When Tom Wolfe speaks, people listen. For someone whose manner is so unassertive, almost courtly, Wolfe is practically impossible to tune out, a master at shaking the reading public by its lapels. To a significant extent, that`s because his voice (written not spoken) is as delicately pitched as a Geronimo war whoop, shrieking for (and commanding) attention, in whatever literary precinct he happens to be working: ”New Journalism,” social commentary, or, most recently, pop fiction.
Wolfe`s latest whoop is a lengthy ”manifesto” in the November issue of Harper`s, entitled, ”Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a reference to his intrepid struggle to capture New York society, the low and the high end, in his seriocomic first novel, ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Though his Harper`s essay, like his 1987 novel, tends to lumber and sprawl in every direction, it probably falls into the broad categorial bin of literary criticism. And Wolfe is nothing if not critical about modern American literature.
Almost without exception, Wolfe denigrates and ridicules contemporary novelists-the Absurdists, the Minimalists, the Neo-Fabulists, the Magical Realists, the K mart Realists, all the introspective and constipated storytellers, the stunted and anemic scriveners-for their failure to deliver the prodigiously researched, Herculean ”social novels” that he believes (or says he believes) our cataclysmic age demands.
As paramount examples, Wolfe repeatedly invokes the names of Balzac, Zola, Dickens and Thackeray, not to mention a lone contemporary writer who will temporarily go unmentioned (even though his identity can easily be guessed). To a man, they are all resourceful journalists as well as novelists, Wolfe points out, who have heroically documented the manners and morals of their epochs, producing top-to-bottom microcosms of society, ”with the city always in the foreground, exerting its relentless pressure on the souls of its inhabitants.”
If Wolfe`s admonitory message seems vaguely familiar, arousing a sense of deja vu among faithful readers who have hung on his every word, italic, ellipsis and exclamation point, of the many thousands he`s written since the
`60s, that`s easy enough to explain. In many of its generalities and particulars, ”Billion-Footed Beast” is a recap of and a further
amplification on Wolfe`s 1972 article for Esquire, which he describes in his present essay as ”brave speculations about nonfiction as an art form.”
That was his celebrated encyclical on the ”New Journalism,” in which he maintained that such maestros of the form, such exalted ”lumpenproles” as Gay Talese, Brock Brower, Rex Reed, John Sack, Joe McGinniss, Al Stump, Jimmy Breslin, and, by no means least, Tom Wolfe were threatening to seize the high ground of literature from the snooty upper-class novelists, who were slipping and sliding, groping and wallowing in their own drab and meager imaginations, too lazy and contemplative to do the enormous job of reporting that contemporary fiction requires.
Wolfe (or an Esquire headline writer) titled that earlier treatise, ”Why They Aren`t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore.” Wolfe`s latest essay backtracks extensively over the same terrain, borrowing a great deal from its predecessor, including historical citations, scholarly allusions, tone and point of view, even some verbatim passages. Yet despite the numerous similarities and parallels, these brave new speculations obviously could not have appeared under the same headline.
For this time around, Wolfe seems to be proclaiming, in a slightly lower register than is his custom, that in the 17 years since his Esquire article on the New Journalism, one fledgling novelist has indeed written the Great American Novel. And that novelist, the only contemporary who belongs with Balzac, Zola & Co. in the sacred pantheon of social realists, is (hold on to your Borsalinos, folks) Tom Wolfe.
To be sure, Wolfe doesn`t state it quite so immodestly, so self-aggrandizingly, but the braggadoccio isn`t hard to detect in the article`s subtext (to use an academic word he abhors). Postponing for the moment a consideration of his extravagant claim, or the validity of his long brief for the ”big realistic fictional novel,” it might be instructive to indulge in some pointed speculation about the rationale for Wolfe`s essay.
With his impressive forays into literary history and scholarship, his authoritive nods to Lionel Trilling, George Steiner and other theorists, Wolfe might appear to be assuming the mantle and posture of the Man of Letters, whom he seems to rank among the more despicable species of literary poseurs. But not to worry. The bottom line is that Wolfe`s piece is neither criticism nor scholarship, but salesmanship, a prototypically Wolfean example of me veneration.
And given the context, it`s salesmanship of an especially low order, a recognizably antiquated style of merchandising that was best exemplified by Crazy Eddie and Madman Muntz. Even though there are nearly 3.5 million copies (paperback and hardcover) of ”Bonfire of the Vanities” already in print, Wolfe is hardly content to rest on his sales figures. So here he is, in the usually decorous pages of Harper`s, shamelessly hustling his first novel as if it were 50 square yards of Empire carpeting.
Incredible shrinking fiction
Not that Wolfe doesn`t make a number of trenchant and corrosively amusing observations about the deficiencies of contemporary fiction, despite the frequent commercial interruptions. God knows (as well as Wolfe), more novelists ought to abandon their classrooms and salons for the streets and barricades of the real world. But Wolfe is scarcely the first, or the most incisive, commentator to take note of the incredible shrinkage among America`s novelists: their failure to confront reality, their retreat into the graveyards of Academe, their abdication of moral and social responsibilities
(though few critics, if any, have complained about the absence of modern Balzacs, et al.).
