Two Cheers For Tom Wolfe
Alter, Jonathan
Two Cheers For Tom Wolfe by Jonathan Alter In his memorable introduction to The New Journalism, a 1973 collection of classic magazine pieces, Tom Wolfe declared that modern American fiction was...
...they're too broad and cartoonish, too full of curlicues that signify nothing...
...Wolfe has no one...
...Beaux arts is beautiful...
...The idea of applying the techniques of fiction to journalism, if not original to Wolfe, nonetheless kicked off a golden age in American journalism...
...Why feel guilty about that abandoned novel in the desk drawer...
...The speakerphone conference call with Gene Lopwitz (supposedly based on Gutfreund) should shame that instrument of communication out of existence...
...With similar empathy, Wolfe's powers of observation could have been harnessed to something more noble than tweaking New York...
...More important, as many critics have pointed out, Wolfe suggests a hopelessness about New York's problems of race and class, as if those chasms really are unbridgeable—not even worth trying to bridge...
...It's easier now, when they're down...
...Including Sherman, Wolfe goes inside the heads of about half a dozen characters...
...That's the unresolved issue in The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...He vanquishes the vanities of the rich, but lacks the courage to say what he admires...
...Satirized...
...For Wolfe, making that point—twisting the knife with relish—was worthwhile...
...Wolfe's original protagonist was a famous Upper East Side novelist...
...Dickens always had at least one redeeming character—say, Pip in Great Expectations—who carried within him the seeds of hope...
...Doing so might put him at risk of looking foolish...
...There's little need to reprise the uproarious and exhaustively reviewed highlights of this book* "Lemon Tarts" (the gorgeous young blonds on the arms of septuagenarian billionaires) and "social X rays" (Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner types...
...And it wasn't just that a few corporate raiders found their names in the papers all the time...
...The point of From Bauhaus to Our House was that minimalism offended Wolfe in any form...
...Whatever the explanation, The Bonfire of the Vanities is clearly missing some critical sense of commitment...
...They are never seen as individuals...
...Besides, there's an original and bracing quality to Wolfe's nihilism...
...If that has a familiar ring, it's because it resonates of Wolfe's old quarrel with The New Yorker, home of the Nothing Happens school of short story writing, which extends back to his famous early-1960s attack on William Shawn in the old New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine...
...Wolfe is correct that this is a reflection of how white Manhattan views Harlem and the Bronx...
...It's not enough, in literature, simply to stand up for bravery...
...I think of that type of figure, of what it means to physically confront something very bad in the name of something worthwhile...
...The characters aren't deep enough, they say...
...It is the richness of detail that moves Wolfe's characters beyond stereotypes and makes them into people that we can all recognize...
...Two Cheers For Tom Wolfe by Jonathan Alter arts...
...Bacon's approach—the black view gets lost...
...For young journalists, this was intoxicating stuff...
...Sherburn, not Sherwood, was saving not some poor innocent, but himself, a coldblooded murderer...
...And Sherman, who coins the phrase, is a sympathetic character because he removes that little gnawing idea that some readers have about these young millionaire investment bankers and traders—the idea, buried inside too many of us, that their fabulous success actually proves that they are smarter than everyone else...
...Radical Chic" (where he made fun of Leonard Bernstein's 1969 party for the Black Panthers) and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" (a description of the way black poverty activists intimidated white bureaucrats) seemed to white liberals to confirm that the Virginia-born author was a racist...
...But at least the rest of the world is seen through their eyes for a few pages...
...It has almost gotten to the point where if something actually happened in a novel, beyond a walk on the beach or a meaningful sigh, then by definition it had to be second-rate "genre" fiction—a thriller, mystery, or spoof...
...This is satire, and satire is often set in a world without heroes...
...The original installments, often written under extreme deadline pressure, were engaging but unsatisfying...
...Blacks are either a mob or exotic urban fauna...
...Masters of the Universe" is a wonderful way of summarizing how terrific these guys thought they were...
...The difference shows here, in the legwork...
...Novels are in large part about observation, and this is the most fully reported work of fiction in years...
...For Wolfe and for Spy, the stock market crash came not as a shock but as a validation...
...Glass boxes stink...
...Just one step ahead of the conventional wisdom, he made Wall Street the villain...
...First, there's the matter of literary device...
...The substitution was essential to the book's success...
...That is the more cynical explanation of Wolfe's prescience in writing this book...
...It sometimes seems that Wolfe believes the notion of physical courage is itself worthwhile...
...This was the subtext...
...Then again, cynicism is now In, as Spy's success tells us...
