(As Always) Life Imitates Tom Wolfe

(Amazon now says that Tom’s new book is scheduled to street on November 9th, incidentally.)

Update: The New York Times has a fun profile of Tom. You may want to read it from the printer version though: that’s some photo the Times chose to accompany every page of the Web version of the article.

Wolfe sums up the what’s driven the conflicts of the 20th century pretty nicely in this segment:

Wolfe says he believes in something he calls ”the matrix,” and his matrix has remained remarkably consistent over the years, as have so many of his ideas. The matrix, in the Wolfean scheme of things, is a grand unifying explanation, a theory of life. ”You have to have a theory,” he explained last summer, ”and it doesn’t really matter what the theory is — it will force you to make connections.” (One character in Wolfe’s new novel belongs to a group called the Millennial Mutants, who dream of coming up with a new matrix, which is a key to membership in the aristo-meritocracy.) ”For much of Western history, the theory of life is Christianity, but then Marxism comes along and that will work, or Darwinism or Freudianism.”

Nietzsche would be have been proud, but then this is far from the first time that Tom has quoted ol’ Friedrich: