What’s the Big Deal About Tom Wolfe?
This week Tom Wolfe, iconic American author in the white suit, reenters our cultural scene with his new book, Back to Blood. His return at the same time as Camille Paglia is a happy coincidence. Two of our sharpest culture critics both think that art and literature should mean something. (As they are both atheists, they need art to mean something, but that is one of Paglia’s arguments and so I will address it in my Glittering Images review, hopefully later this month.) Established fans of Wolfe know of his reputation as a cultural critic, but for younger readers for whom Back to Blood is their first knowledge of the author, a brief introduction to Wolfe’s massive influence:
Wolfe started out writing news as stories. He used a narrative, historical fiction style but, since he wrote on current events, he could interview the players and observe the events rather than creatively fill in gaps in the historical record. His first books were news stories about cultural phenomenon such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about the hippie culture and The Right Stuff on NASA culture. He expected that those true stories would inspire related fiction. They didn’t.
So in 1987 he penned an explosive essay for Harpers, “Stalking the Billion Footed Beast.” He argued that if modern American authors insisted on writing novels about nothing, then they would cede American literature to realist authors like himself. His first fiction novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, was his proof. A story about wild New York City financial life in the ’80s, Bonfire was a fabulous success. By the time he published his next novel, A Man in Full, the old guard authors were annoyed — and ready to strike back.
I adore Tom Wolfe, and I’m thrilled to hear he’s back. However, I hope I misread the line which seems to call “Twilight” a great story.
You did not misread, and I’ll stand by the claim. Not only is the story one of the standard romantic forms, it is one that has been missing in the modern era. That’s why young women, and women from Gen X, drank it in. Having come of age in the free-wheeling, all about me, hook up era the story of lovers obsessed with doing for the other, resonated for them, either as memory, fantasy, or wishful thinking. Is it the best telling of this romantic form, not at all. But that’s why it illustrates my point, story trumps prose. You ought to see some of the prose in fan fiction, but ff is popular because the stories are often—not always, note— better than the stuff Hollywood pays for.
I saw the Harry Potter part of that and wondered how you’d survive all the people who think it is the new standard of literary excellence.
And I have my own experience with ff, once asking some others after reading a recent released book if it was just my ego that my recent foray into ff was better than it or not and getting general agreement. And not that my ff was all that good, it is just the book was so bland and stilted as to not be worth the time spent throwing it away.
I might have to look into Wolfe.
Are there really many people who think HP new standard for lit? I’m a huge fan, and I think that some critics are harsh just because the books are popular, but I don’t know anyone who thinks they are masterworks.
As for fan fiction, I’m sure I know of which released book you are talking about, and yes, it isn’t worth the time to pitch it. I finally read the first book last summer because I couldn’t keep writing about it based only on reviews. It was worse that I expected, and I had just come off my first ff reading jag with teenage authors writing in their second, not fluent, language. I knew bad prose.
There is tons of better stuff, prose and story wise. That said, it still became popular because of the story. One article hit it well, from Katie Rophie: “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambience, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level. If you are willing to slog through sentences like “In spite of my poignant sadness, I laugh,” or “My world is crumbling around me into a sterile pile of ashes, all my hopes and dreams cruelly dashed,” you must really, really, want to get to the submissive sex scene.”
It’s a bit more complicated that than, but Rophie isn’t strictly wrong.
Every time I criticize the writing in the Harry Potter books as weak I always seem to have dozens willing to leap down my throat for uttering such heresy, and praising the writing seems to feature heavily every time I see a review.
They aren’t the worst ever, and the story is serviceable, but I’m simply never going to recommend them over The Chronicles of Narnia or The Wind in the Willows or even just Edgar Rice Burroughs.
As for the fan fic, it was the WotC game novel “Against the Giants” up against my serialized AD&D campaign summaries. (Everyone needs to abuse their hobby at least once.)
As for “50 Shades of Grey”, I’ve seen several reviews on that level – that it is not that is cheap porn, it is not that it is cheap mommy porn, it is that it is poorly written cheap mommy porn and you can find ten times better at just about any website that hosts randomly submitted porn stories.