...Race and class are frequently avoided by modern minimalist novelists, who cannot imagine that such concerns might be relevant to the identity crises of their characters...
...Sherwood, who has saved somebody from lynching...
...In attacking the liberal dogma of the 1960s, Wolfe showed the social and journalistic equivalent of physical bravery...
...Of course, besides being a novel of manners, Bonfire is a novel of race and class...
...That meant that satirizing bloated literary or artistic figures was suddenly not much of a public service...
...Bacon (the media-manipulating, rabble-rousing Harlem minister) or Henry Lamb (the teenager Sherman and his mistress run over in their car...
...Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $19.95...
...He shares the unspoken assumption of his fellow New Yorkers but assumes the essential critique of non-New Yorkers...
...It used to be that much great American literature was written by former reporters like Stephen Crane or Ernest Hemingway...
...Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" were not just charges of paternal racism, not just gibes at naive liberalism—they were essays that said to whites: you are appeasers...
...That's what makes it a political book...
...The explanation of why people want to live there may be obvious to New Yorkers—so obvious, apparently, that it never needs to be said...
...This is one of those rare trendy books that people do not just pretend to read...
...Real courage But the rough equality achieved by trashing everyone and everything carries a steep price...
...When the novel appeared, it was clear why...
...But suggesting that Wolfe (not to mention Spy) need some "commitment" is not an argument for ruining them...
...And why were they appeasing blacks...
...Moral courage...
...In fact, besides Lamb and his mother, blacks in the novel are either corrupt or simply barbarians ready to storm the gates of civilization...
...Obviously there are limits to the importance of external design...
...Sherwood" reference...
...The courage required for love...
...That is Spy's secret, too...
...The fact that the crash made it obvious—and thus created an instantly receptive audience for Wolfe's book—is what one might call earned good fortune...
...Wolfe knew that what he called "plutography"—graphic depiction of the glorious lives of the rich and famous—couldn't last, and he devoted himself to hastening its demise...
...Wolfe puts these issues at the center of the novel...
...The value that Wolfe admires above all others is physical courage, as he readily admits...
...Other than targeting rich whites for money and manipulation— Rev...
...Or maybe the "worthwhile" thing to do is simply play the old New York game, which Spy is now playing so well: figure out who's Out a step ahead of everyone else—for instance, anticipating that Gutfreund would be Out—then reap the praise...
...None of these people are portrayed in an especially flattering light and most look like fools...
...Even his worst imitators could not dim the importance of what he had done...
...And the subtleties are right...
...If he had mustered the courage to stand up for something he believed in, the novel would have been richer—infinitely richer than Lopwitz—and the world in which it is set a less forsaken place...
...But committing capital—or New York social suicide— is not the same as committing yourself...
...Sherman himself is even redeemed a bit at the end of the novel when, stripped of his phony dignity, he goes to court without fear...
...In that sense, it is not the complete book on the culture of the city...
...In the classic "W" formulation, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein were Out...
...This, at bottom, is what has always so infuriated liberals about him...
...The struggle later surfaced over another medium: architecture...
...But real...
...The future was in reporting...
...For the same reason he admired Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff...
...Since the 1920s, the reigning cultural con men—the ones who cut the widest swath in the life of the city, whatever their real talent—had been in the Jonathan Alter is a senior writer at Newsweek and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He sees spare, fine lines as signs of boredom more often than beauty...
...In a recent interview with Insight, the newsmagazine of The Washington Times, Wolfe said: "I think of Huckleberry Finn...
...he realized that this worshipping of rich shit-heads had gone too far...
...too rich and too thin) may soon enter the language along with "radical chic," "The Me Decade" and Wolfe's other nonfiction contributions...
...It might open him up to the ridicule of some new Tom Wolfe...
...That's because spoken racism is gauche in liberal, professional Manhattan...
...That would explain the Col...
...Or it could be that the positive value he has been upholding all these years is simply order...
...But by the mid-1980s, this was no longer true...
...Suddenly New York magazine has stopped puffing the John Gutfreunds of the world and started trashing them, which is the way it should have been in the first place...
...But Wolfe has the advantage of something else— timing...
...This is a novel about New York that doesn't capture the joy that the city brings to so many people— it doesn't explain why New Yorkers (including Wolfe himself) put up with all the lunacy instead of moving away...
...Before long, bond traders were not only making a fortune, they were actually getting laid more than sculptors from the Village, a remarkable social transformation...
...But what...
...were In...
...Racists must observe the proper etiquette, which is to pretend that they are not...
...There is Martin, the detective who, to Kramer's horror, tells the tough black guy to move his car...
