Book Review: Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe, edited by Harold Bloom (2001)

Tom Wolfe, 1930-2018. Nattily dressed, as always, but this time not in all white.

The collected works of Tom Wolfe. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Tom Wolfe! One of the major writers of our time! The man who introduced phrases like “pushing the envelope,” “the me generation,” “radical chic,” and “masters of the universe” into our language! And yet, for some reason, Wolfe was never fully accepted by the East Coast critical establishment. For example, compare Wolfe’s obituary in The New York Times to Philip Roth’s. Those two writers passed away just eight days apart in 2018. But while Roth’s obituary includes a video the Times taped with Roth specifically for his obituary, Wolfe’s obit includes nothing of the sort. I’m not trying to suggest that either Wolfe or Roth was a “better” writer than the other, I’m merely pointing out that Roth was clearly anointed by The New York Times as a “Great and Important Writer” and Wolfe wasn’t. The New York Times even got the date of Wolfe’s first book wrong: it was published in 1965, not 1968. 

I think part of Wolfe’s lack of serious acclaim is due to him starting his career as a journalist, which is traditionally regarded as somehow inferior to being a novelist. In order to impress the literary establishment, you really must write serious fiction. The major literary prizes never went to Wolfe. Thomas Mallon recalls John Updike “flashing me a relieved smile” when A Man in Full lost the National Book Award for Fiction in 1998. 

There aren’t very many books about Tom Wolfe or his writing. One of the few is Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe, published by Chelsea House Publishers in 2001. The volume was edited by literary critic Harold Bloom, and it presents essays about Wolfe’s work that were published from 1974 to 1999. 

Bloom’s introduction damns Wolfe with faint praise. “Wolfe is a grand entertainer, a true moralist, and a very intelligent and perceptive journalist. That is not Balzac, but is still very impressive indeed.” (p.1) This is typical of the East Coast critical establishment view of Wolfe. John Updike dismissed Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full as falling short of literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Norman Mailer’s review of the same book took a similar tack, as it was full of belittling questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” Yes, we can praise Wolfe a little bit, he does write well, but he crams all those status details into his writing, that can’t actually be literature! He’s too focused on what brand of shoes those are, and what store the end table came from! And so, Tom Wolfe, for all his astounding success, remained something of a literary outsider. I suspect that was probably just fine with Wolfe. 

Ronald Weber’s 1974 essay, “Tom Wolfe’s Happiness Explosion,” is a very good essay on Wolfe’s early journalism. In the introduction to Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang, he described taking part in a symposium on “The Style of the Sixties.” The other panelists all seemed quite depressed about the state of the world, and they were open in their fears of incipient fascism, always the greatest fear of liberals. When it was Wolfe’s turn to speak, he said “What are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a…Happiness Explosion!” (The Pump House Gang, p.9) The other panelists didn’t have the foggiest notion what Wolfe was talking about, but he was right. Sure, there were lots of problems in America in the late 1960’s, but Wolfe’s point was that the booming post-war economy had allowed many people the time and money to indulge in their chosen leisure activities. From the very beginning of his career, Wolfe was pushing against the literary mainstream. Where others looked around and saw creeping fascism, Wolfe looked around and saw all the fantastic personal indulgences. 

Much of Wolfe’s early journalism was preoccupied with these new “statuspheres” as he called them—the custom-car scene in Southern California, teenagers living the surfing lifestyle, Hugh Hefner, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Weber’s essay is an excellent look at Wolfe’s early journalism, and the ways in which it broke from the conventional mold. 

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh is next with the longest essay in the book, a 35-page slog about non-fiction novels. The two books he discusses are Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, both classics of “New Journalism,” and both published in 1968. If you’re not deeply familiar with both books, I’d say just skip the essay.

Zavarzadeh’s essay is written in the nearly incomprehensible academic-speak that is unfortunately all too prevalent in academic writing. Here’s a sample sentence: 

“It does not proclaim the inability of totalizing models to decode current fictuality, but it enacts such inability on a split screen on which we see simultaneously the Old Quest and the New Actuality.” (p.47-8) 

My God, the things’ practically impenetrable! You’d need a Ph.D. to figure out what it means! It’s good old academic psychobabble of the highest style! Wolfe had a Ph.D. of his own, from Yale, in American Studies, but he never wrote like this!

