Wolfe Starts a Book Bonfire

American novelists, get real! You’re wasting your time, gang.

While you’ve been noodling around with avant-garde, self-reflective, nouveau roman clones in hopes of impressing Susan Sontag, the Great American Novel has been smack in front of your face, wiggling its fingers in its ears, jumping up and down and shouting: Write me!

At least that’s what Tom Wolfe says in the November Harper’s Magazine, and you can bet that penthouse intellectuals soon will be lining up at news racks as if Moses had just chiseled out an 11th Commandment. With good reason.

America’s most renowned popular culture critic’s latest pronouncement is simply this: the Great American Novel of the 20th Century will be a work of social realism. And it will probably be about New York City.

Wolfe should know. He attempted that selfsame big book in his fiction best-seller, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” And came pretty darn close to hitting his mark, he implies.

It seems that even 20 years ago, as Wolfe was starting to pound out such journalistic benchmarks as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” he was worried that someone would, at any moment, beat him to the punch. Someone must be out there writing a realistic novel that finally grasps the city and the era in its glorious, chaotic entirety.

Yet, “To my relief, and then my bafflement, those novels never appeared,” Wolfe writes. “And to this day they remain unwritten.”

For reasons Wolfe finds “bizarre and hilarious,” serious American authors, sometime after World War II, accepted the academic truism that the realist novel was dead and struck off to pursue all sorts of effete and self-indulgent alternative forms of fiction.

Meanwhile, Wolfe himself was wrestling with the giants that fictioneers shied away from: “the racial clashes, the hippie movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam.”

But eventually he realized that his only hope for getting the “big picture” in his grasp was through fiction. Hence “Bonfire.”

In detailing his decision to switch forms, Wolfe sounds like the brilliant poetry professor who waits impatiently for a dull class to explicate a favorite text, then finally figures he’d better do it himself.

Until now, it seems, the world has been painfully slow in grasping how very important “Bonfire” is and why.

Wolfe is least effective in his evaluation of why other novelists have been so foolish as to ignore the proper literary route of realism. His simplification slights the masters who set the alternative course--James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and, later, Latin Americans such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez--presumably because they weren’t Norte Americanos.

And Wolfe is at his snobbish, xenophobic worst--none dare call it racism--when he wonders if the fact that a nonwhite majority will soon rule urban America will “render these cities incomprehensible, fragmented beyond the grasp of all logic, absurd, meaningless to gaze upon in a literary sense.”

No, the task of the writer will be merely more difficult, he concludes with a patrician sniff, ignoring the possibility that ethnic diversity might just make America more comprehensible, more easily grasped by certain novelists--those of color, for instance. (After all, “Bonfire” just might have been the Big One if Wolfe hadn’t fallen so far short in his portrayal of the book’s nonwhite, non-privileged characters).

But even readers who decide that Wolfe’s world view is prissy and bigoted will marvel at the dazzling case he builds for social realism.

A big reason writers have feared the realist approach, Wolfe believes, is that they’ve seen that modern fact is much more preposterous and entertaining than fancy ever hoped to be. Not to worry, though. By developing the craft of factual reporting, as well as fictional technique, a good observer can at once capture the nuttiness of reality and wrestle it into manageable form.

It was those skills that allowed Sinclair Lewis to write of the fictional Elmer Gantry, a flamboyant evangelist who gets caught in a tryst with a secretary who then turns around and demands hush money. And so it was, Wolfe points out, that Lewis “happened to scoop the Jim Bakker story by 60 years.”

Citing the example of 19th-Century French Naturalist (read realist) Emile Zola, Wolfe issues a cry: “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 it as literary property.”

Novelists had better soon muster the courage to take America away from nonfiction writers like him, Wolfe writes, or be prepared to abdicate their perch atop the hierarchy of letters.

“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.”

The rest of the November Harper’s is also full of literary fun. In one piece, literary scholar Hugh Kenner writes a simple, amusing celebration of the joys of computer networking.

Another selection, in the “Readings” section, disproves the old folklore that every poem published in the New Yorker contains some sort of water imagery. Studying four months of New Yorker poems published earlier this year, Poet Charles Bernstein found references to “ancient pools,” “midnight’s watery ghost house,” etc., in only 87% of the poems.

McMartin News

Whatever happens in the McMartin preschool case this year, the media post-mortems are certain to start rolling in. Without question, the analyses of the 29-month, $15-million case will be oversimplifications. It just isn’t possible to make sense of that much testimony, delivered over that much time, without boiling down the information.

In the October Los Angeles Magazine, Mary A. Fischer (with the help of former Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Williams) does just that. Her story is titled “McMartin, A Case of Dominoes?” But it’s the sort of headline where the question mark is laughable.

The writer is anything but hesitant here to pass judgment. Arguing that early reportage on the case fell into lock-step with the prosecution, Fischer comes down plainly in the defense camp.

In making her case, Fischer does what she contends the prosecution did throughout the investigation and trial: She all but ignores anything that would cast doubt on her hypothesis. Still, the evidence, as she presents it, was convincing.

Fischer concludes that the longest criminal trial in U.S. history was a fiasco, triggered by a crazy woman and kept tumbling along by a succession of other players including a police investigator, a social worker, a district attorney, a television reporter and a prosecutor. She raises questions about the motives and or competence of each of them.

Her thesis is summed up in the magazine’s subhead, another one of those spurious question mark statements: “Did six crucial players simply invent the longest, most expensive, most sensational--and most trumped-up--case in L.A.’s history?”

Book Lovers

Subscribers who noticed some time ago that they stopped receiving the Florida-based publication Inside Books can rest assured: The remainder of their subscription to that short-lived publication will be paid off in copies of the West Coast Review of Books, a Los Angeles-based periodical.

The publisher of Inside Books officially stopped publication as of Oct. 4, said David Dreis, editor and publisher of the West Coast Review of Books. “I’ve agreed to take on his (6,400) subscribers.” But Dreis added quickly: “I’m not taking on any of his debt.”

No one could be reached at Inside Books, and Dreis said the publisher has closed his offices.

The next issue will be West Coast Review’s 15th anniversary issue.