Book Review: A Man in Full, by Tom Wolfe (1998)

The obligatory photo of my Tom Wolfe bookshelf, with 1998's A Man in Full front and center. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Tom Wolfe on the cover of Time magazine, 1998.

Atlanta! Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler! Coca-Cola! Hank Aaron! Phil Niekro! Dale Murphy! Chipper Jones! Martin Luther King! Usher! CNN! In his second novel, 1998’s A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe tell us what Atlanta at the close of the millennium was really like. And readers discover a city that the mayor fears could be shattered along racial lines. 

A Man in Full was a huge best-seller when it was published in 1998. It had been 11 years since the smashing success of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the public was hungry for another dose of Wolfe’s writing. In the run up to publication, Wolfe was featured on the cover of Time magazine. A Man in Full was number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list for 10 straight weeks. 

The main character of A Man in Full is real estate developer Charlie Croker, who is 60 years old, newly married to a much younger second wife, and deeply in debt. Tom Wolfe once said in a 1976 interview, “This country really is made up of half failed athletes and half women.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.99) Charlie Croker certainly falls into the former category, as he is constantly reminded of his college glory on the gridiron for Georgia Tech. Croker was known as “the Sixty Minute Man,” as he played both offense and defense. 

Much like Sherman McCoy, the main character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Croker gets pushed to the brink of ruin during the course of the novel. He has to endure a grueling and humiliating “workout session” with the bank that financed his loans, as the bank threatens to start seizing assets. 

Roger White II, a successful African American attorney in Atlanta, is one of the other main characters. Because of his tendency to fit in with white people, his nickname is “Roger Too White.” 

The third main character is Conrad Hensley. Conrad works outside of Oakland in a freezer warehouse of Croker Global Foods, a part of Charlie Croker’s business empire. Because Conrad isn’t in Atlanta with the other main characters, you just keep waiting for the time when he will start interacting with the rest of the cast. As far as I was concerned, it took way too long for Conrad’s story to get to that point. 

Conrad’s storyline just feels shoehorned into the book—it doesn’t feel natural or organic. So then there’s less tension in it, even though he goes through the most dramatic events of any of the main characters. He goes to prison! He miraculously escapes from prison after an earthquake! But I started to resent Conrad, because his chapters took me away from Atlanta and Roger Too White and Charlie Croker.

However, for all of my complaining about Conrad, the chapter when he has the day from hell, Chapter 11, is wonderfully written. Wolfe fully immerses you in Conrad’s troubles, as his car gets towed, one thing leads to another, and he eventually assaults a worker at the car impound lot. Wolfe is able to make you care about both Charlie Croker and Conrad Hensley, and that’s a real achievement. Wolfe has the imagination and creativity to put you into Conrad’s shoes. But he’s also done enough of the reporting work to make it all feel real. It feels real emotionally AND factually—and this is really what Wolfe is getting at in all of his writings about fiction—it’s not enough to just be emotionally real, fiction should also tell you something about the lives of the people it describes. If fiction isn’t connected to the real world that people inhabit, it’s not going to produce an emotional response in your readers. The accumulation of details gives Wolfe’s writing more weight. Sure, maybe he totally made up the geography around Oakland as he describes Conrad’s cross-town travels as he attempts to get his car back. But I doubt it. As Wolfe describes Conrad’s travels in depth, it builds your sympathy and interest in the character’s problems. 

While he’s in prison, Conrad, through a shipping error by a bookstore, comes across the writings of the Stoic philosophers—Seneca, Epictetus, and all the rest. This totally changes Conrad’s attitude towards prison, and life in general. I’m not sure what Wolfe’s point in focusing so much on the Stoic philosophers is. Was he an adherent of Stoicism? Did he think that Stoicism would be a useful philosophy for most Americans to follow? Or did he just re-read the Stoics in 1996 and think, “I think I’ll put this in the novel.” Without giving too much away, Stoicism plays a significant role in the ending of the novel, which is pretty anticlimactic. 

The main plot of the book feels quite contemporary, as it concerns an alleged sexual assault. The victim is the white daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta, while the alleged perpetrator is the star running back at Georgia Tech. And he’s black, from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Atlanta. Wes Jordan, the black mayor of Atlanta, is up for re-election, and he naturally wants to prevent the situation from escalating into a race riot. So he enlists his old friend Roger White to talk to Charlie Croker and see if Croker will make a statement supporting the running back, thinking that having a prominent white citizen on his side will prevent the issue from splitting along racial lines.

Race is one of the main issues in both The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, and I admire Tom Wolfe’s willingness to engage with the issue. Wolfe wasn’t afraid to write about African American characters. You can judge for yourself how successful he was at creating and writing about these characters. But I think it’s to his credit that he was willing to explore the difficult issue of race in America. 

