As he noted at the time with what seemed ironic distance but turned out to eerily prefigure his own career, "The Novel seemed like one of the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold or striking oil, through which an American could, overnight, in a flash, utterly transform his destiny." He says elsewhere in the same piece, "At this late date -- partly due to the New Journalism itself -- it's hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever."

At its best, Wolfe's journalism sizzles with a quality of stunned amazement distilled into keen eloquence. At its worst, his fiction is bloated, overbearing and boring. After he published "The Right Stuff," which many consider to be his best nonfiction work, Wolfe published "In Our Time," a coffee table book; "The Painted Word," an attack on the pretensions of modern art; "From Bauhaus to Our House," a screed on modern architecture; and the collection of articles "The Purple Decades: A reader," before turning to fiction and publishing, in 1987, the blockbuster novel that became a Hollywood movie, "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Since that time Wolfe has been apparently trying to demonstrate, by doing it himself, that realistic fiction is the future of American literature. In 1998 he released his second gargantuan novel, "A Man in Full."

Norman Mailer took up five extra-large New York Review of Books pages to agonize over "A Man in Full" and to say that it was better than "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (which is saying what, precisely?) while at the same time comparing it to making love with a fat lady -- "Once she gets on top, it's over."

Mailer also offered thoughts on why Wolfe is such a fine writer of nonfiction and such a flawed novelist:

Can one say that his strength as a journalist contributes to his weakness as a novelist? It is likely. He was so good as a young reporter that he was promoted to feature writer. But even in the upper reaches of feature writing, you still move on quickly to another subject, another set of people ... He spent his early professional life writing too quickly and moving on ... Can we offer a final verdict? Tom may be the hardest-working showoff the literary world has ever owned.

When Wolfe occasionally returns to the practice of journalism, as he did with "The Artist the World Couldn't See," a recent New York Times magazine article, his fans still hope to see the insouciant fire and wit that made pieces like "Radical Chic" and "The Pumphouse Gang" such an effervescent pleasure. (For the title piece of his new "Hooking Up" collection, his publisher reports, Wolfe immersed himself in the subculture of American teens and reports on their sexual rites with the clinical precision ornamented by baroque flourishes for which he is justly famous. We are also told that according to Wolfe, today's youths define "second base" as oral sex.)

But just as often, we are disappointed. In scolding the art world for ignoring sculptor Frederick Hart, who died at 55 a public success and a critical nonentity, Wolfe predictably ascribes Hart's obscurity to that putative art-world cabal described in "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House," whose high crimes include the promotion of abstract painting and the erection of modern buildings. But, as a letter writer responds, "The art world ignores Frederick Hart's sculpture, not because of the formal nature of his art but because his sculpture, remarkably skilled though it may be, seldom, if ever, rises above the slick and sentimental."

But above all, when Wolfe hectors us about our failure to grasp the importance of social realism and the centrality of status seeking in American life, he doesn't entertain us. It's no fun. Maybe we're dolts, asses and twits; maybe we're lazy and narrow and weak; maybe we need to be educated by Mr. Wolfe. But all we want is to have some fun! He used to entertain us and he doesn't anymore.

The value of "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House" is that by example Wolfe gives us courage to question an orthodoxy that has kept undeservedly long the mantle of the iconoclastic. If read a certain way, those books can reinvigorate our relations to art. We need the courage to trust our own responses, to resist the social pressure to praise what leaves us cold and feign indifference to work from which we secretly derive some warm, sustaining pleasure. What can make Wolfe's bellowing about aesthetics tiresome, however, is that while directing us to seek more authentic aesthetic experiences, he himself lapses from art into polemic. Having given in to the urge to be right, he has forsaken that loftier job of the writer, which is to be intellectually beguiling in a way so complex as to awaken the soul's delight.

And Wolfe's fiction, too, seems meant less as an expression of his own aesthetic powers and more as Exhibits A and B in his voluminous brief against modern novels. While "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was a commercial success, it lacked the stylistic power and sizzle of his journalism. Ditto with "A Man in Full," 1998's rotund tome set in Atlanta, despite its remarkable 1.2 million initial hardback press run. Wolfe simply does not seem to be a great novelist. He is absolutely right about the necessity of looking at the surfaces of American life, but in the process of telling us that, he disregards the surfaces of his own prose. When Wolfe wrote his great stuff about cars, when he wrote "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," his prose had a shimmer in the details because he was celebrating the power of surfaces both in the world and in his writing.

What can you do? Gather below his New York apartment with megaphones and hector: Bad Tom Wolfe! Stop Writing Fiction! Bad Tom Wolfe!

Apply tough love? "Dammit, soldier, get out there and report! Tell us how we live today! Make us hear it, touch it, smell it, see it, taste it! Make us feel it!"

Don't be ridiculous.

For fans who love and respect the early journalism of Tom Wolfe, the only thing to be done, aside from looking eagerly forward to "Hooking Up," is to recognize that Wolfe is onto something else now. Like it or not, leave it at that. Perhaps for his forthcoming collection, he will have occasionally dipped his pen into the ink of the gods.

Rather than petulance and stridency, the proper stance is a studied and patient distance.

Can you do a good insouciant shrug?

Good. Let's all do one big therapeutic insouciant shrug together on the count of three:

One.

Two.

Three.

SHRUG!

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