A. Carl Bredahl has a more traditional take on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s a very good essay that is much easier to read. Bredahl writes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ attempts to start a new social order: “What was to have stimulated the individual to discover himself has become a social enterprise where the group is dependent on a leader.” (p.63-4) Bredahl understands the key fault of this enterprise, and why it ultimately ends up being doomed. It’s yet another search for a leader, a messiah who will lead you through the wilderness. It’s probably inevitable that any kind of new religion or way of thinking will start with a charismatic individual that is able to draw people to them, but ultimately, the new ideas will have to survive without the charismatic founder. It’s clear by the end of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that the Merry Pranksters are floundering without Kesey’s guidance, and they will be unable to make the leap to self-discovery.

In his essay, Bredahl sees the Pranksters’ unfinished movie of their cross-country bus trip as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together.” (p.68) 

And that’s perhaps the difference between being “on the bus” and “off the bus.” To briefly explain the difference, those who are “on the bus” are a part of the psychedelic experience and have devoted themselves to Kesey’s ideas about a new society. Everyone else in society is “off the bus.” Those people who were “on the bus” were too close to the experience (and maybe too strung-out) to really make sense of it. Thus, it was left to Wolfe, who was definitely “off the bus,” to write the masterpiece of the psychedelic era, despite not being a Hippie himself. 

Richard A. Kallan offers a rhetorical analysis of Wolfe’s writing. Kallan makes note of Wolfe’s many unusual writing habits, including idiosyncratic punctuation marks like the multiple colon, and multiple exclamation marks. Kallan’s thesis is that Wolfe was writing in an electronic style for the electronic age. Kallan’s essay was published in March of 1979, just a few months before Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff came out. The Right Stuff chronicled the Mercury 7 astronauts and was radically different in style from Wolfe’s other books. I suspect Wolfe knew that he needed to use a different style—after all, he was examining a world that could not have been further from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The hyper-excited style of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test wouldn’t have worked for the conservative world of the Mercury 7 astronauts. I’d be interested to know how Kallan would define Wolfe’s shift in style for The Right Stuff. 

Wolfe’s writing style is unusual, even off-putting at the beginning. But he’s able to conjure up these visions that take you closer to the experience than a typical journalist would be able to. Kallan examines the beginning of “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe’s 1964 article about Baby Jane Holzer, a socialite who was that season’s “It Girl,” and who palled around with the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol. Wolfe begins the article with a long list of unpunctuated details as he observes the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert. You’re 34 words in before you even get a comma to catch your breath! Wolfe’s list of visual details throws you into the scene, whereas a more traditional writing style wouldn’t be as visceral or immediate. Wolfe was taking a bold gamble with his style, trying all sorts of different techniques “anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Wolfe’s style was brash—you’re either going to go with him on this journey, or you’re going to throw the magazine across the room and say “what in the hell is this guy talking about?” There’s no in between. 

In his essay, “Tom Wolfe on the 1960’s,” Thomas L. Hartshorne makes the excellent point that Wolfe wasn’t necessarily a part of the 1960’s madness that he was chronicling. As Hartshorne writes, critics “took him as a representative of the switched-on, rebellious, anti-traditional culture of the 1960’s.” (p.85) Wolfe was really a traditionalist wearing outlandish clothes and writing in an outlandish style. 

Hartshorne makes the point that it’s difficult to determine Wolfe’s true feelings about his subjects: “they must be deduced or inferred.” (p.87) Hartshorne puts forth the theory that NASCAR driver Junior Johnson is one of Wolfe’s subjects that he most admires, and I agree with that. There is no pretense about Johnson—he’s not trying to fool you into thinking he’s anything more than a “good old boy” who just happens to be a very skilled race car driver. Wolfe was always able to skewer anyone who was putting on airs, but Junior Johnson, like Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, embodied a confident, straight-forward masculinity that Wolfe found honorable. 

Barbara Lounsberry contributes a nice essay on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My favorite quote from her essay is: “The bus is thus carefully elevated through Wolfe’s diction from a literal 1939 International Harvester bus to the major metaphor and symbol for the whole psychedelic odyssey.” (p.107) As Ken Kesey said, “You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.” 

Ed Cohen’s subject is the two articles that Wolfe wrote about The New Yorker magazine in 1965, as the magazine was celebrating its’ 40^th anniversary. These articles, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43^rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” were published in New York magazine, then the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune newspaper. They caused an enormous stir when they were first published, and they weren’t collected in one of Wolfe’s books until 2000, when they appeared in Hooking Up, his final essay collection. 