Wolfe’s sense of humor is on display in his naming of companies. There’s Maws and Gullet, (p.77) a food service corporation. The law firm that Roger White works for is Wringer, Fleasom, and Tick. (p.191) Other law firms mentioned are Fogg, Nackers, Rendering, and Lean, (p.237) Clockett, Paddet, Skynnham, and Glote, (p.251)and Tripp, Snayer, and Billings. (p.346) 

Attentive Wolfe readers will see pet phrases of his come up time and again. “Shank to flank” makes several appearances, as does the phrase “season of the rising sap.” Wolfe’s favorite fake product Streptolon, which appears in nearly all of his books, is mentioned. (There’s even a form of it called Streptofoam, mentioned on page 168.) And only Tom Wolfe could have written a fictitious hip-hop song with the lyrics “shanks akimbo.” (p.120) 

Wolfe’s usual keen eye for details is evident throughout A Man in Full. One of my favorite terms that Wolfe uses is “pizza grenade necktie.” “It was the sort of tie that looked as if a pepperoni-and-olive pizza had just exploded on your shirtfront.” (p.98) Those ties were ubiquitous in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and I might have a few pizza grenade neckties left over from that era, but I don’t wear them anymore.

Sartorially, it seems that Roger White is a stand-in for Wolfe’s own style. One of the funnier moments in the novel is when White tries to dress down: “Hence the suede shoes and the tennis collar and the knit necktie and the twill pants and the tweed hacking jacket. Casual. Inconspicuous. Sure. What planet had he been beamed down from?” (p.404) One can imagine Tom Wolfe dressing down in a similar manner. 

Anyone else who remembers the late 1990’s can understand Charlie Croker’s thoughts about the word paradigm: “But this word paradigm absolutely drove him up the wall, so much so that he had complained to the Wiz about it. The damned word meant nothing at all, near as he could make out, and yet it was always ‘shifting,’ whatever it was. In fact, that was the only thing the ‘paradigm’ ever seemed to do. It only shifted.” (p.71) 

A critique I had as I read A Man in Full is that there are parts of the book that are overwritten, which might be inevitable in a 780-page paperback. Too many times Wolfe describes a gesture one of the characters makes, and then tells us what it means, which just seems unnecessary. Here’s just one example: “Roger looked at Wes with wide eyes, as if to say, ‘What does this mean?’” (p.540) 

Reviews for A Man in Full were generally positive, but two of the most famous novelists in America both disliked the book. John Updike and Norman Mailer both wrote scathing reviews of A Man in Full. Updike’s review of A Man in Full dismissed the book as falling short of literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer’s review took a similar tack, as it was full of questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” There’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black here, as Mailer writes as though he had never hankered after having best-sellers of his own. 

Mailer does have words of praise for the book, but in the best Midwestern, passive-aggressive style, there are always reservations: “Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great—his absence of truly large compass.” Mailer is still thinking that American writing is like a heavyweight boxing match! Thank God Wolfe didn’t have the stamina! He broke down in the fifth round! He was busy looking at the referee’s shoes, trying to figure out what brand they were, and then WHOMP! Norman finally landed that right hook!

Novelist John Irving joined in the complaining as well, and the whole mess was chronicled in Wolfe’s essay “My Three Stooges,” collected in Wolfe’s 2000 essay collection, Hooking Up. (I reviewed Hooking Up here, with more details about Wolfe’s feuds with Mailer and Updike.) My own thought is that Irving, Updike, and Mailer were all jealous of the huge sales and media attention Wolfe was garnering. Plus, in the cases of Mailer and Updike, there was simmering resentment of Wolfe that was left over from what he had written about them in the 1960’s. 

In some ways, A Man in Full might be a more impressive novel than The Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s more virtuosic, as Wolfe takes you through all of these different strata of society. Wolfe captures the voices of so many different people throughout the book. Even the minor characters are very fully drawn.

However, I don’t think that A Man in Full captured the zeitgeist in the same way that Bonfire did. I think Bonfire has become cultural shorthand for “1980’s capitalism run amok” whereas I don’t know what the shorthand takeaway of A Man in Full would be. There’s certainly a lot of capitalism run amok on view in A Man in Full. 

Wolfe’s view of fiction was that it should try to capture the spirit of the time and place in which it was written, and he strongly urged novelists to go out and observe things the way a journalist would. In his 1989 essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe wrote: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” That’s exactly what Wolfe did with A Man in Full. 

A Man in Full has its flaws, but, taken in full, it has much to say about America in the late 1990’s, and is a superb example of Tom Wolfe’s writing at its best.

Book Review: Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe (2000)

The paperback cover of Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe, 2000.

Tom Wolfe on the cover of Time magazine in 1998, as his novel A Man in Full was published.

Hooking Up, published in 2000, is Tom Wolfe’s most recent collection of non-fiction pieces. It also contains a novella, “Ambush at Fort Bragg.” The writings collected in Hooking Up appeared in a variety of publications, and demonstrate Wolfe’s wide interest in many different facets of modern American life. 

As someone who was a college student in the year 2000, I can attest that the title piece was a pretty accurate summary of college life at that time. Wolfe’s examination of campus life at the turn of the millennium would provide inspiration for his next novel after Hooking Up, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe explains to the reader that “hooking up” is the new way that young people meet each other. As Wolfe writes, “The old term ‘dating’—referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner—was now deader than ‘proletariat’ or ‘pornography’ or ‘perversion.’” (p.6) I was naively shocked when I got to college and discovered that people didn’t date very much—it was mainly about hooking up. 

 “Two Young Men Who Went West” connects 19^th century politician and pioneer Josiah Grinnell and 20^th century engineer Robert Noyce, who pioneered the microchip and was the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. What do Grinnell and Noyce have in common? Well, Grinnell founded the town of Grinnell, Iowa, home to Grinnell College, which was Noyce’s alma mater. The parallels between Grinnell and Noyce are perhaps overstated in the article—you can hear the framing device creak now and then as Wolfe stretches it out. However, Noyce is a pretty interesting guy to read about, as he was one of the founders of what came to be called Silicon Valley. 

“Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill” bites off a lot, covering the careers and theories of priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, media critic Marshall McLuhan, and finally biologist Edward O. Wilson, one of the chief Darwinists of the late 20^th century. All three men were people who had unified theories about human behavior. Wolfe is always suspicious of those who claim to have all of the answers. (He wrote about Marshall McLuhan in the article “What if He is Right?” in The Pump House Gang.) Wolfe is also skeptical about Darwinism providing all of the answers to human behavior. This piece plants some of the seeds that will sprout in The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe’s 2016 book about how human speech developed.

“Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died” is about brain imaging. It fits in again with The Kingdom of Speech, as Wolfe examines neuroscientists who think they have all of the answers to human behavior. According to Wolfe, there are neuroscientists who think that they could predict someone’s life down to the very minute. (p.97) Wolfe sees neuroscience and brain imaging as being part of a great shift during the late 20^th century away from the dominant theories of the century, Marxism and Freudianism. (p.100) 

Wolfe frets that this shift towards science could lead to a collapse of personal responsibility—that people will excuse their behavior based on their wiring. “Don’t blame me, honey. Four hundred thousand years of evolution made me do it.” (p.104-6) Wolfe seems to wonder, if we are only these walking, talking computers, then where’s the mystery, the poetry of life? If everything is predetermined from birth, then why go on with the charade?

“In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” is an excellent takedown of liberal academic pretensions. Wolfe writes about the turn of the millennium, and how little it was remarked upon in the media. “My impression was that one American Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a mouse pad.” (p.114) 

Wolfe writes that “For eighty-two years now, America’s intellectuals, right on time, as Nietzsche predicted it, have expressed their skepticism toward American life.” (p.128) Wolfe, despite his consistently ironic viewpoint, does not have as much skepticism towards American life, writing: “The country turned into what the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simons and Fouriers, had dreamed about: an El Dorado where the average workingman would have the political freedom, the personal freedom, the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he saw fit.” (p.119) 

This has been a favorite theme of Wolfe’s since the 1960’s, that America is actually in the middle of a happiness explosion, rather than constantly teetering on the brink of incipient fascism, as most liberals have said it is. 

“The Invisible Artist” is about the sculptor Frederick Hart. Hart was a realistic sculptor, and he worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Hart was also the sculptor for The Three Soldiers, also known as The Three Servicemen, which depicts American soldiers in Vietnam overlooking the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (And was added after Vietnam veterans raised a furor over sculptor Maya Lin’s controversial design for the Memorial.) Wolfe makes the point that although Hart worked on several important commissions and became very successful in his own right, the mainstream art publications never gave him the time of day, so he never became accepted as a “serious” artist. According to Wolfe, if you don’t fit in the appropriate boxes as an artist, you won’t get any press. This fits in very well with Wolfe’s 1975 book on modern art, The Painted Word, in which he makes an argument along a similar line. 

Wolfe writes in “The Invisible Artist” that “Art worldlings regarded popularity as skill’s live-in slut. Popularity meant shallowness. Rejection by the public meant depth.” (p.137) Wolfe has a point here. In the visual arts, as in jazz, popular success is often scorned and questioned—the assumption is that if you’ve had mainstream success you’ve “sold out” in some way. 

