, with my only real complaint being the ending. Or maybe I should say the structure of the book. Wolfe sets all these great characters and plot elements in motion and then he doesn’t really resolve anything; it was kinda like he just got tired and decided to stop. That said, endings are hard. Robert Heinlein and Roald Dahl are two other writers who were great in the set-up but often had problems with the follow-through.

The characters in Bonfire were two-dimensional, but I can attribute that to Wolfe being more of a reporter than a novelist. When you’re reporting, you don’t need to flesh out your characters’ full dimensionality because, after all, they’re real people—as a reporter, you’re just telling part of the story. With a novel you have to put in that extra effort. In any case, two-dimensional ain’t bad. Gone Girl was pretty good, and all its characters were one-dimensional. 1984 is a great novel, and one might argue that its characters are zero-dimensional. The Rotter’s Club, these guys are three dimensional, but he’s Jonathan Coe, for chrissake. And Rabbit’s positively four-dimensional (remember, time is the fourth dimension), but Rabbit’s the greatest creation of a great novelist. Bonfire of the Vanities is an excellent book that we should define by its many strengths—its vividness, its up-to-the-minuteness, its Dickensianness, etc.—not by its few weaknesses.

What else? I never read The Right Stuff—the movie was so good, I felt no need to read the book—and was never able to get through his classic reportages of the car guys and the surfers and all those other pieces from the 60s. I found the whole Style!!! thing just too exhausting. It’s not that I’ll never read stream of consciousness—I read On the Road back when I was 20 or so, and it was great!—but something about those Wolfe essays, they just seemed so willed. I’m sure they were great at the time, but from the standpoint of decades later, I find the understated style of Gay Talese much more convincing. I did, however, like some of Wolfe’s later essays, such as his justification for Bonfire (that article about the billion-footed beast) and his attack on Mailer/Irving/Updike. Perhaps it’s just my taste that I preferred Wolfe when he was writing straight.

And then there was Wolfe’s attack on evolution. That was just foolish. But, hey, nobody’s perfect. Wolfe was proud of his ability to defend ridiculous positions, and in other settings that made for great writing.

After Wolfe died, I read a bunch of obituaries. And I learned a few things.

First off, I learned that he was tall. Who knew? In all those photos, I just somehow assumed he was short. Really short, like 5’3″ or something. Maybe it was how he dressed, like a dandy?

I also learned that Wolfe was middle-of-the-road, politically. I’d always thought of him as conservative, but I guess that was just in comparison to the rest of the literary establishment. According to Kyle Smith, he “habitually voted for the winner in every presidential election, except when he picked Mitt Romney in 2012 and Ross Perot in 1992.”

Finally, I learned that, in his famous article, Radical Chic, Wolfe was unfair to Leonard Bernstein. By this I don’t mean that he was making fun of Bernstein, quoting Bernstein out of context, not showing sufficient respect for Bernstein, etc. What I mean is that he put words into Bernstein’s mouth, put thoughts in Bernstein’s head, based on no evidence at all. Jay Livingston has the story. I’d never actually read that particular essay so I had no idea, and it didn’t come up in any of the other obituaries that I read. I guess maybe Radical Chic should be taken as fiction or satire; Bernstein was a public figure; you can say what you want about public figures if you’re writing fiction or satire; in any case Wolfe was still a brilliant writer and cultural critic. Still, it made me sad to learn this. Making fun of Bernstein, fine. Attributing thoughts to him—and not just any thoughts, but thoughts that make him look particularly foolish—not so cool. Then again, Wolfe was many things but I doubt he ever would’ve claimed to be cool.

12 thoughts on “Tom Wolfe

  1. “And Rabbit’s positively four-dimensional (remember, time is the fourth dimension), but Rabbit’s the greatest creation of a great novelist.”
    I agree! But I’m surprised to see you say this since I seem to recall a bunch of Updike bashing on the blog?

    “I never read The Right Stuff—the movie was so good, I felt no need to read the book”
    I loved both the movie and the book. There are tons of interesting details in the book that aren’t in the movie, but not too long after reading the book I forgot all those details so I’m mostly just left with the movie.

    “First off, I learned that he was tall. Who knew? In all those photos, I just somehow assumed he was short. Really short, like 5’3″ or something. Maybe it was how he dressed, like a dandy?”
    Maybe this is the result of partial pooling to other great non-fiction writers of his era like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote?

    • Z:

      No, it’s Helen De Witt who can’t stand John Updike. I’m an Updike fan. I can’t recall any time I’ve bashed Updike on the blog. Once I said that I didn’t think he was so good at titles (The Witches of Eastwick is really the only good title of his that I can think of), but that’s pretty minor, hardly a bash.

  2. “I also learned that Wolfe was middle-of-the-road, politically. I’d always thought of him as conservative, but I guess that was just in comparison to the rest of the literary establishment.”

    Tom Wolfe’s talent seemed to be skewering the intellectually pompous, and this requires a mind that naturally sees things for what they are. When leftism is culturally dominant, this makes people like Wolfe look conservative.

    He was also helped by the apparent insanity of his targets, especially modern architecture and art. Wild caricature doesn’t seem excessive when confronted with buildings and artworks that boast of their unpleasantness.

    http://enacademic.com/pictures/enwiki/83/Sangshad_2.jpg

    • Terry:

      Yes. To put it another way, there’s nothing inherently leftist about all-black paintings or buildings where you can’t find the front door. It’s just that leftism was culturally dominant then, so the artists and architects who did that work took the leftist label.

  3. Wolfe also called evolution “a myth”: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09/08/493072035/evolution-uproar-what-to-do-when-a-famous-author-dismisses-darwin. Mainstream evolutionary biology seems like a rather odd target for skewering to me compared to, say, modern art. Especially since Wolfe seems not to have the first clue about evolution. But I suppose I would say that since I do some evolutionary biology.

    I don’t think this should affect anyone’s opinions of his other work having nothing to do with evolution. And I don’t know that it should affect anyone’s “overall” opinion of Wolfe. Personally, I often prefer to remain of (at least) two minds about people who’ve done things I like and things I don’t, rather than forming some “overall” opinion.

  4. There’s a lengthy Wolfe interview in Paris Review (behind paywall nowadays, I think) which is largely about “the Bonfire”, and how the story kept changing in his head due to it being written on two-week cycle for the Rolling Stone. I think he also revised it for the book edition.

    I think this bit from the PR highlights the writer vs reporter quandary best:

    INTERVIEWER
    The Bonfire of the Vanities ends with an epilogue—a shattering epilogue, one page long or so, where you find out that a year later McCoy’s back in exactly the same predicament. Was that always in the design?
    WOLFE
    No, it wasn’t. That was one part of the outline that I hadn’t worked out. I didn’t know whether to make it a happy or an unhappy ending. I could have made it a happy ending, but I felt that this would not have been true to the criminal-justice system in New York! Having gotten their hooks into a highly publicized figure like McCoy—and I think this is one of the sad sides of the interaction of the press and the criminal-justice system in large cities—they were not going to humiliate themselves by letting this man off completely if there were any way to hold him. McCoy had committed a Class E felony—leaving the scene of an accident where there has been personal bodily injury. That can be considered an important crime or a very minor crime depending on the mood of the hour. In the case of someone in a highly publicized case, given his background, it would have been treated severely. He would have probably drawn a year in jail and would have ended up having to serve most of it. I had a choice of either giving it a happy ending or spending several more chapters to follow him through the maw and the innards of the criminal-justice system—the hearings, the various court appearances, and appeals and all the rest of it. I felt that would be anticlimactic. So I came up with this device of the epilogue—a newspaper article written by The New York Times. My model—and this may seem farfetched—was the epilogue to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in which the Divers are seen from afar by someone who says, “The last time I saw them they were sitting in a terrace of a hotel having a drink. I should have stopped to say something to them and I never did.” It’s very poignant. I decided to have this type of monologue-from-afar in the form of a newspaper piece in The New York Times. I’m not sure it worked, but that was my solution.

  5. (Ah, I think my last comment didn’t go through.)

    re: the Bonfire, there’s a good interview with Wolfe at the Paris Review, largely about how the book was written on 2-week cycle and his fascination with Dickens. Most of it is paywalled but here is the bit on his thinking behind the ending (which he admitted was “gimmicky”) & the writer vs reporter dynamic:

    INTERVIEWER
    The Bonfire of the Vanities ends with an epilogue—a shattering epilogue, one page long or so, where you find out that a year later McCoy’s back in exactly the same predicament. Was that always in the design?
    WOLFE
    No, it wasn’t. That was one part of the outline that I hadn’t worked out. I didn’t know whether to make it a happy or an unhappy ending. I could have made it a happy ending, but I felt that this would not have been true to the criminal-justice system in New York! Having gotten their hooks into a highly publicized figure like McCoy—and I think this is one of the sad sides of the interaction of the press and the criminal-justice system in large cities—they were not going to humiliate themselves by letting this man off completely if there were any way to hold him. McCoy had committed a Class E felony—leaving the scene of an accident where there has been personal bodily injury. That can be considered an important crime or a very minor crime depending on the mood of the hour. In the case of someone in a highly publicized case, given his background, it would have been treated severely. He would have probably drawn a year in jail and would have ended up having to serve most of it. I had a choice of either giving it a happy ending or spending several more chapters to follow him through the maw and the innards of the criminal-justice system—the hearings, the various court appearances, and appeals and all the rest of it. I felt that would be anticlimactic. So I came up with this device of the epilogue—a newspaper article written by The New York Times. My model—and this may seem farfetched—was the epilogue to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in which the Divers are seen from afar by someone who says, “The last time I saw them they were sitting in a terrace of a hotel having a drink. I should have stopped to say something to them and I never did.” It’s very poignant. I decided to have this type of monologue-from-afar in the form of a newspaper piece in The New York Times. I’m not sure it worked, but that was my solution.
    INTERVIEWER
    Did it bother you at all that the book was criticized for having so few, if any, sympathetic characters?
    WOLFE
    Well, I don’t like to be criticized, but it didn’t bother me a great deal because I felt that this was a book about vanity in New York in an age of money fever. In fact, those who triumph in an age like that are seldom what we usually consider heroic and admirable characters. I also looked back at novels about cities that I admire tremendously, John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, Zola’s Nana, Balzac’s Cousin Bette, and it’s hard to find any major character in them who is sympathetic in the usual meaning of that term. Somewhere I ran into a theory that I’d never heard of before, that without love from the author a character is not noble. I was being called incapable of love for the characters. Actually, I was in awe of the characters. I couldn’t very well love them.
    INTERVIEWER
    Thinking back, would you make any changes now?
    WOLFE
    I might change the ending. The epilogue. Looking back on it I felt it had a somewhat gimmicky quality about it. I still couldn’t give it a happy ending. That wouldn’t be right.

    https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2226/tom-wolfe-the-art-of-fiction-no-123-tom-wolfe

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