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November 16, 2004

Tom Wolfe Finds His Champions

by Ron Hogan

"It's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel," says David Brooks in an op-ed page defense of I Am Charlotte Simmons, "hundreds of people do it every few years." Unfortunately, the gist of Brooks' argument seems to be an "I'm OK, You're OK" chestnut: it's okay to be a crap stylist as a novelist if you have "moral intent" in what you write. He's convinced "Wolfe takes risks in his novels to describe the moral climate of the age," which is just plain silly--every fiction writer, consciously or unconsciously, describes the moral climate of the age, and frankly mystery writers do a better job of it than Wolfe. But the editorial suggestion that "it seems only fair that we at least take the chance his books offer to debate the more serious things he's trying to get at" does seem quite in line with the Times' apparent philosophy of the function of literature in a news-driven society...

Philadelphia Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano isn't having any of this anti-Wolfe malarkey either: he's all for IACS, and to hell with anybody who doesn't agree with him that the novel "bristles with authenticity." Especially Michiko Kakutani:

[She] jumped the Nov. 9 publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons to savage it as a disappointing amalgam of college-life cliches. Although her preemptive missile strikes on big-name authors now rank as a pathological cliche of their own, one can look at [it] that way...But to do so requires ignoring Wolfe's project from the beginning of his career. He passionately wants to construct definitive, lasting portraits of parts of our lives, using nothing more than words (OK, and lots lots lots of punctuation tricks). Any definitive seizure in art of a man, institution, or slice of life must deliver cliches, or realism goes out the window.

Color me skeptical--and color me even more skeptical that "just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms about war, or The Great Gatsby about evanescent success, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years as a bracing document of those four years in which, more than at any other time in our lives, before becomes after." I don't believe that at all for two crucial reasons: (1) we read those books about war and evanescent success because for many of us they remain vicarious experiences at a level of extremity that a four-year college education doesn't reach, and (2) we read those books because our junior high English teachers assign them just before Catcher in the Rye, and I'm willing to bet no junior high in the country is going to assign any Tom Wolfe novel any time soon. Or any high school, for that matter. Because the school year's too short.

Meanwhile, Tim Adams of the Observer takes what's rapidly becoming the more traditional approach to Wolfe's third novel, judging it "a virtual certainty for the shortlist of another of the year's distinguished prizes: The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award."

Comments

Yo, Ron - great minds think alike:

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2004/11/romano_stands_a.html

Posted by: TEV at November 16, 2004 11:19 AM

Oh man. This is hilarious. I cannot wait to weigh in completely once I'm done with this thing.

Posted by: Ed at November 16, 2004 02:30 PM

This is called "projection." Brooks says "Wolfe" but he's really talking about himself. "Just because I'm a self-hating, sloppy hack who's past my prime and prone to getting things wrong or else flagrantly twisting the data, I do so in the name of showing you how smart I am and demonstrating that I, David Brooks, have captured the American Zeitgeist."

Posted by: Jimmy Beck at November 16, 2004 05:09 PM

Yep.

Can I just say Brooks officially fell off the radar about six months ago. Jeez, I used to really like that guy, you know? Sure, he wasn't a liberal like the rest of us, but at least he made sense and had some bright things to say.

No more. And, no, I don't know what the hell he was doing reviewing Tom Wolfe. As far as I'm concerned, there's Falluja, the deficit, the "mandate," Powell's resignation, and, Brooks, listen to me now, they aren't going to spin themselves.

Posted by: Scott at November 17, 2004 11:46 AM
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