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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
It's fascinating that in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the only author in demand on the TV networks was Tom Clancy. As a writer, as a handler of language and character and metaphor, Clancy ranks somewhere slightly below the sixth-graders I used to teach. But he knows something -- about terrorists, about weapons of mass destruction, about the world we live in with all its fanaticism and teeth and cynicism and terror.
So you believe Wolfe's writing meets the criteria of serious fiction?
Yes! When you read "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full," you return to the era of Balzac and Zola and Dickens and Thackeray and Twain -- you see and you learn and -- unlike in most postmodernist, semiotic, feminist, deconstructive written-for-professors fiction -- you're allowed to use your own judgment in drawing conclusions from all this information.
In "Bonfire," we see a New York courtroom in which, when felon after felon is paraded before the judge and asked "What's your occupation?" we hear "security guard" and learn, from Wolfe's years of research and observation, that this is the favorite occupation of America's criminal class. And why not? Entry requirements call for a fourth-grade education and a pulse. So when, after Sept. 11, we discover that our airports and planes and lives are being safeguarded, in part, by felons and parolees and people too stupid to pour proverbial piss out of a metaphorical boot, are we surprised? Not if we've read Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe writes about things that have seemed off-limits to "serious" writers the past few decades: observing class and race unblinkingly, without the filter of politically correct polemics; looking at the power of money in almost every human interaction; looking at how one event -- such as the hit and run accident in "Bonfire of the Vanities" or Charlie Croker's money problems in "A Man in Full" -- can cut vertically through society, like a knife through a cake, changing the lives of politicians, journalists, "Master of the Universe" stockbrokers, petty criminals, street thugs, factory workers and fake civil rights leaders.
When, in Boulder, Colo., a few miles down the road from where I live, the murder of little JonBenet Ramsey eventually cost the careers of the district attorney (an idiot I'd known slightly for 16 years) and the mayor and the city manager and the chief of police and the chief of detectives and ... well, those of us who read Tom Wolfe had a sense of the dynamic of it all. Those who read Updike and Irving and Mailer and Rushdie ... who knows what insights they gleaned? Perhaps JonBenet was murdered by a disembodied hand from a telepathic Egyptian escaped from a Shakespearean play or fallen out of an airliner passing over. Anything is possible.
[Simmons gets up to retrieve a couple of books: a copy of John Gardner's "The Art of Fiction" and "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe, into which he has tucked a battered copy of an essay by Wolfe.]
Still, Tom Wolfe weakens his own case when he writes -- as he did in his ad hominem attack on Updike, Mailer and Irving, "My Three Stooges" -- that the paragon of the reportorial novelist was John Steinbeck. Wolfe argues that, "'The Grapes of Wrath' is a textbook American demonstration of Zola's method of writing the novel: leaving the study, going out into the world, documenting society, linking individual psychology to its social context, giving yourself fuel enough for the maximum exercise of your power as a writer -- thereby absorbing the reader totally."
Well, maybe. But if Updike, Mailer, Irving, Roth and Bellow wanted to respond to this argument, they could do worse than to quote John Gardner in "The Art of Fiction":
"No ignoramus -- no writer who has kept himself innocent of education -- has ever produced fine art ... Witness John Steinbeck's failure in 'The Grapes of Wrath.' It should have been one of America's great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil."
So where does that leave us on taking sides in the great hissy-fit bitch-brawl? A pox on both their houses? Perhaps, but there remains the simple imperative of excellence. That which is excellent is serious, however comedic in its tone or inwardly Jamesian in its focus or grandly Stevensonian in its scope and adventure. Talent commands.