Wolfe was stinging in his critique of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who helmed the magazine from 1952 until 1987. Wolfe writes: “William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross. To preserve The New Yorker just as Ross left it, exactly, in…perpetuity.” (Hooking Up, p.270) 

In “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” Wolfe attacks the very style of The New Yorker itself! Wolfe hits the nail on the head when he writes about the “fact-gorged sentence,” a stylistic affectation that, in my opinion, still plagues The New Yorker. “All those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.” (p.273) 

After Wolfe’s articles on The New Yorker appeared, numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to columnist Walter Lippmann, denounced him in print. Cultural critic and longtime New Yorker staffer Dwight Macdonald compared Wolfe to Hitler and Joe McCarthy. You know, because a newspaper reporter who also wrote for Esquire in his spare time was equivalent to a murderous dictator and a demagogic U.S. Senator. I’m sure Wolfe didn’t care much about what Macdonald thought of him, as Macdonald was another one of those elitist, arteriosclerotic old men taking up space at The New Yorker, preserving the august history of this important magazine forever in amber! Once again, we see how Wolfe annoyed the literary elite of the establishment. 

James Stull writes about Wolfe’s privilege, which is very fitting with the cultural moment we now find ourselves in. And it’s certainly true that Wolfe’s life was very privileged. Tom Wolfe sold a lot of books and lived in a very nice brownstone in New York City. But isn’t every successful writer privileged, simply because they’re successful? 

Stull writes that “Wolfe is more interested in portraying a static idea—a status distinction, conflict, or incongruity—than with dramatizing diverse interactions of psychologically individuated selves.” (p.130) My question to Stull would be: what is the alternative to this? I would agree that sometimes Wolfe’s characters in his fiction are more archetypes than fully drawn people, but I’d like to know what authors succeed at “dramatizing diverse interactions”? 

James F. Smith compares Wolfe’s debut 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a comparison that Wolfe, a devoted fan of Dreiser’s social realism, would no doubt be pleased with. 

And then, after 150 pages of reading other people’s writing about The Man in White, there he is! TW himself! He tells us all about “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”! The subtitle proclaims it to be “A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.” A social novel? What is he talking about? Doesn’t he know that social realism went out with John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell? First published in Harper’s magazine in November of 1989, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” spawned much criticism and controversy. 

In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe essentially argued that American novelists should be, well, more like Tom Wolfe. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument. I suspect that most major novelists, if pressed on the point, would probably like most other novelists to be more like themselves. Wolfe made it clear in the essay that he had issues with the major literary styles of the past thirty years. The essay buttressed Wolfe’s reputation as an iconoclast, and again demonstrated how he didn’t fit in with the literary establishment. 

Wolfe thought that American writers should tell us something about what it’s like to be alive in America right now. And he thought that the way to write such novels was to go out there and do some reporting. Ask questions! Interview people! For God’s sake, get out of your cloistered little study and TALK TO SOME PEOPLE, FER CRYING OUT LOUD!!! Of course, Wolfe had the journalistic background to easily do this, and each of Wolfe’s four novels grew out of his own reporting. 

Wolfe didn’t understand why no one was writing about “this phenomenon that had played such a major part in American life in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: racial strife in the cities.” (p.153) Wolfe continues: “The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life.” (p.154) The novelists were turning inwards, to novels that illuminated the inner lives of their characters, but that did not engage with the social milieu surrounding them. Wolfe wrote of the Neo-Fabulist school of fiction: “The characters had no backgrounds. They came from nowhere. They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed indicated any class or ethnic origin.” (p.157) All of this was anathema to Wolfe. When he finally embarked on his long-awaited debut novel in the early 1980’s, he put his money where his mouth was and ventured out into the messy world of New York City to see what was happening for himself. 

And the book that Wolfe came up with, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a hulking great hardcover, weighing in at nearly 700 pages. And between those covers was a portrait of New York City, dense and vibrant and complicated. Wolfe took the reader from the Park Avenue apartments of Manhattan to the Bronx County Courthouse, where the lawyers were scared to venture out after dark. The Bonfire of the Vanities became a huge best-seller, thus proving to Wolfe that a good, old-fashioned social realist novel could still be successful. 

Wolfe makes an excellent point in his essay about New Journalism outstripping the fiction of the time. If you examine the period from 1965 to 1975, what are some of the classic American books of those years? Some of them would surely be In Cold Blood, the Armies of the Night, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In short, New Journalism 101. Fifty years later, the ultimate book about the American Hippies isn’t a novel that someone involved with the movement wrote: it’s Wolfe’s non-fiction The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

I’d be curious to know what Wolfe thought of historical fiction. I’ve never read his opinion on it. Did he think it was worthwhile to try and depict the past, or was it a waste of time because you were ignoring the present?  I wonder too, what Wolfe would make of the state of American fiction now, thirty years after the publication of “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”? 