I guess that’s why I’m reading more and more pre-1960s fantasy/sci-fi/horror these days, and have an extremely short list of current writers I will even bother considering.
Back to Blood is on its way from Amazon; I can’t wait. His other novels are highly recommended to whose who have not read them.
Lefties like Mailer cannot stand him because he skewers too many of their sacred cows. (Not that he leaves Rightist/Capitalist cows standing.) To them selling the critical narrative is the only valid purpose of literature. America’s “Greatest Novelists” denouncing a work as entertaining shows how large the gap is between the Elites and the reality. Wolfe should wear their scorn as an award of the highest rank.
Re: Wolfe should wear their scorn as an award. He does. He is not modest. There was a great interview in the Telegraph today that touched on that a bit.
As for sacred cows, have you noticed this is a trend in left and right thought? They tend to be very sensitive to having their cows skewered. We are more used to it and more likely to confront it than complain. South Park skewering of all kinds comes to mind. The need for peer approval suggests doubt and insecurity. They want endorsement, someone to reassure them they are right and good.
The Left is unable to stand ridicule, they have made it illegal, so they live in bubbles where they never hear a discouraging word and that has weakened them. The Right is accustomed to derision, I think that strengthens us.
I did a little searching and found Tom’s essay on Junior Johnson, which I read in Esquire when it was published. This captures the essence of NASCAR and Junior as well as anyone ever did. This article and a road test of an Alfa Romeo sport coupe he did for Car & Driver in 1965 are what got me buying his books. I love the Internet.
http://www.esquire.com/features/life-of-junior-johnson-tom-wolfe-0365
I, too, first encountered Wolfe when he wrote for Car and Driver in the ’60s. CD really was a car mag you bought for the writing and I subscribed for many years and followed Davis over to Automobile, which at first was sort of a cross between the CD of old and Town and Country.
The Right Stuff was wonderful and wonderfully irreverent. I read Bonfire and liked it; didn’t see it as revolutionary or anything but that might be because I already knew Wolfe pretty well from CD. My Name is Charlotte Simmons was more “sober” and sobering, especially since my stepkids were high school and college aged at the time and much of it rang all too true. I just got Back to Blood for my Kindle yesterday PM and read a bit of it before going to sleep last night. So far it reads like Tom Wolfe on speed and running around inside some guy’s head, a bit off-putting, but OK – so far. Writing from an omnicient view has to be done really well for me, so we’ll see how he pulls it off or even how much he uses it as the story develops.
Oh, and I read that Junior Johnson piece when it first came out. It was pretty remarkable in ’65 that anybody with some big Yankee magazine would even acknowledge NASCAR racing. You got a little on Wide World of Sports and papers in The South would have a few inches and maybe a picture from the bigger races but that was it. NASCAR was distinctly Southern and in 1965 The South was just barely a part of the Country. I had a homegrown model of that #3 ’63 Chevrolet, and lettered for Holly Farms Poultry, roll bar fabricated from sprue, and the “mystery motor” faked by using putty to reshape the valve covers of the 409 that came with the AMT kit. I’d hate to be judged by it now, but it wasn’t bad for a 13-14 year old in those days before fancy diecasts and aftermarket parts and decals for practically any stock car that ever existed. It sure was easy to cheer for Junior, even if it was often a forlorn hope, and hate Freddy Lorenzen; he was a Yankee, after all.
For decades now, among the cognoscenti, the more which is withheld, the greater the art – presumbably. That which gratifies, especially too quickly, is regarded as cheap, easy, and tawdry. What Wolfe in part is talking about is confusing the terms “serious” and “sober.”
The ghettoization of pop art/culture is nothing new, but ferreting out the good, the bad, and the ugly is still a challenge. We have come a long way: comic books and science fiction get their due nowadays but have themselves become calcified and fallen back into themselves.
As ever, one must keep one’s radar up and realize good stuff is where you find it, and not where you want or expect it to be, or where it used to be.
At the Library of Alexandria, Plotinus wrote: “To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen.”
Around 1960 Frank Herbert wrote: “Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”
Using such tools of criticism and self-criticism, one may find that some of the most touted novels are little more than trash, and writers few have heard of have written great work.