...Sherman is such a pathetic guy that we know, just know, that the men he symbolizes are nothing much either...
...Why does Wolfe like these men...
...That is always admired ." In the name of something worthwhile...
...And reporting was suddenly more than just relevant or fun...
...Still, there is much that is right about his emphasis on details...
...The biggest con artists were no longer artists...
...There's a terrific scene, for instance, where Lawrence Kramer, the young lawyer, feels inferior to a haughty British nanny he's hired until she makes a racist comment, which immediately allows him to feel superior again...
...Or practically no one...
...Those eyes are never black...
...The courage of convictions...
...And Kovitsky, the Bronx judge assigned to Sherman's case who stands up to the thugs populating the courtroom...
...Then, after the enormous success of The Right Stuff, Wolfe changed his mind...
...Wolfe never reconciles the two...
...For something had changed in New York...
...Peter Fallow, Wolfe's freeloading British tabloid journalist, has a friend who writes Marxist diatribes while supporting himself with fluffery in House and Garden (Alexander Cockburn call home...
...Bonfire fuels the flames of that old fight, and for reasons that may not be immediately apparent...
...While Woodward and Bernstein were busy proving that journalism could bring down the government, Wolfe showed how it could change writing and enrich the culture...
...If you're a bleeding heart, you may end up hurt, bleeding real blood...
...Another variation would be the Wall Street courage to bet the house on a hunch, as Sherman might do...
...Wolfe overdoes descriptions of clothes and furniture: just because he dresses to make a statement doesn't mean that everybody does...
...they loved the men they made fun of...
...At the same time, the rest of the country thinks it's just as obvious that anyone who actually lives there is crazy...
...The wonderful thing is that by succeeding, Wolfe may help American fiction in much the same way he helped American nonfiction...
...Because they were scared of them...
...He embarked on a novel, which first was serialized in Rolling Stone...
...Through the fools' eyes This alone would make Bonfire significant...
...Wolfe was affronting the manhood of these white liberals, many of whom wouldn't go to Vietnam, and that hurt...
...Many of Wolfe's critics wrongly assail it along these lines: funny and smart but not "real" literature, whatever that means...
...He has mustered one of the first expeditionary forces aimed at liberating the novel from its postmodern oppressor, which sometimes goes by the name of minimalism...
...The list of great moments could go on for as long as a New York party, and often has...
...And that's healthy...
...A mob approaches his house, but he comes out to the front, and it's not a mob anymore...
...Wolfe has long made a subspeciality of pushing these buttons on race and class...
...But how about the way Harlem and the Bronx view white Manhattan...
...The question should always be: Courage for what...
...The novel had lost touch with its roots, he wrote, with the "joys of detailed realism and its strange powers...
...Wolfe did it when they were up...
...Wolfe thought the new king of letters was journalism, which could provide the texture and insight of Dickens or Dostoevsky with the added benefit of being true...
...It's just plain funnier to dump on everyone—with an extra kick in the teeth to the people who are rich and powerful enough to take it...
...Two Cheers For Tom Wolfe by Jonathan Alter In his memorable introduction to The New Journalism, a 1973 collection of classic magazine pieces, Tom Wolfe declared that modern American fiction was dead...
...A closer reading of Huckleberry Finn suggests that Col...
...The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...Larger than life...
...now he was a bond trader on Wall Street...
...Cervantes and Shakespeare proved that humor and commitment can coexist...
...Wolfe will walk in Sherman's shoes or Fallow's, but not in those of Rev...
...now it's written by graduates of creative writing workshops...
...Shelly the juror, for instance, never has to say why she wants Kramer's help in getting an apartment in Manhattan...
...There's a chapter on Col...
...Wall Street was just a place where you made a living...
...The Bavardage dinner party is as revealing as any cooked up by Proust...
...Saul Steinberg (the financier, not The New Yorker cartoonist) and John Gutfreund (the chief of Salomon Bros...
...For years, Wolfe has had the courage to say what he is against, while avoiding the responsibility to say what he is for...
...From now on, any husband planning to phone his mistress will make sure not to leave the house and absent-mindedly call his own number, as Sherman McCoy did...
...Of course, it could be argued that the pointofview question is irrelevant because no one in the book comes out looking good...
...The white lynch mobs of the 19th century have become the black lynch mobs of the 20th, a peculiar and disturbing implication on Wolfe's part...
...Whatever its slender attributes, the minimalist fashion has clearly grown out of hand in recent years...
...Along with Spy magazine, founded in 1986, he rode the wave perfectly...
...The status was trickling down...
...Everyone else in New York is now scrambling to catch up...
Vol. 20 • March 1988 • No. 2
