What’s the Big Deal About Tom Wolfe?

A good story will always be more relevant than pretty prose about nothing.

From the 1968 first edition cover of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”.

Tom Wolfe, the iconic American author in the white suit whose passing was announced today, started out by innovating news. He wrote news as stories.

Wolfe pioneered using a narrative, historical fiction style for current events. His first books were in depth looks at news stories about cultural phenomena. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a contemporary written documentary about the hippie culture. The Right Stuff did the same thing for NASA culture.

He expected that those true stories would inspire related fiction. They didn’t, or they didn’t quickly enough for Wolfe. A few of his books would later become movies, however. The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Almost Heroes were all from Wolfe, and I recall, though I cannot find the mention at the moment, that Wolfe’s Bonfire partly inspired The Devil’s Advocate. But that all came later. Wolfe did not wish to wait.

So in 1987 he penned an essay for Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion Footed Beast,” in which he argued that if modern American authors insisted on writing novels about nothing, then they would cede American literature to realist authors like himself. Which is pretty much what happened over the next decades.

His first fiction novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, became his proof. A story about wild New York City financial life in the ’80s, Bonfire was a fabulous success. By the time he published his next novel, A Man in Full, the old guard authors were annoyed — and ready to strike back.

In a series of reviews John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer dished out scorn. Irving wrote that on each page he found something that “made him gag.” Norman Mailer compared reading Wolfe to making love to a 300 pound woman, “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” Updike took the elite route: damning with success — if lots of people like it, then it obviously isn’t any good:

“A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.”

Wolfe answered in an essay found in his 2000 collection of essays Hooking Up. (There are some excerpts online, but none do the essay justice, I recommend Hooking Up, but this essay is one of the best in the collection.)

Wolfe dubbed Irving, Mailer, and Updike his “three stooges;” men who write beautiful prose about nothing. Not that Wolfe disrespected pretty prose. He commented that pretty prose was fine but did not think it a compliment that only earnest readers of the New Yorker want to read their books. He called them foolish to look down on a culture that does not care for masterful navel gazing.

Wolfe had the better of the argument. Today, readers of fiction or watchers of movies have seen many times over that competent prose will sustain a great story — which explains the success of the likes of Harry Potter or Twilight — but that perfect prose won’t save a dull story. See, for example Rabbit, Run by Updike.

Wolfe’s realist novels give us interesting stories with more than competent prose. Wolfe is a joy to read — but for the subject matter, which generally is human nature presented with all of its brokenness.

Bonfire, set in 80’s Wall Street, has stood the test of time, even coming around again after the banker excesses of the 2000’s led to the 2008 crash. In 2004 I Am Charlotte Simmons told of a small town girl navigating the hook up culture. His last novel, Back to Blood covered the turmoil on our southern borders. It wasn’t a hit when first published, but time may see a different result.

Wolfe is relevant, while the stooges — and so many other storytellers — are not.