No other writer was so good at distilling the political from the cultural as Tom Wolfe, who died in May at the age of 88. Whether dispatching the pretensions of modern painting (The Painted Word), architecture (From the Bauhaus to Our House), or radical grifters and their marks (Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers), Wolfe was adept at extracting how power worked to shape our physical and intellectual environments.
Yet, as is so often the case with critics, his incisiveness and wit hardened into contempt—contempt for so many in the varied, many-splendored America he claimed to adore. In trying to depict the nation as a whole—a laudable ambition—as opposed to one obtrusion or another of elite culture, he showed again and again how little he cared to understand or even notice most of us, preferring always to tell us he was shocking an entrenched liberal Sanhedrin even after it had long faded away. For such a provocateur, Wolfe ended up awfully far behind the times.
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It began, ironically, with his greatest success, The Bonfire of the Vanities. I well remember how thrilled I was by its accompanying manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe’s call in the November 1989 Harper’s to revive the “big novel,” the “novel of the city,” realist and reported, ranging freely across class and race.
But in the book itself, I didn’t recognize the city I was living in. Oh, I suspect that Wolfe got the wealthier upper precincts that he inhabited right, and his depiction of Ed Koch was spot on. (One of the jobs I had around then was answering letters for the mayor, and on the sole occasion I was summoned from the warrens of the Tweed Courthouse to meet the great man, Koch told me freely, in the most avuncular manner possible, about everyone he was going to “get,” beginning with the Episcopal bishop of New York and the Daily News.)
Yet nowhere else in Bonfire did I see the exuberant, striving city I knew. The problems of New York in the late 1980s were manifest, and we groaned and groused about them all, and lived with one eye over our shoulder. But Bonfire was a cold novel, I thought, for all its skill—one written from a lofty height, and curiously given to hoary clichés. All cops were working-class heroes, all people of color cracker-thin stereotypes. Most of us were living lives somewhere in the middle, and it felt as though he missed us, and all the roiling undercurrents that had already begun to change the city over again.
Reading Bonfire on its publication in 1987, one encountered a New York on the eve of destruction, a near-bedlam about to be overrun by crime and racial demagogues. But less than five years later, the city’s crime rate began its dramatic, generation-long plunge, and New York, for better and for worse, grew rich and splendid and Disneyfied, almost overnight.
Wolfe, nonetheless, in his novels and particularly his assessments of what used to be called “practical politics,” went on reducing American politics—and much of American history—to the story of “real people,” out in the red states, valiantly holding back an oversexed, amoral, multicultural tide of barbarity. Their every choice of policy, prejudice or president was exalted, even to the point of absurdity, because, well, they were the real people.
Hence, Ronald Reagan “was a huge success,” precisely because “the strictly intellectual component of the presidency is not all that important.” During George W. Bush’s presidency, Wolfe expressed mild alarm that the occupation of Iraq was not going well, yet added, “But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire building—acquiring territory and slaves. I’ve never met an American who wanted to build an empire.” (As for W.’s 2004 opponent, John Kerry, Wolfe said, “He is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all.”)
By the time Trump rolled around, Wolfe was reveling in the fact that he suffered no political consequences despite the fact that Trump “doesn’t present policy programs” and was saying “a lot of things that are politically incorrect,” such as “no more illegal immigrants from Mexico, no more immigrants from Islamic countries.” “I love the fact that he has a real childish side to him, saying things like I am too worth 10 billion!” Wolfe kvelled to the American Spectator, adding, “He is a lovable megalomaniac. … The childishness makes him seem honest.”
It’s difficult to know what to make of all this. The presidency isn’t about intelligence, or policy, or sanity, or even adulthood. The principled man sends others to die in the next senseless conflict, while it’s the decorated Vietnam vet who believes in nothing. And America never had much to do with empire-building or slavery, don’tcha know. It was almost as if Wolfe had become one of his own fictional characters—the once incorruptible social critic, now so desperate to stay relevant that he has turned into self-caricature. Was it just another aging writer’s slide into performance art? Critics respectfully put this sort of bear-baiting down to Wolfe’s “conservatism”—a word that has now lost all meaning in American life—or his desire to shake up dinner-party orthodoxy. But how did someone so adroit at skewering illogic and artifice come to decide that a president need not have any ability, or even sense?
“I’m not surprised that this great moment of fake news has arrived, which I think is a laugh and a half,” Wolfe told a bookstore audience a month after Trump had won the 2016 election, revealing more openly than ever before the bared teeth, the vicarious pleasure long enjoyed in other people’s chaos and distress.
The dimming of objective reality is a laugh-and-a-half, I suppose, from a certain, Olympian perspective. Not so much, perhaps, if you have to live with it.
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