Rand Richards Cooper examines Wolfe’s second novel, 1998’s A Man in Full. His critique is that Wolfe essentially writes each character in a similar voice, as he offers seven similar descriptive passages from A Man in Full that physically describe seven different characters, one of whom is a horse. These seven passages are all about Wolfe’s fixation on male strutting, how men show off their muscle in subtle, or not-so-subtle, ways. I suspect that Wolfe’s reply to Cooper would be something along the lines of, “Yes, those passages are similar because that’s what all men do! They’re all showing off, all the time!”

I think some of Cooper’s criticism is justified, that sometimes Wolfe wrote types instead of fully fleshed out characters. However, where Cooper argues that having Charlie Croker intersperse his interior monologue with the occasional French phrase is a sign of Wolfe’s authorial voice peeking through, I’d argue that it might be a sign that Croker is more intelligent than Cooper thinks he is. 

I must quibble with Cooper’s assertion in his opening sentence that Tom Wolfe first “splashed into the national consciousness in the summer of 1970 with ‘Radical Chic.’” (p.169) I’d assert that it happened two years earlier, in the summer of 1968, as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became a best-seller. One could even argue that Wolfe’s first splashdown occurred with his very first book of articles, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which became an unlikely best-seller in 1965.

In the book’s final essay, Joshua J. Masters takes Wolfe to task for the racism he sees in The Bonfire of the Vanities. This was much commented on at the time of the book’s publication in 1987. A theme of the novel is the waning of white authority in the urban metropolis, and how minority groups are starting to flex their own power. 

In one example, Masters seizes upon Wolfe’s description of African American youths observing white people going to a trendy nightclub. Wolfe writes of the youths “eyeing the drunks and heads going in and out of the door.” Masters takes this to mean that Wolfe is “transforming them into monstrous gargoyles awaiting the opportunity to victimize (and perhaps cannibalize) what they can only see as disembodied ‘heads.’” (p.186-7) Masters takes “heads” to mean a literal head, but what he doesn’t seem to know is that “head” is good old-fashioned 1960’s slang for someone on drugs. That seems to me the sense in which Wolfe is using the word in this example. 

I’d argue that Wolfe’s racial vision of New York City in Bonfire is not necessarily how he himself sees things, but how his characters see things. The Bronx being characterized as a “jungle” might not be Tom Wolfe talking, but rather Sherman McCoy’s interpretation of the Bronx. It’s quite clear that Sherman has no knowledge of the Bronx, thus his imagination runs rampant. 

Masters writes of Wolfe’s symbolic language describing the judicial system as consuming “meat.” Wolfe is blunt in his point that the judicial system is meant to devour the meat of whoever is in front of it. Yes, most of the time it’s the minorities who are being shoved into the meat-grinder, but now that Sherman is in the judicial system, it will greedily devour him too, despite the advantages of his race and privilege. Sherman becomes a cause celebre, and because of the rarity and novelty of someone like Sherman being processed through the judicial system, many people are crying out for him to be painfully wrung through the meat-grinder. For the District Attorney, Sherman becomes the “Great White Defendant” that he longs to take down. 

Race was a theme in many of Wolfe’s writings, from Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers through all four of his novels. In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo in Time magazine, Wolfe replied to those critics who found Bonfire to be racist:

“What they are really saying is that I have violated a certain etiquette in literary circles that says you shouldn’t be altogether frank about these matters of ethnic and racial hostility. But if you raise the issue, a certain formula is to be followed: you must introduce a character, preferably from the streets, who is enlightened and shows everyone the error of his ways, so that by the time the story is over, everyone’s heading off wiser. There has to be a moral resolution. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.286) 

Wolfe’s quote is exactly why I think he was such an excellent writer on race in America. Wolfe didn’t just mouth the usual liberal pieties about the subject, he tried to straightforwardly expose the important role race still plays in American society. And it took guts for a white Southerner from Virginia, who walked around in a WHITE SUIT, for crying out loud, to write about race in an honest way. 

Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe features many interesting essays and viewpoints about the writing of Tom Wolfe. The book will inevitably bring you to reexamine the marvelous, stimulating, incandescent, phosphorescent, vibrant, bold, and colorful prose of Tom Wolfe.