 “The Great Relearning” is a short piece about the late 20^th century. Wolfe predicts that the 21^st century will be known as the “Twentieth Century’s Hangover.” (p.144) It remains to be seen if he is correct or not.

“My Three Stooges” describes a great literary feud. John Updike and Norman Mailer, two of America’s leading writers, wrote very critical reviews of Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full. John Irving also got into the act, swearing at Wolfe on TV and attacking his skill as a writer. 

In “My Three Stooges,” Wolfe swung back hard, calling Updike and Mailer “two old piles of bones.” (p.152) Updike, Mailer, and Irving all essentially said that A Man in Full wasn’t literature, but Wolfe fired back that in fact, A Man in Full was the best kind of literature—a book that drew on real-world reporting. On a TV show, Wolfe said that his three critics had “wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them.” (p.156) In other words, they should have been writing novels the way Tom Wolfe does. This was an oversimplification on Wolfe’s part, since Mailer had been alternating journalism with fiction since the early 1960’s, and indeed, many of his most famous books drew heavily on non-fiction reporting—books like The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Fight, and The Executioner’s Song. While Updike didn’t do journalistic writing, his novels still depended on an accurate picture of a specific time in America, and his Rabbit tetralogy books are full of his attention to real life details. 

Why were Updike and Mailer so hostile to Wolfe? They may have simply been jealous of Wolfe’s staggering sales success, or they may have been settling scores that were decades old. Updike may have been peeved by Wolfe’s 1965 takedown of The New Yorker, the magazine that was closely associated with Updike for his entire career. Or, he might have been annoyed by Wolfe’s 1964 article about him in the New York Herald Tribune, which Updike quoted in his 1998 speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Updike quoted from the first two paragraphs of Wolfe’s story, which included the lines, “No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time.” (John Updike, More Matter, p.853) Wolfe then goes on to describe Updike blushing. In his speech, Updike said he remembers the evening differently than Wolfe. Updike also said that someone offered him a program to sign on that long-ago night: “That, and the subsequent report by Tom Wolfe, were my first taste of the joys of celebrity.” (More Matter, p.853) It seems clear that Updike had a vivid memory of the first time his celebrity was mocked in print. 

Mailer’s beef with Wolfe goes back to the 1960’s as well. Specifically, to Wolfe’s March 1965 review of Mailer’s novel An American Dream. Wolfe’s review, titled “Son of Crime and Punishment: Or, How to go Eight Fast Rounds with the Heavyweight Champ—and Lose,” posits the theory that Mailer was trying to complete with Dostoevsky, and Wolfe ends the review by comparing Mailer to James M. Cain, author of hard-boiled fiction like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. 

The same month that Wolfe’s review appeared, Mailer said of the review in a New York Post interview, “The review is personally insulting as opposed to critically insulting.” (Conversations with Norman Mailer, p.100) Two years later, Mailer was still smarting over Wolfe’s review, telling Newsday in October 1967: “I never mind a bad review so long as the reviewer stays in bounds. But that one bothered me. When Wolfe started in telling me how to write—when he said it would have been better if I started the book on page 14—well, I objected to that. It struck me as kind of…punky, smartass, you know.” (Conversations with Norman Mailer, p.110) Mailer was famous for getting terrible book reviews—twice he took out ads for his books with the negative reviews highlighted, rather than the positive reviews—so it really says something that Wolfe’s words got under his skin.

Updike’s review of A Man in Full had dismissed the book as falling short of literature, and Mailer’s review took a similar tack, as it was full of questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” There’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black here, as Mailer writes as though he had never hankered after having best-sellers of his own. 

Mailer does have words of praise for the book, but in the best Midwestern, passive-aggressive style, there are always reservations: “Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great—his absence of truly large compass.” Mailer is still thinking that American writing is like a heavyweight boxing match! Thank God Wolfe didn’t have the stamina! He broke down in the fifth round! He was busy looking at the referee’s shoes, trying to figure out what brand they were, and then WHOMP! Norman finally landed that right hook!

Just as Wolfe compared Mailer to Dostoevsky and intimated that he fell short and was more like James M. Cain, so Mailer compares Wolfe to Dickens, and intimates that Wolfe falls short, so he compares him to…Margaret Mitchell. They are both confining the other to the status of mere genre novelists, rather than Great American Novelists. 

 “Ambush at Fort Bragg: A Novella,” is moderately interesting, as it shows Wolfe’s great talent for getting inside the minds of status-conscious, insecure men—namely Irv Durtscher, the producer of a TV show that is about to get a murder confession from three Army recruits. 

A gift for long-time Wolfe fans in Hooking Up was the first publication in a book of Wolfe’s two articles from 1965 about The New Yorker, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43^rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets.” Both are superb skewerings of The New Yorker’s self-important style. I’ve been an admirer of many of the writers associated with The New Yorker, in particular the “three Johns,” O’Hara, Cheever, and Updike. That being said, I find the magazine itself to be quite full of itself. 

