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The Bonfire of the Vanities movie
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"Deep down he's really shallow" might have been invented for Tom Wolfe's detractors to describe him as a writer. His work is crammed with references to surface appearances, clothing styles, cultural bric-a-brat and commercial brand names. The minutiae of modern life not only fill the descriptive paragraphs but dominate the inner lives of his characters. Deep down, people are really petty, grasping, self-serving creatures in love with their own images reflected in the culture. But, the thing is, Tom Wolfe does have an uncanny ability to show people's lives this way. Perhaps "show" is the wrong word. For he takes the reader along on the ride with the character. Whether it's the milieu of the good old boys (a phrase Wolfe popularized) of the southern United States in "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!", a story in his first non-fiction collection, or the worlds of Wall Street, Park Avenue and Harlem in The Bonfire of the Vanities, his first two decades later. Note the similarity between his fiction and non-fiction. For years Wolfe was known as the greatest exemplar of New Journalism, which in America meant a breaking down of the barriers between the two forms. Wolfe claims to have invented the new style almost accidentally. Story goes he got stuck while writing a magazine article about California's hot rod and custom-car building craze in the early sixties. His editor asked him to send his notes and he sat up most of a night typing out all his impressions without regard for conventional journalistic form. The editor ran the mix of reportage and subjectivity as it was, under the title "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)..." So the New Journalism was born. The story was collected with similarly creative pieces on pop culture in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), which became a sensation. It was followed in 1968 by more of the same in The Pump House Gang and an account of author and LSD-advocate Ken Kesey's adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Many consider the latter his best nonfictional work. By this time other American
writers, like Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's His 1971 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing
the Flak Catchers was controversial for exposing wealthy liberals as
do-gooders manipulated by the black-power radicals of the time. The
Painted Word (1975) roused an even bigger storm for its depiction of
the New York art world as insular and elitist. The next year he derided
an entire generation by labelling the 1970s the "Me Decade" in
an article in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter A more positive and substantial work was his 1979 story of the rivalry between rocket test pilots and astronauts during the early space program, The Right Stuff. It won an American Book Award, among other honours, and was made into a successful film of the same name in 1983. Other writers, like Mailer,
had also experimented in the opposite direction, applying journalistic
techniques to fiction, but Wolfe stuck to non-fiction for over twenty
years. His first serious attempt at a novel was The His next novel, and the last so far, was A Man in Full (1998) about a failing real estate developer, a laid-off warehouse worker and a black lawyer who eventually come together over an alleged rape case, each pondering what it means to be a complete person at the end of the second millennium. The novel appears to be becoming an even bigger hit than Bonfire. Wolfe's success and his declarations that his reportage form of fiction represents the future of American writing has infuriated other great writers. It's too early to tell though whether his fictional output will change the novel as much as his nonfiction changed journalism. My suspicion is it may indeed change it to the same extent, but this may not be such a big deal. What was the impact of Wolfe on journalism anyway? Journalism is less obsessed with pretended objectivity today than it was before the changes of the 1960s, but it is still generally based on the same principles. We still don't see a lot of journalism in the extreme style of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test these days and, when we do, it's still noted as an exception. The literary innovations of Wolfe's novels are not as great as many critics (including Wolfe himself) seem to think. Sardonic reportage of the social scene has been a feature of such great writers as William Thackeray and Evelyn Waugh. Journalistic styles have been applied in the past by writers such as John Dos Passos (see his U.S.A. trilogy for a radical example that far exceeds Wolfe). What Wolfe has done is not so much apply journalistic techniques to fiction, but first apply fictional techniques to journalism and then apply the result of that fusion back to fiction. The result may be not to enrich the novel but rather to dilute it. The surface fireworks of journalism are extended down into the depths of the novel, so that it is hard to tell whether any depths exist any longer. The suggestive power of prose is discarded. The mysteries that engage and bedevil us are gone. It's what-you-see-is-what-you-get all the way down. Watching Wolfe's success, writers are bound to be influenced towards his seemingly ripped-from-the-headlines style, but what will make the greatest long-term difference will still be how much readers are moved by the characters and story, whatever style is adopted. Wolfe has created a sensation or two, but so far it's not clear that his characters or stories stand up as real in their own rights. Are they deeply affecting? Are they important to us? Or are they just superficially complex? Deep down, are they really shallow? Will anyone care about these stories after the eras they depict have passed? Does that even matter? Or does the future of the novel lie in that it will no longer be written for the future, but rather for an everpassing now. I mean now. I mean...3..2..1..now. Now! — Eric |
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© Copyright 2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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WOLFE, Tom