In my own world, that means I’ve found “Oliver Twist” and “A Tale of Two Cities” in the classics, and “Snowcrash” and “Ender’s Game” in science fiction, to be almost unreadable novels upjumped far above what they deserve and the largely unknown Jack Vance to be one the 20th century’s greatest American prose stylists.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about “Ender’s Game” and most of what Card produces. I have been an avid reader of science-fiction for four decades and I just don’t get what anyone sees in his work.
“Ender’s Game” is the most overrated SF novel of all time. Nothing else even comes close. SF is largely amateur hour nowadays. Each writer seems to have had the same politically correct writing teacher and the fact John Scalzi is head of the Science Fiction Writers of America speaks volumes for how SF has fallen.
The New Wave push-back in the ’60s against the Old Guard would be much more justified today as the genre is conformist and goblinized to a degree that’s just sad.
My main problem with Ender’s Game is that since I figured out what was happening in the end, Ender should have been able to do it too.
As for Scalzi, I can’t say about the rest of his work, but Redshirts is a fun read.
When I first got out of college, I had this notion—correct—that I hadn’t read enough. I searched for a list of books essential to understanding American intellectual life. This was before the web was huge, so I found some must-read list in the New York Times. Picking the books I hadn’t read, I tried the likes of Updike, Nin, Tolstoy. Most of the listed books were barely readable. I picked up a few Austens to cleanse my pallet. I gave up on the NYT when I got to Tropic of Cancer, a case study into how to make even sex tedious. Thus began my education about the New York Times not living up to its reputation. I started out on my own. I found Rand and spent a few years as an Objectivist. I finally read the Foundation Trilogy, and so on. Books were far more interesting and challenging when I wasn’t taking cues from the NYT. I used to have my list on my blog. Maybe I’ll put it back up.
I saw your list of American books on your blog. Very interesting! I tried to get a reading group on the Federalist Papers started in New York City a few years ago and couldn’t get any traction. I’ll just get the $0 Kindle Edition but wish some publisher would offer Scalia or Sowell crazy money to do an annotated edition.
In any case, serendipity and finding out about books from other books is the best way to figure out what to read next, rather than the New York Times.
If you haven’t gotten further with Tolstoy, get the Maude translation for Anna Karenina.
The only Henry Miller work I’ve liked is “Quiet Days in Clichy”– short and straightforward. The best of the Olympia Press writers though was Marcus Van Heller, particularly his novel “Young Spartacus.”
I have found there isn’t much difference between Wolfe’s fiction and non-fiction. There’s a short essay in “The Purple Decades” about dating in New York City that hasn’t aged much. I read the excerpt from “Back to Blood” in Vanity Fair over the weekend at my nail salon and it’s a total delight.
Agree about other books as best recs for new books. I need to rewrite that book list intro to cover my new advice to coeds (one has to self educate, university or no) about reading a masterwork from every genre and every period. That will provide prose judgment, history lessons, multiple perspectives, and point you to what you like for further exploration.
I slogged though Maude, skimmed that whole self reflection on the train bit. I’m afraid of Miller. I hated his stuff. Agree that Wolfe fiction and non-fiction sounds the same. I often have to check to see if an essay is true story or not. Wolfe would probably like that.
Three times I have tried to read Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy. Three times I have failed. The subject matter is such that I *should* find it enthralling, but…
I haven’t tried that trilogy but the upgunned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles novel “Snowcrash” was enough. I wouldn’t have found “Snowcrash” funny, clever or interesting even when I was 11. No coincidence “Snowcrash” came out during the height of the TMNT feature films. Vintage Mad Magazine and Warner Bros. cartoons from the ’40s and ’50s seem sophisticated in comparison. And that goes double for Terry Pratchett – another “clever” ha-ha writer who leaves me cold but which many people practically worship. It’s a strange irony that so many people with tired mainstream sensibilities have decided to enter a hard genre like SF.
I found Snowcrash more entertaining than Neuromancer. Gibbons is another highly over rated writer.
