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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
The once massively cool Tom Wolfe is trying to secure his legacy, but his new book doesn't pass the acid test.
Nov 6, 2000 | Here's how it goes with Tom Wolfe: You were in high school, you stumbled across "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" or the "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" while killing time in the fluorescently depressing library stacks. That prose! That frantic, amped-up, rollicking, vigorous language! Who was this guy? And the payoff? He wrote for Rolling Stone, your pimply adolescent bible. You were captivated. This was not your father's journalism. You checked out everything you could get your hands on and didn't leave your room for a week.
That's how it goes with Tom Wolfe, for young men who came of age in the '70s, who were weaned on the New Journalism; in fact, who didn't even know that there was any other kind of journalism that could be written. Tom Wolfe was a touchstone, the nonfiction equivalent of Thomas Pynchon and Jack Kerouac, a dandified brother to Hunter Thompson (who young '70s men would discover soon enough). Tom Wolfe didn't write about boring crap; Tom Wolfe wrote about the Merry Pranksters and whether you were on or off the bus, and about dropping acid, and he wrote about surfers, and he wrote about cars, man, and he wrote about those superbad mofo Black Panthers and it was all so ... unbelievably exhilarating. He had no respect for grammar, his syntax scintillated, it sparked, it throbbed. He threw around exclamation points and capital letters with efflorescent abandon. He broke the rules. He looked frooty in that white suit, but so what? He was massively, unquestionably cool.
Then -- POW! -- "The Bonfire of the Vanities" began to appear in Rolling Stone and there it was: Tom Wolfe really was a genius. The dude could write anything. It was a bright time, and Tom Wolfe, in that crazy white suit, burned more brightly than anyone. He wasn't young, but he seemed like he was. He was the Dick Clark of American letters. You could dance to Tom Wolfe. You wanted to.
Unfortunately, nothing bright can stay that way forever, and like the Hindenburg, exploding and crashing in flames in New Jersey, Wolfe is currently burning out in dramatic fashion. The spectacle is heartbreaking, because Wolfe, formerly a maestro of perspective, possessed of a preternaturally reliable critical eye and a sensibility that could slice steel, has lost it. Worse, Wolfe no longer reads young. In "Hooking Up," a flabby collection of recently published and reprinted articles, plus a novella that originally appeared in (where else?) Rolling Stone, Wolfe reads old.
Tom Wolfe reads from "Hooking Up"
Of course, the secret to Wolfe's success was that he always thought old, but he had the foresight to phrase his contrarian insights in brassy pop chords. A patriot, a conservative, a stodgy champion of throwback architecture and the naturalism of Zola, Wolfe -- like his equally severe though far less entertaining distaff counterpart, Joan Didion -- was the haughty interloper who was unexpectedly adopted by the Woodstock Nation. He got away with it because his curiosity was unflagging. The national freak show served his purposes, but you could also tell that he loved it. And, as the pieces included in "Hooking Up" clearly demonstrate, he never lost his faultless reporter's nose for a great story. Or a fur-flying, guns-a-blazin' dogfight.
The problem is that Wolfe's talent for polemic has superseded his appetite for stories culled from the American hurly-burly (the "Billion-Footed Beast" of his notorious 1989 Harper's essay). His once-infectious enthusiasm has been replaced by glib thuggery, a journalistic version of the toothless coot telling the damn kids to get the hell out of his yard. The title essay is a soap bubble, the reportorial sketches ("Two Young Men Who Went West," "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died") rich in detail but rife with contradiction and the hardcore stuff, the much discussed attacks on campus radicals ("In the Land of the Rococo Marxists") and the literary lions (Updike, Mailer, Irving -- Wolfe's "Three Stooges") who jeered "A Man In Full," the bestselling follow-up to "Bonfire," suggest a bully whose huffing pugnacity is infuriatingly ignored.
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