As in his previous excursions into the follies and misfortunes of modern art (”The Painted Word”) and architecture (”From Bauhaus to Our House”), Wolfe is an incorrigible provocateur, a saturation bomber. But in ”Billion-Footed Beast” his style is blessedly free of its trademark tics and tricks, the exhibitionistic mannerisms, the rhetorical arabesques, the hyperthyroid prose and the Karate Kid punctuation, which were as profuse and as distracting in ”Bonfire of the Vanities” as in his novelistic nonfiction. No matter how often Wolfe`s offensive missiles strike home, his pronunciamento is seriously contaminated not simply by its unbridled commercialism, its narcissistic horn-blowing and breast-beating, but by its dubious generalizations and misinterpretations, its evasions, distortions and omissions. In his honor roll of reportorial novelists who have lamentably vanished from the American scene, for instance, Wolfe puts Sinclair Lewis at the very top, followed by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and other Nobel Prize-winners.
Yet Faulkner, particularly, seems antithetical to Wolfe`s argument, since the strength of Faulkner`s fiction was not in its stenographic depiction of metropolitan life. On the contrary, its source, as well as its power, came from the darkest heart of the country, in Faulkner`s ”own little postage stamp of native soil,” Yoknapatawpha County (a region that Wolfe indirectly dismisses as a ”Rustic Rural Septic Tank setting”). And has anyone other than Wolfe accused Hemingway of being a ”social realist,” closet or otherwise?
What about Bellow?
Only in passing does Wolfe mention Saul Bellow, another Nobel laureate who would seem to qualify for at least an associate membership in Wolfe`s
”social realists” club. But, as Wolfe explains, admission is restricted to urban novelists who live ”where things are happening.” Because such behemoths as ”The Adventures of Augie March” and ”Humboldt`s Gift” take place not in New York but Chicago, where nothing happens, Bellow is evidently a victim of the Wolfe blackball.
A more puzzling exclusion (or perhaps a convenient attack of myopia, since he and Wolfe have the same publisher) is Jonathan Franzen, whose 1988 book, ”The Twenty-Seventh City,” was a bustling, audacious and subversively funny novel about the sinister impact of East Indians on an American metropolis. Bursting at its seams with social realism, awash with immigrants from the ”fourth great wave” (as Wolfe calls the phenonemon in his essay), Franzen`s first novel apparently meets all of Wolfe`s requirements but one:
The ”27th City” is St. Louis.
If only because he`s a fellow New Journalist, who also claimed New York as his turf when he careered into fiction, Jimmy Breslin ought to rate an honorable mention. But Wolfe`s ”damnable beast” seems to have eluded Breslin as neatly as it has John Updike and Pat Conroy (”Prince of Tides”), to name a couple of other presumptive social realists. And by Wolfe`s grandiose but deliberately fuzzy guidelines, James Michener ought to qualify, since his obese best sellers have charted the manners and morals not only of great cities but entire countries and galaxies, going back thousands of years. But no, Wolfe prefers to be alone on his mountaintop.
If magazines were subject to the same regulations as other consumer goods, Wolfe`s essay could probably be cited for truth-in-packaging violations. Rather than a rabble-rousing and earnest plea for more aggressive legwork by novelists, as advertised, ”Billion-Footed Beast” is a venture in literary status-seeking, an effort to both publicize and legitimize ”Bonfire of the Vanities,” which even Wolfe`s most sympathetic critics would find hard to classify as ”social realism.”
A virtuoso journalist, who skillfully appropriated the techniques of the nonfiction novelist in ”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and ”The Right Stuff,” Wolfe has seldom gone to such extreme lengths as a reporter, or such extreme lengths to make readers aware of his reporting, as he has in ”Bonfire of the Vanities.” But as he stalked his beast though the underbelly and the penthouses of New York, from the South Bronx to Wall Street, documenting the way people live, eat, talk, spend and (particularly) dress, Wolfe let his excesses run wild in his garish, frequently riotous but inhuman comedy.
Bankrupt characters
However bountiful and impressive as journalism, ”Bonfire of the Vanities” is sadly impoverished fiction, mostly because Wolfe`s characters are such hollow men and women, objects of his contempt and derison, hapless zombies with only coincidental semblances to reality. With his inflationary prose and simplistic slant on human behavior, Wolfe further sabotaged reality, turning a story that in rough outline had a horrifying plausibility into a 700-page Puppetoon, a tragicomic strip that might have resulted from a delirious collaboration between Stan Lee and Ayn Rand.
As much as anyone else, Wolfe resembles Truman Capote, with whom he shares an obsession for the uppermost classes and a genius for self promotion. But even though his ambitions and his ego are majestic, Wolfe is a relatively low achiever next to Capote, who aspired to be another Proust before literally falling down on the job. With ”Answered Prayers” unfinished and Capote permanently out of contention, Wolfe can relax. He has secured an undisputed place in America`s literary firmament, as both the recording secretary and the big daddy of Radical Chic and Me Decadence.