Wolfe is 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.” (p.270) 

Coming in for criticism also is what Wolfe calls the “fact-gorged sentence,” something 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) 

In an afterword, Wolfe details the heat he felt after the two New Yorker articles were published, as numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to Walter Lippmann, denounced him in print. But Wolfe survived to write another day. 

It’s too bad that Hooking Up doesn’t include the essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” first published in the pages of Harper’s in November, 1989. It outlines Wolfe’s thoughts about realism in American fiction writing—perhaps it was deemed to be too repetitive, as Wolfe chronicles some of the same arguments about fiction in “My Three Stooges.” Regardless, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” is well worth seeking out. 

Hooking Up is something of a coda to the large and distinguished body of non-fiction work that Wolfe has left us, including such classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic, and The Right Stuff. As Michael Lewis wrote in the November 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, “The marketplace will encourage Wolfe to write nothing but novels. And a funny thing happens. The moment he abandons it, the movement he shaped will lose its head of steam. The New Journalism: Born 1963, Died 1979. R.I.P. What was that all about? It was mainly about Tom Wolfe, I think.” (p.194) Wolfe largely moved on from journalism after The Right Stuff, and the pieces in Hooking Up, while very good, do not have the same impact that Wolfe’s earlier journalism did.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

Gore Vidal, 1972.

Gore Vidal, 1964.

JFK and Gore Vidal, 1960.

A Life's Work. Gore Vidal, 1925-2012. Taken at Powell's Bookstore, Portland, OR. Photo by Mark Taylor.

The great American writer Gore Vidal died yesterday. Our world is a little less colorful today without him. Vidal was one of my favorite authors, and I was saddened to hear of his passing. Vidal was truly the last of a generation of American writers, including Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who were also very public celebrities. Vidal famously feuded with both Capote and Mailer during his long career. It’s safe to say that all three writers shared a very high self-regard. 

Gore Vidal has been one of my heroes since high school. I admired his courage for speaking his mind, even when his views were not shared by a majority. I liked the way he presented himself, full of knowing humor, with a clever bon mot always within reach. If I become a famous writer, I said to myself in high school and college, I would want to be a lot like Gore Vidal. A straight Gore Vidal, that is. Well, I’m not a famous writer, at least not yet, and if I did become a famous writer I’m not sure if I would be as bold as Gore Vidal was in his public pronouncements, but I can still hope, can’t I? I even wrote Gore Vidal a fan letter when I was 17, and to my great shock and surprise, he wrote me back. One of the great thrills of my life was opening that envelope from Italy. I was always amazed that Vidal took the time to write me back.

In my past posts about Gore Vidal I’ve commented on his contribution to the screenplay of “Ben-Hur,” and been critical of his post-2001work.This post will be an overview of his career with my capsule reviews of the books of his that I’ve read. 

Vidal was a precocious talent, publishing his first novel, the war story “Williwaw,” at the age of 21 in 1946. “Williwaw” was well-received, but it was Vidal’s third novel, 1948’s “The City and the Pillar,” that truly made him famous. 1948 was also the year that Truman Capote published his first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and Norman Mailer published his first novel, the monumental “The Naked and the Dead.” “The City and the Pillar” was one of the first, if not the first, American novels to deal seriously and honestly with homosexuality. The main character of “The City and the Pillar” is gay, but he does not conform to the limp-wristed stereotype of that era. It was a bold move for Vidal, as he essentially outed himself with the book. It was a scandalous best-seller, but it also made the literary establishment wary of this young author. Vidal quickly found himself informally blacklisted from the nation’s most important media outlets. The New York Times stopped reviewing his novels, as did Time and Newsweek. The New York Times obituary of Vidal mentions this fact, but it doesn’t mention that Vidal was right. “Mr. Vidal later claimed that the literary and critical establishment, The New York Times especially, had blacklisted him because of the book, and he may have been right.” Yes, he was right. You didn’t mention his name in your newspaper for years; you were blacklisting him because he was gay. Vidal’s next five novels all landed with a thud, as most people probably weren’t even aware of the books. So Vidal wrote for television, wrote screenplays-yes, he added the gay subtext to “Ben-Hur,” and wrote novels under pseudonyms. (He wrote three murder mysteries as “Edgar Box.” These were all favorably reviewed in The New York Times.) Vidal also ran for Congress in upstate New York in 1960. He ran as a Democrat, under the slogan “You’ll get more with Gore!” Vidal lost, but he always mentioned that he got more votes in his district than JFK did. It was for the best that Vidal lost, although the thought of him as an actual member of Congress is a delicious one. 

Vidal returned to the novel, publishing “Julian” in 1964. “Julian” was a historical novel about the 4^th century Roman emperor who tried to turn away from Christianity and back to paganism. “Julian” was unquestionably the best book Vidal had written to that point. Finally reviewed again in The New York Times, “Julian” went on to become one of the best-selling novels that year. Vidal had found his niche-historical fiction peopled with real historical figures, but with all the gossip and detail that historians would never include. In 1967 Vidal published the first of his “American Chronicles” historical novels, “Washington, D.C.” (The “American Chronicles” series is also referred to by Vidal as the “Narratives of Empire” series.) Vidal was now on a hot streak, and through the rest of the 1970’s and 80’s he was on a roll, publishing one best-seller after another, while at the same time decrying the fact that the American public had no taste for literature. (How then did Vidal explain his own popular success?) Vidal was a frequent guest on television talk shows, and he proved that he really was an actor. Sure, he must have been funny and acerbic off camera, but Vidal clearly loved to perform for an audience. Vidal also wrote essays on many topics, from the Kennedy family to the novels of John O’Hara to his friendship with Orson Welles. And of course, he wrote many, many essays on the United States government, and our foreign policy, which he almost always disagreed with. 

Gore Vidal may have become more and more of a crank as the years wore on, but at his best he was always a funny, sharp, engaging crank. He saved one of his best books for late in his life, his memoir “Palimpsest,” published when he was 70. The title of the book is a word referring to something that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing sometimes visible underneath. What a wonderful title. “Palimpsest” covers Vidal’s fascinating family, which I did not cover here, and his life until 1964 and the publication and success of “Julian.” It’s a wonderful book, full of gossip and yet very poignant. I don’t think that we shall encounter another talent quite like Gore Vidal. 

Some thoughts on the works of Gore Vidal:

Williwaw, 1946: A good first novel. The prose is tight as a drum, with doses of Hemingway and no sign of the gadfly that would eventually emerge.

The City and the Pillar, 1948: A fine novel with a sympathetic attitude towards homosexuality. It may seem prim and proper now, but at the time it caused a sensation.

Dark Green, Bright Red, 1950: An interesting short novel detailing a revolution in a South American country. The book is a premonition of the CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954. Unfortunately, Vidal re-wrote many of his early novels in the mid-1960’s, so it’s tough to know what was in the book in 1950 and what he added later. 

The Best Man, 1960: Very funny play, later adapted into a movie and currently being revived on Broadway. Excellent portraits of Adlai Stevenson and Richard Nixon-under different names, of course.

Julian, 1964: An amazing book. I couldn’t put it down. This is one of my favorite Vidal novels. Vidal really puts you inside the waning Roman Empire. If you liked I, Claudius, you will enjoy Julian.

Myra Breckinridge, 1968: A funny, silly book. Combines two of Vidal’s favorite subjects: sex and the movies. It’s not my favorite of Vidal’s, but it was another shocking and scandalous best-seller.

Two Sisters, 1970: This is a weird one. A combination novel and memoir, it’s not very good as either. It’s about incestuous twins. Supposedly it was a veiled attack on Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill. The paperback edition features one of my favorite book blurbs of all time. Norman Mailer used to put his bad reviews in ads for his books, so Vidal decided to praise himself on the back of his own book. "A work of perfect genius!”-Gore Vidal. Which I think accurately sums up how Gore Vidal viewed all of his own books, and that makes me smile.

An Evening with Richard Nixon, 1972: This play, written before Watergate, is an attack on the character of Richard Nixon. Vidal uses Nixon’s own words as often as he can, which makes the play better read than performed. It’s very entertaining.

Burr, 1973: A wonderful examination of one of the most interesting of all the Founding Fathers. (Or members of the Founding Generation, or whatever you want to call Aaron Burr.) Vidal very successfully conjures up the scheming and devious Burr. Along the way there are many great portraits of all the other Founding Fathers. I always thought that a good miniseries could be made of Burr, with Vidal himself playing the aging Burr dictating his memoirs. 

Views from a Window-Conversations with Gore Vidal, 1981: An interesting book, this is a compendium of interviews with Vidal over the years. Very funny and very readable. 

Duluth, 1983: As someone from Minnesota, I felt like I had to read a Gore Vidal novel called Duluth. This is one of Vidal’s “inventions” where he just lets his imagination run wild. So the Duluth of the novel has little in common with Minnesota’s Duluth, as Vidal’s Duluth borders Mexico. A hilarious book.

United States: Essays 1952-1992: I haven’t read all of the essays in this massive tome, but this is the best introduction to Vidal’s essays, and maybe to his work in general. No matter what you’re interested in, Vidal will have an essay for you. He has an essay where he reads all of the books on the New York Times best-seller list, it’s wickedly funny.

