Why Wolfe Is Too Popular For Their Vanities

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 2, 1999

PAUL SHEEHAN

Tom Wolfe is growing old gloriously - so just ignore those other oldies, Updike and Mailer.

IF YOU are reading this story there is a good chance you are in possession of the literary blockbuster of the year - Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full. The book's first printing was 1.2 million, hardcover. It has become an immediate bestseller around the world.

For some people, this is a problem.

Tom Wolfe is enormously popular and in the literary world, popular can be a dirty word. Take, for example, the recent attack launched by the celebrated author Norman Mailer. Writing in The New York Review of Books, he frothed:

"It is Tom Wolfe's best book by far, it begins to promise that he is ready to become a great American novelist, and then it loses its air and settles . . . for being a mega-bestseller . . ."

Tut-tut. Wolfe has descended to the level of mega-bestseller. And Mailer explains just how bad the writers and readers of mega-bestsellers can be:

"Mega-bestseller readers want to be able to read and read and read - they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading."

So there. Success equals failure. And Mailer is just warming up. In a 6,000-word review, he makes many valid criticisms and astute observations, but his main intent is to trivialise Wolfe's career, especially when compared with his own:

"Be it said. The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is 1,500 pages long . . . At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it's over . . .

"After a time, I simply began to groan within each time there was a new description . . . Wolfe's novel is injured by the sheer quantity of his descriptions . . .

"How then does one pass clear judgment on a novel that is as rich and as poor, as genuinely exciting and as seriously disappointing, as observant and blind, as brilliantly written and as slovenly in its final execution as A Man in Full ?

". . . Can we offer a final verdict? Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned . . . He lives in the King Kong kingdom of the mega-bestsellers - he is already a media immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that . . ."

This is the same Norman Mailer who, at age 75, is a potent but faded literary force, whose most recent books have met with critical and commercial failure, whose writing has never created the bridge of affection with a large-scale audience that Wolfe has managed.

Mailer is not the only distinguished lion of letters to raise the spectre of scorn about Wolfe's latest success. In a review for The New Yorker, the author and critic John Updike wrote:

"He concocts a good, if sometimes laborious, read, which becomes perfunctory and implausible only toward the end. The laboriousness derives, in part, from the worked-up quality of many scenes, masterpieces of creative journalism but a little thick for floating suspense and characters with free will . . .

"Wolfe has perhaps too many opinions for a novelist: his characters have a hard time breaking out of the illustrative mould in which they are cast."

Both Mailer and Updike have spotted the obvious weaknesses in Wolfe's work: that he continues to depend on his magnificent descriptive journalism to camouflage shortfalls in his characterisation. But both men go further; they seek to use this weakness to patronise Wolfe.

Mistake. Wolfe has not turned the other cheek. He did not go through 10 years' hard labour on this book, bypass surgery and a trough of depression to put up with being patronised. He told reporters: "You have to take Mailer and Updike as a matched set and ask why are those old bones rising up to try and shoot down this book. It's because their own works of the past few years have been sinking without trace."

This is true. Mailer's most recent novels have made a mockery of the portentous standards to which he holds Wolfe. They have failed to find either critical acclaim or commercial impact. Updike, who remains a prolific, superb and highly respected staff writer for The New Yorker, has never developed a mass following, and his novels have grown less important with the years, not more.

Perhaps the root of the resentment that Wolfe attracts (apart from his sales and his face on the cover of Time ) is the rod he made for his own back when he wrote an essay for Harper's magazine 10 years ago challenging American fiction writers to rise above their collective self-absorption:

"At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim its literary property . . . Of one thing I am sure. If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the 20th century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain, but also seized the high ground of literature itself."

There is nothing weak, pale or tabescent (it means wasting) about Wolfe, which is why he has built a large and devoted following over 30 years, has sold millions of novels and millions of non-fiction books, has created his own singular literary style, has written defining books about the '60s (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ), the '70s (The Right Stuff ), the '80s (Bonfire Of The Vanities ), and now created one of the big publishing events of the '90s. Not bad for a mere journalist.

At 68, Wolfe grows old gloriously, with a reporter's notepad still in his hand and a gambler's risk in his heart. He is burying his curmudgeonly critics under a pile of bestselling books. Hardcover.