HIS DEATH DIMINISHES ME, BABY!

  In the first place, I haven’t read much Tom Wolfe. I only really read one of his books all the way through, but that’s sort of like saying you’ve only participated in one full-scale riot. 

  I have profoundly mixed feelings about his work, which is why I’ve avoided most of it, but if you care about American writing, you can’t reasonably ignore him any more than you can blow off Melville or Hawthorne.

   Wolfe is tough to explain away with brevity, unless you’re satisfied with superficial, glib putdowns. Wolfe certainly wasn’t. I’m struck by how often in his early work (I refer to the “new journalism” pieces he wrote which made him famous, collected in Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) he seems to make fun of some American’s outré behavior, only to get so caught up in the subject’s language, clothes, hair, pace, and obsessions that it doesn’t seem to matter anymore what his “take” on it may be. The one thing that’s always clear is that he’s EXCITED about it. He’s excited by what he’s seeing and hearing, excited by what it represents in our culture, and excited to bring you into it. He’s like a host who can’t wait for you to sit down with your drink so he can tell you what he saw on his vacation. 

  The question of whether Wolfe was conservative or liberal (and I don’t mean in the political sense) is moot, I think. Where Jack Kerouac used a new kind of writing to capture something he felt was coming to life in our country, but for all his official status as a bohemian outsider, was shot through with a kind of midwestern naive reverence about the new America he chronicled, Wolfe “goes native” without ever completely losing himself in the oddball world he’s writing about. He never stops reminding you that he has a Ph.D from Yale, in SOMETHING, but he also never stops paying attention to all the craziness around him, generally perpetrated by eccentrics who care more about their custom cars, or drugs, than any book learning.

  And while I suppose it is true, as the Post drily noted this morning, that Wolfe skewered the buffoonery of the left while generally letting the right off the hook, it’s dangerous to read into this. I think Wolfe loved the fun ride that ridiculous public nonsense and self-indulgence offered, and I suspect he found the idiocies and well-protected fantasies of the right to be dull. He seems to have romanticized the “heroism” of jet pilots and astronauts in the book most agree is his finest, but I prefer the Wolfe who wrote about a different kind of American pioneer spirit, the giddy sort with cotton candy colors and Hal Blaine backbeat that you find in the life and work of someone like Phil Spector, a lousy ratlike human being who managed to make the three minute single into a monument to Art as beautiful and lasting as any gothic cathedral. 

  Just as I’ve grown weary of roller coasters in my dotage, the adrenaline Batman kapow of Wolfe’s empty calorie irony doesn’t grab me the way it used to, but there should always be a place in American letters for his sugar rush and sugar cube refractions, recollected all night long to the sound of the old-fashioned Clackety-Clackety-Ding! of a typewriter, and the coffee cup rings forming inscrutable ancient hieroglyphics on a motel desk.