The Mature Wolfe

...Yet his prose was too much like the tumultuous gush of the acid movement he was chronicling—a theater of the '60s drug scene enacted in all its exuberance and apotheoses, crammed with "screeling screamers, megascope, fooling pooling...

...initially Wolfe's present sensibility appears to identify with the fashions of contemporary life...

...He is fascinated with fashion and appearances: Things are put on and off, he says, according to changing tides and values...

...John Dowd and Garth Flint are knights taking off to go jousting with sams (Russian missiles) and Charlies (ground fire)—sticking to the rules, obeying their code of honor, fighting for glory, indifferent to death...

...Wolfe is furious at those who reviled the American boys in Vietnam, at the doves who would recommend the exclusive bombing of military targets in Hanoi and expose our flying aces to suicidal missions...

...The old Wolfe was daring and sometimes felicitous in describing a kaleidoscopic world...

...Indeed, "no one is able to resist that delicious itch to reveal his own picture of himself through fashion...

...Their attitude transcends all fears and links them to, more than anything else, a holy brotherhood held together by an athletic regard for form and sporting combat...

...The attentive listener sees how some try to lose their accents, others correct them, and still others flaunt them...

...It is the same kind of phony beauty that Wolfe will expose more and more often in the sketches that follow, and it is opposed to the one he cherishes: the beauty of real style and elegance, the beauty that uncovers truth, defies death and cares for the immortal Now...

...So, too...

...It heaves, it moves up and down, as the ship moves up and down into the wind and, therefore, into the waves, and the wind keeps sweeping across, sixty feet up in the air out in the open sea, and there are no railings whatsoever—and no way whatsoever to cry out to another living soul for a helping hand, because on top of everything else the newcomer realizes that his sense of hearing has been amputated entirely and his voice is useless...

...Mauve Gloves, by contrast, brings to mind one of those ancient Chinese tapestries that at first seems merely a huge multicolored blotch...

...In "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to Amerioa," "The Perfect Crime," "Pornoviolence," "The Me Decade," and "Funky Chic" he lambasts the people who used to criticize LBJ for being tough on the Reds, and now love to feel persecuted and oppressed by the dire forces of fascism lurking in the country...

...Because of Freud's hangups, we are doused with prescribed therapeutic spasms, with "heaving, groaning, biting, sticking, jamming, nuzzling guzzling, skoto-philia, rut-boar grunting...

...What is more, the populace wants new pleasures, more leisure, all the kicks money can buy...

...In the '60s it was fashionable to be ostentatiously rich, but today the debutante heroine wears blue jeans, loves little black children, and even learns from them...

...Reviewed by Nereo Condini Contributor, "Village Voice," "Quartet" This new collection of essays, journalism and fictional sketches (with a title John Berryman would have loved) reveals a different Tom Wolfe...

...In place of literature and old-time values, Wolfe observes, we now have violence...

...By opening their mouths, these people lay bare their hidden aspirations, their defeats, their frustrations...

...Audience participation became so popular that soon various illuminati of the Commodus set, various boys and girls of the year, were out there, suited up, gaily cutting a sequence of dwarfs and feebles to short ribs...

...Manners reveal the man in his age, and pronunciation tells whether you come from Beacon Hill or Newark...

...Instead of his new novel, this famous man of letters is tackling the ridiculous world of necessity he has woven for himself: payments, expensive clothes, cocktail parties (Clutter & Vine is his florist, Mauve Gloves his caterer...

...This, added to Wolfe's wit and a lyrical quality that every now and then breaks through, makes Mauve Gloves an invigorating experience...

...Their false acts of bravery stand in sharp contrast to Wolfe's real heroes, the pilots immortalized in "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie...

...Soon, though, it becomes apparent that he is mocking, not praising, in this deceptive maze of social analysis, sardonic humor and poignant ironies...

...He does not content himself here, as he once did, with mad torrents of words that could be enchanting, but often were gratuitous and cavalier...

...Despite the lousy liberals, though, the pilots stand their ground...

...In "Funky Chic" and "Honks and Wonks," though, his humor turns biting, his irony savage...

...Living with the utmost intensity, Dowd and Flint return to the carrier: "This flight deck—in the movie or the training film the flight deck is a grand piece of gray geometry, perilous, to be sure, but an amazing abstract shape dominating the middle of the ocean as we look down upon it on the screen—and yet, once the newcomer's two feet are on it—geometry—my God, man, this is a . . . skillet...

...To circumvent the boredom that the soup of fists and ketchup will inevitably bring on, Wolfe puts forth a modest proposal: "In the latter days of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Commodus beoame jealous of the celebrity of the great gladiators...

...The first, in the title piece, is the semifiction-al author of Under Uncle's Thumb...

...On the carrier Coral Sea...

...Wolfe's sympathy lies with the last?Dis is da way I tawk an dis is da way I'm gonna talk, an you betta lissen...

...The Me Decade," the glorification of the self, has ignited a fiery mysticism unquenohed by the modernistic, rational efforts of the Protestant and Catholic churches...

...In Wolfe's cosmology, "honks" are the true artistocrats, the Kennedys with their nasal knighthood, the Gucci-Pucci old girls...

...His two heroes notwithstanding, Wolfe's relentless attacks on mannerism far outweigh his occasional tributes to valor...

...We watch blood, earthquakes and floods in our theaters, and read about them in the gory headlines of our newspapers...

...While Wolfe's view is a bleak one, on the whole he tries not to let the sour satirist get the better of him...

...We are victims of a nouveau vulgarity—parvenu manners and bad taste glorified...

...Why, Wolfe asks, can't we do the same...

...Voicing an indignation they do not really feel, they behave like their cronies in Europe during the '60s, who said, "It no longer is necessary to produce literature, it is only necessary to live la vie intellectuale...

...Writing with all the vitality of the old, he makes every effort to be, at the same time, cool, firm and dignified...

...But most of the time the new Tom Wolfe tries to keep his distance...

...Wolfe's writer, however, warns of repression and police brutality—just as the fake futurologists go on about the tragedy of pollution, the disaster-mongers get hysterical over rampant fascism, the New York rich try to upgrade their low-rent accents and crave anything but their real selves...

...Upon closer inspection you notice trees, animals, people, then the intricate jewelry the men are wearing, and finally the intimations of immortality in the crevices of their skin...

...He took to the arena himself, with his sword, and began dispatching suitably screened cripples and hobbled fighters...

...wonks" are the poor, the blacks, the blue collars, the chicanos, and the phonies...

...And despite his allegiance to the "honk" world of style and beauty, a pervasive nostalgia for the mud always brings him back to the other camp: "Laiiike, nyew nyeoow, man, ai mean, Fisha's island is a groove and a gas com-compaaaiiihed...

...He suggests that the mess of pornoviolence started, in part, with that crazy Doktor's legacy of libido, the sticky heirloom that sways the men and women of today and warns that if you don't have sex regularly, you contribute to the moral ruination of the country...

...But the best way to describe the mature Wolfe is to present the characters in his latest book...

...Jazzy, syncopated rhythms enlivened his dayglo syntactic bravuras, making the page shimmer and tremble...

...The hijackers in "The Perfect Crime" symbolize this warped perspective, too...