Palimpsest, 1995: Vidal’s memoir. As I said above, this is a terrific book. Vidal pulls no punches as he chronicles the first 39 years of his life. There’s even a chapter about his one-night stand with Jack Kerouac. 

The American Presidency, 1998: A very short volume containing an essay about the occupants of the Oval Office. Brief, but entertaining.

The Last Empire: Essays, 1992-2000: I’ve read most of these essays, and as usual they are quite insightful and funny.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 2002: Short collection of essays. Features Vidal’s thoughts about 9/11. Good, but it also includes some essays previously published in The Last Empire.

Dreaming War, 2002: Another short collection of essays published in the run-up to the second Iraq war. It’s very good, but also includes some essays previously published in The Last Empire.

Inventing a Nation, 2003: A short book about the Founding Fathers. Quite good.

Imperial America, 2004: Another short essay collection. The new stuff is okay, but I think it also has some previously published essays from, you guessed it, The Last Empire.

Point to Point Navigation, 2006: Vidal’s second memoir, this isn’t as good as Palimpsest and treads some of the same territory. 

And that’s all the Gore Vidal books I’ve read. It’s a lot, but when I look at this list all I can see are the many books of his I haven’t read yet. I need to read more of his “American Chronicles” series. Hopefully this will inspire some of you out there to read some of Gore Vidal’s books. He was truly a great writer.

Barbary Snore

"Barbary Shore" was Norman Mailer's second novel, published in 1951, and it pales in comparison to his first. "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948, when Mailer was all of 25, was his first novel, and it thrust him into the limelight. (Yes, great novels actually used to thrust people into the limelight back in the day.) "The Naked and the Dead" was an epic, 700-page novel about the Pacific theater of World War II. Along with Irwin Shaw's "The Young Lions," and James Jones's "From Here to Eternity," it was considered one of the great epics to come out of World War II. So how did Mailer follow such a success? By writing a book that was the antithesis of his first novel.

"Barbary Shore" is much shorter, a comparatively brisk 400 pages, with only a handful of characters. I would suspect that Mailer was running away from his early success, deliberately trying to create a work of art that bore no relation and paid no debt to his first book. I think he wanted to change gears, he didn't want to be stuck with the label of realist, the next James T. Farrell. Unfortunately, this time out, he didn't create a very compelling book. In the beginning, the main plot of the story seems to revolve around Lovett, the narrator, struggling to regain his memory. He is a veteran, and save for the occasional flashback of combat, can remember nothing of his past life before the war. Okay, that's an interesting enough plot device. But Mailer doesn't make it the main thread of the book. Lovett's struggle to regain his memory is hardly mentioned again. Instead, the plot focuses on Lovett's landlady, his fellow tenant Hollingsworth, and McLeod, another tenant who turns out to be the husband of the landlady.

The crux of the novel are Hollingsworth's conversations with McLeod, witnessed by Lovett, in which Hollingsworth is interrogating McLeod about his Communist past. Despite the high stakes that you may think are involved, these "interrogations" don't involve anything remotely close to anyone's definition of torture, unless your definition includes being forced to slog through page after page of didactic dialogue. Okay Norman, you read "Darkness at Noon," I get it. There's zero tension to this part of the novel, in part because it's not at all clear what the stakes are. It's not even clear which side anyone is on, who Hollingsworth is working for, or what information McLeod could possibly have that would be of use or interest to anyone. It's certainly of no interest to most readers, that's for sure. McLeod apparently possesses some object that Hollingsworth longs to get his hands on, and of course we never find out what it is, it's just a literary "MacGuffin," to use Alfred Hitchcock's term for an object that motivates the actions of the characters but whose specific details don't matter. All that matters is that someone wants it. (Ie, the microfilm in "North By Northwest," and the briefcase in "Ronin.")

In short, Mailer created a boring book filled with characters that bear little resemblance to people in the real world. He would do better with later books, so perhaps "Barbary Shore" was just a learning experience for him. Interestingly enough, Irwin Shaw's second novel, "The Troubled Air," also published in 1951, also dealt with Communism in America. Unlike "Barbary Shore," Shaw's "The Troubled Air" is actually very good, and definitely worth reading. It deals with a radio show that may have Communists in its cast. (There was an actual pamphlet from 1950 called "Red Channels" that purported to name people in TV, radio, and movies who had "Communist sympathies.")

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer died last Saturday, at the age of 84. He had a good run, nearly sixty years as a published author, which is amazing. He was one of my favorite writers, and I will miss him. We need writers like Mailer, fearless men and women who aren't afraid of looking foolish. Okay, so Mailer did some crazy things in his life. He made experimental films, he bit off part of Rip Torn's ear, he stabbed his wife with a pen-knife, he argued for the release of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, who killed again once he was released, he took on feminists, he ran for Mayor of New York City, he smoked pot when only jazz musicians did, he had an ego the size of all outdoors. Still, he was never boring. Mailer thought of himself as the greatest writer of his generation, and even if he his reach exceeded his grasp, he was still trying to be the best, to write the Great American Novel. He once said that his goal for his writing was to achieve "Nothing less than a total revolution in the consciousness of our times." That's a pretty big goal to set for yourself. I admire a man who would make such a bold statement. I don't think many writers would admit, even to themselves, a goal so lofty. And Mailer wasn't afraid that people would mock him for his ambitions.

Unlike Hemingway, Mailer actually had a sense of humor about himself, he could poke fun at himself and his image. He was also a much better writer than Hemingway, and much less of an ass. There's a story that Hemingway and Mailer were going to meet at some bar in New York City, and Mailer was there waiting for his idol to show up, and he kept waiting and waiting and waiting. Hemingway never showed up, apparently he got cold feet. I think he was scared to meet someone who might possibly be as good a writer as he was. It's too bad, imagine the conversation that would have taken place!

Mailer was an extremely lucid commentator on America. It will probably be the case, if it isn't already, that his non-fiction is held in more esteem than his fiction. Two of my favorite Mailer books are "The Armies of the Night" and "Why Are We At War?" Published in 1968 and 2003, respectively, they show a writer who had a real grasp of his country, a brilliant incisiveness that he brought to his best writing. In interviews he was always entertaining, and a skilled conversationalist. Every interview I've read or seen of Mailer's always impressed me with his intelligence. On camera he was fascinating to watch, his bright blue eyes flashing with every new point he made.

I doubt very much that we will see his like again, the serious writer who becomes a celebrity and goes on talk shows. Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote were the three post-war writers who held the attention of the media in a way that few other authors have since. Can you imagine John Updike on the Tonight Show?

1948 was the year that Mailer burst onto the literary scene with the publication of his first book, "The Naked and the Dead." He was just 25 years old. The book still stands up as brilliant today, especially considering his age. Mailer was thrust into the limelight, and for a long time had to deal with only being known as the boy who had written this book. His subsequent books failed to find an audience. His 1955 novel "The Deer Park," though a favorite of Mailer's, was rejected as obscene by just about every publisher. When it finally appeared, the reviews were atrocious. Mailer even took the step of running an ad highlighting the book's many negative reviews! (He would later repeat this trick with 1983's "Ancient Evenings.") People always said to Mailer, "I loved the Naked and the Dead...(long pause)...and the others...(voice trailing off)..." When Mailer met JFK in 1960, Kennedy said to him, "I loved the Deer Park...and the others..." And in so doing, astutely stroked the Mailer ego and won his ever-lasting affection.

One could argue that Mailer didn't hit his stride again until the 1960's, when he found a decade more suited to his quicksilver talents. Mailer didn't seem to fit in the 1950's. He was no man in the grey flannel suit, he needed the times to catch up to him, and in the 1960's they caught up in a hurry. Mailer was at his most prolific during this decade, publishing some 8 books during the 60's. He also was at the forefront of what came to be called New Journalism, inserting himself as a character into his pieces, notably in "The Armies of the Night," about a 1967 march on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. I would say that by writing about Norman Mailer the character, he found his ideal subject, and perhaps his greatest creation. Mailer was larger than life anyway, why not simply make himself a character in his own works? He was more complicated and interesting than any fictional character he could invent. And maybe he did invent some of that character, that public persona that he put on.

By the late 70's Mailer had seemingly worn out his "Norman Mailer" persona. People seemed tired of him constantly inserting himself into the narrative, even though his 1975 book "The Fight," about the Rumble in the Jungle between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, is one of my favorites. But that was one of the last times Mailer used himself as a character. He kept himself out of 1979's "The Executioner's Song" entirely, a won a second Pulitzer Prize. (His first was for "Armies of the Night.") Even though people love it, I couldn't get into it, and gave up about halfway through. Part of my problem was that Norman Mailer wasn't in it, and for that reason, it was much less interesting.

Mailer mellowed, at least a little bit, in his old age, although there was no way he would go gently into the night. His 2003 book "Why Are We At War?" issued just after the invasion of Iraq, showed that the old man had plenty of fight left in him. It was a brilliant attack on the Bush administration, full of all the vigor associated with Mailer at his best. And he still had one more big novel left in him, this year's "The Castle in the Forest." Good for him. Good for Norman to have one more big one, one more to go out on. He was a great man, despite his many failings. As usual, Gore Vidal summed up Mailer perfectly when he said, "He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements." Thank you, Norman Mailer, for all the wonderful work you left us. You will be missed.