Well, as long as we’re piling on, let’s add the other great wunderkid, Neil Gaiman. Start any Gaiman story and he commits the cardinal sin all too common nowadays: you catch him writing, and conspicuously so, rather than story telling. Do it the other way round and the writing comes. It’s like trying to paint a portrait starting with hues rather than contrast first – it just doesn’t work, at least for me. It’s like those hideous Leroy Neiman paintings. Gaiman’s wife, Amanda Palmer, is an even worse artist as a musician.
This type of writing sits entirely on the surface and repels me rather than draws me in. It’s smacks of an almost desperate type of pandering rather than simply being oneself and saying “follow me.” In older work, even a completely eccentric writer like Cordwainer Smith has a way of immediately drawing you in. People are trying way too hard to be clever and the result is tiresomely similar.
There are definitely people in fantastic literature who can still write well: Peter Hamilton, Jack McDevitt and George R.R. Martin, who have all written some wonderful stuff in recent years, but they seem too few.
Jack Vance is my hero. I don’t write the way he does — I can’t — but for graceful storytelling whose language matches the story in its excellence, he’s unsurpassed.
Concerning other movements in SF, you might want to check out Sarah Hoyt’s recently formed “Human Wave” movement. The URL is http://www.humanwavesf.com, and a swelling number of writers are declaring themselves “in.”
I’ve read about the HW and I still don’t get it. Half of it seems to rail against legacy publishers and half is too general for me to understand the point. If they’d list some novels they consider something they are totally sick of it’d be easier to understand what they’re talking about.
Like Thomas Wolfe, I myself wrote 3 SF novels this Spring simply as a pushback and example of what I’d like to see done. I don’t know anything about writing but they’re still probably more original and lively than most of the nonsense I butt up against nowadays.
Political correctness and pandering to a fan base in a way even the old pulps never did seems to be the main culprit. SF and fantasy has been vampirized, televisionized and dragonized and with long, descriptive passages that turn 40,000 word novellas into 80,000 word novels. A one page sword fight becomes 3 pages.
I enjoy Vance’s “Dying Earth” books, but a gratuitous wallowing in baroque vocabulary does not awesome prose make, and more critically does not accessible prose make.
Not appreciating Card I can understand, his faith heavily impacts his work, and takes it meandering a bit at times, but snubbing Gaiman while praising Martin? While that gets points for being provocative it falls fatally short of demonstrating any particular literary insight.
Casmir spoke to Lady Desdea. “Bring Madouc here at once.” Lady Desdea left the chamber and a few moments later returned with Madouc, who entered the room somewhat reluctantly.
King Casmir spoke in even tones. “I ordered you to throw no more fruit.”
“Indeed you did, Sire, in the direction of Lady Desdea, and you also advised against the use of substances more offensive, in connection with Lady Desdea. I followed your advice exactly.”
“But you threw a quince at Lady Marmone. Was that my advice?”
“I took it to be so, since you failed to include her in your instructions.”
“Ah hah! Did you want me to name each individual of the castle and in each case name the stuffs with which he or she was not to be pelted?”
Madouc shrugged. “As you see, Sire, when there is doubt, mistakes occur.”
“And you felt this doubt?”
“Exactly, Sire! It seemed only fair that each of the ladies should be treated alike, and enjoy the same advantages.”
King Casmir smiled and nodded. “These advantages are subtle. Can you bring them into sharper focus?”
Madouc frowned down at her fingers. “The explanation might be lengthy, even tedious, so that I would be committing the same fault I deplore in the Ladies Desdea and Marmone.”
“Please make the effort. If you bore us, we will excuse you this once.”
Madouc chose her words with care. “These ladies are surely genteel but each day their conduct is much like that of the day before. They know neither zest nor surprise nor any wonderful new events. I thought it might be well if they were provided a mysterious adventure, which would excite their minds and reduce the tedium of their conversation.”
“Your motives, then, were totally kind and sympathetic?”
Madouc turned him a dubious glance. “I suspected, of course, that at first they might not be grateful and perhaps even a bit gruff, but in the end they would be delighted for my help, since they would realize that the world is sometimes unexpected and strange, and they would start to look around them with gay anticipation.”
