Tom Wolfe

[Chixulub]

Comparisons of Tom Wolfe and Dickens are invidious; I didn't draw the original comparison, merely followed through with my thoughts on it. Thomas Wolfe stands up much better to Dickens. At least his books have substantial social commentary and real moral dilemma.

I probably didn't make my case very clearly. What I'm saying is that Dickens (or Hardy or Thackeray) are best appreciated in the context of authors like Bessant, who was fabulously popular with novels like 'Beyond the Dreams of Avarice.' This was, in the late 19th Century, the equivalent of a NYT Bestseller, yet it hasn't been reprinted since 1895. I only know about it because of a curious coincidence and a friend who studied Bessant and other forgotten Victorians for his doctoral dissertation.

I disagree about Thomas Hardy. His books, IMO, are not like soap operas at all. His characters are very modern, almost contemporary, which may account for his belated popularity.

The only Hardy I haven't read yet is 'Jude the Obscure,' but when I was hitting him heavily, it struck me that his characters were exactly as you say, modern and contemporary. The plotting, characterization, social dilemnas, etc., not to mention the chains of coincidence that tie things together are very much like daytime television. I'm not saying the prose is as badly written as a soap script, just that the storytelling has a lot of common ground. And in a world without TV or radio dramas, the serialized segments of Victorian novels were probably read and enjoyed by roughly the same segment of the British Middle Class.

The point being, most daytime TV is trash, but if you had one that was written very well and cast with excellent actors, then there's a good chance that it would survive the test of time. Just as Shakespeare survived so many of his contemporaries, by writing plays that pleased the public of the time but also had timeless themes and amazing poetry.

Just the fact that he admits to researching (and being surprised at!) such a thing as normal colloquial speech among college kids belies a complete isolation from the society he's writing about, which is why it seems forced and superficial.

It depends on how you take Wolfe's attitudes. Your evaluation is valid, but it can also be legitimately claimed that to write the sort of social criticism he does, he absolutely has to remain aloof and 'superior' to his subject, at least in his mind.

The spawn of New Journalism is the Nobody Memoir. The formula (locate your personal 'subject' and insert yourself into its history) is running rampant through nonfiction publishing. In fact, "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood" is probably the book Charlotte Simmons would have been if Tom Wolfe was still the Tom Wolfe he was in 1970.

I haven't read 'Smashed,' so I can't comment on it, but 'New Journalism' or 'Gonzo Journalism' or for that matter the fictionalized memoir isn't really all that new. George Orwell did it in 'Homage to Catalonia,' 'Down and Out in Paris and London' and 'Road to Wigan Pier.' He wrote in first person, about events and places he had inserted himself into, but even by his own account dissembled in the interest of truth at times. It's a tradition that goes back to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, etc.

I think what Tom Wolfe is trying to do is expand his letters beyond the 'nonfiction' of 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' and include a body of fiction that is, in his view, what a novel ought to be. Obviously, it's a matter of taste, and he may very well be the Walter Bessant of the late 20th/early 21st Century.

I find his novels entertaining if long and overwritten. He certainly doesn't irritate me the way Pat Conroy does, especially the later you get in Conroy's career. The comparison to Norman Mailer is apt, 'The Executioner's Song' comes to mind. An important book in many ways, but a hard one to stick with at times.

Your questions about Wolfe making the bestseller lists are also ones I share. Given that the short story struggles in a nation of incredibly short attention spans, who buys these books?

And if an aspiring novelist, unpublished and unproven, comes to an agent with a 220,000 word epic, what are their chances?

I love Don DeLillo's 'Underworld,' but if he didn't have a body of shorter novels and an established audience, I'd aver that DeLillo would have to try POD or some other self-publishing method. Ditto for 'Middlesex,' which is easily 3x the scale and scope of 'Virgin Suicides.' Notice too, Lethem never wrote anything nearly as long and involved as 'Fortress of Solitude' prior to winning the NBCC for 'Motherless Brooklyn?' It seems that the modern literary market (with some genre exceptions) basically dictates that you have to prove yourself with a short novel to get a larger work published. In such a market, would Pynchon get 'V.' published, much less win major literary awards with it as a debut?

Or picture an unknown author shopping a 773 page epic covering two surveyors who's life work was essentially a waste. It's a revisionist historical novel written in period language so thick you need an OED to get many of the jokes. It features, among other things, a pot smoking session with then-Colonel George Washington; also a coffee house where Ben Franklin is playing the glass harmonica in his tinted spectacles; also a clay duck modeled off the Golem of Prague. Of course I'm writing of Pynchon's masterpiece (in my view) 'Mason & Dixon.' Fortunately for him, he had the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest people backing him and a track record of literary awards. He didn't have to take that manuscript into the MFA workshops at Columbia or cart it around the Bread Loaf conference as an unknown author.

Sorry to digress from your topic of Tom Wolfe's decline. I don't see it as such, but since I DO feel that way about Pat Conroy, I can relate. And I've never been able to make it through a Michener book. Maybe I'm missing out big time, but from the beginnings I've tried he seems to be the Crown Prince of the Slow Start, which makes it hard to keep me going into a 1000+ page book.

 

[novella]

I've read Orwell's Down and Out and Wigan Pier. Down and Out is particularly sharp and entertaining, but just because it is a good and earlier example of nonfiction, nonprivileged anthropological observation doesn't make it New Journalism, which, to my mind, refers specifically to the Mailer-Didion-Wolfe-Thompson school of American experiential writing as a psychological trip. Different thing.

All novels to some extent are serialized narratives with plot-convenient coincidences, Hardy no more than any modern writer. Jude the Obscure is my favorite Hardy, in part because of its fine portrayal of melancholy and because of Jude's quest. Hardy certainly had more of the 'naturalistic' approach to plot than most Victorian novelists. For one thing, the worlds of Hardy are 'open' in the sense that he does not write about closed societies in which all ends eventually meet and all characters drive some part of the plot. People leave their homes and don't necessarily return. They meet characters once and perhaps never again. These are very modern fictional elements.

My sense of Lethem is that he's just growing up, and grew into writing Fortress of Solitude. His theme has been consistent, but his work has matured. I doubt he was waiting for the market to be ready for a bigger book.

I haven't read Pat Conroy or Michener. Not my kind of thing at all.

 

[Chixulub]

I've read Orwell's Down and Out and Wigan Pier. Down and Out is particularly sharp and entertaining, but just because it is a good and earlier example of nonfiction, nonprivileged anthropological observation doesn't make it New Journalism, which, to my mind, refers specifically to the Mailer-Didion-Wolfe-Thompson school of American experiential writing as a psychological trip. Different thing.

Orwell was entering self-imposed poverty when he wrote those 'nonfiction' books, and he admits he took considerable liberties with condensing facts and events, and if memory serves even building composite characters.

But that's just what makes it exactly the thing that Wolfe and Thompson and the rest of the 'New Journalists' did. Orwell had as much choice about going down the mine shaft or sleeping in the casual wards as Thompson and Wolfe had about hanging with the Hell's Angels or the Merry Pranksters. Thompson did it much more the way Orwell did, by riding with the Angels and hanging out in their dives. He put himself in the story, which is a no-no in traditional journalism.

Maybe that's the biggest difference with Wolfe's fiction, he takes himself OUT of the story, totally and completely. No one is going to mistake him for a college frat boy the way someone might take Thompson with the Angels as an 'outlaw biker' or Orwell for a tramp.