Lady Desdea and Lady Marmone made sounds of incredulity. Casmir smiled a small hard smile. “So you feel that you have done the two ladies a favor?”
“I have done my best,” said Madouc bravely. “They will remember this day to the end of their lives! Can they say the same of yesterday?”
That’s a long way from “a gratuitous wallowing in baroque vocabulary.”
This is the opening from Neil Gaiman’s short story Sunbird.
“THEY WERE A RICH and a rowdy bunch at the Epicurean Club in those days. They certainly knew how to party. There were five of them: There was Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, big enough for three men, who ate enough for four men and who drank enough for five. His great-grandfather had founded the Epicurean Club with the proceeds of a tontine, which he had taken great pains, in the traditional manner, to ensure that he had collected in full.
There was Professor Mandalay, small and twitchy and gray as a ghost (and perhaps he was a ghost; stranger things have happened), who drank nothing but water and who ate doll portions from plates the size of saucers. Still, you do not need the gusto for the gastronomy, and Mandalay always got to the heart of every dish placed in front of him.
There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.
There was Jackie Newhouse, the descendant (on the left-handed route) of the great lover, gourmand,violinist, and duelist Giacomo Casanova. Jackie Newhouse had, like his notorious ancestor, both broken his share of hearts and eaten his share of great dishes.
And there was Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, who was the only one of the Epicureans who was flat-outbroke: he shambled in unshaven from the street when they had their meetings, with half a bottle of rotgut in a brown paper bag, hatless and coatless and, too often, partly shirtless, but he ate with more of an appetite than any of them.”
Pffffft!
With bent forward and hands clasped behind his back Drofo surveyed his underlings. After a moment he spoke, in a deep and passionless voice. “I can tell you much! Listen, and you will gain wisdom to surpass the scholars at the Institute, with their concords and paradigms! But do not mistake me! The weight of my words is as more than the weight of a single rain=drop! To know, you must do! After a hundred worms and ten thousand leagues, then with justice you may say, ‘I am wise!’ or, to precisely the same effect: ‘I am a wormringer!’ At this time, because you are wise and because you are a wormringer, you will not wish to utter vainglories. You will chose reticence, since your worth will speak for itself!” Drofo looked from face to face. “Am I clear?”
Lankwiler looked in puzzlement. “not entirely. The scholars at the institute routinely calculate the weight of single raindrops. Is this to be considered good or bad?”
Drofo responded politely: “We are not adjudging the research of the scholars at the Institute. We are discussing, rather, the work of the wormringer.”
“Ah! All is now clear”
“Precisely so! said Cugel. “Proceed, Drofo, with your interesting remarks.”
WIth arms behind his back, Drofo took a step to port, then a step to starboard. “Our calling is starkly noble! The dilettante, the weakling, the fool: all reveal themselves in their true colors. When the voyage goes well, then any mooncalf is bright and merry; he dances a jig and plays the concertina, and everyone thinks: “Oh, for the life of the wormringer!’ But then hardship attacks! Black pust rages without remore; impactions come like the gonga of Fate; the worm takes to rearing and plunging; then the popunjay is revealed, or, more likely, is discoverd hiding in the darkest corner of the hold!”
Cugel and Lankwiler mulled over his remarks, while Drofo paced to port, then to starboard.
Drofo pointed a long pale fore-finger toward the sea. “Yonder we go, halfway between the sky and the ocean floor, where the secrets of every ge are concealed in darkness which will grow absolute when the sun goes out.”
As if to empasize Drofo’s remarks, the face of the sun momentarily glazed over with a dark film, similar to a rheum in an old man’s eye. After a flutter and a wink, the light of day returned, to the obvious relief of Lankwiler, although Drofo ignored the incident. He held his finger in the air.
“The worm is a familiar of the sea! It is not wise, though it uses six concepts only: sun, wave, wind, horizion dark deep, faithful direction, hunger, and satiation . . . Yes, Lankwiler? Why are you counting on your fingers?”
“It is no great matter.”
I repeat:
vocabulary
wallowing
baroque
@Sam, “Everyone needs to abuse their hobby at least once.”
Absolutely.