Tom Wolfe’s Literary Manifesto: A Response

Tom Wolfe, the lionized author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), whose still unpublished second novel recently commanded an advance estimated at $7 million, is not satisfied with amor y pesetas. He wants salud as well. He would be the bringer of health to a sick American literature. Alas, he cannot: Tom Wolfe is the disease of which he pretends to be the cure.

In a “literary manifesto” just published in Harper’s magazine, Wolfe begins with a diagnosis. Influential critics, he claims, have contaminated a generation of American novelists, luring them away from the practice of realistic fiction. Wolfe himself, already famous as a “new journalist,” stood in wonder, he tells us, as the years of the ‘60s and ‘70s passed, and no novelist saw fit to exploit such irresistibly colorful and challenging subject matter. When he began “Bonfire,” his novel of New York City in the ‘80s, Wolfe says, he still had the field of realistic fiction improbably to himself. Implicitly, he takes the success of that novel as proof of the correctness of his diagnosis. And his prescription, to be only slightly more plain about it than he is, is that other writers should write as he does.

Wolfe’s manifesto makes, in literary criticism, the same mistake that his books “The Painted Word” and “From Bauhaus to Our House” made in art and architecture criticism, respectively. That mistake is what we might call the bright-student mistake. After reading a clever theory, the bright student finds evidence for it simply everywhere and becomes its champion, or else finds evidence against it everywhere and becomes its consecrated foe. Agreement is not decisive. Obsession is.

In “The Painted Word” and “From Bauhaus to Our House” Wolfe finds evidence everywhere that artists and architects have taken art and architecture criticism as prescriptive. He disagrees with the prescription, but in the process he shows himself to be, more than any other American novelist with a comparable popular success to his credit, obsessed with critical opinion. He may assume a rollicking manner. He may wish to be the joker who calls the professorial bluff. But the smile is forced, the act unconvincing. As ever, not to philosophize is to philosophize.

The professors who obsess Wolfe in the Harper’s article, entitled “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” are George Steiner and the late Lionel Trilling. Their thesis, in his formulation, is that the realist novel “was the literary child of the nineteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie. . . . But now that the bourgeoisie was in a state of ‘crisis and partial route’ (Steiner’s phrase) and the old class system was crumbling, the realistic novel was pointless. What could be more futile than a cross section of disintegrating fragments?”

The toxic idea now in place, Dr. Wolfe (Ph.D., American Studies, Yale, 1957) sets out to discover whom it has intoxicated. He contrasts an older, still realist generation of writers to a younger, post-realist one. Thus, “Writers who had gone to college before 1960, such as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone, and John Updike, found it hard to give up realism, but many others were caught betwixt and between. They didn’t know which way to turn. For example, Philip Roth. . . made a statement (in 1961) that had a terrific impact on other young writers. We now live in an age, he said, in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow morning’s newspaper. ‘The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist’.”

This paragraph is downright goofy. Robert Stone, whom Wolfe places in the older generation, is four years younger than Philip Roth, whom he places in the younger generation. Updike is Roth’s senior by only two years. All three of these writers (along with Tom Wolfe himself, for that matter) were in college at the same time. It is nonsense to divide such near contemporaries into generations.

Bellow is older, of course, but no writer had a greater influence on aspiring novelists in the ‘60s than he did. Roth’s 1961 essay is reprinted in a volume entitled “Reading Myself and Others” which is dedicated to Bellow as “the other from whom I have learned most.” Bellow’s “Herzog” (has Wolfe forgotten?) was a critical and popular sensation in 1964. It was with that book, more than with any of his earlier ones, that the future Nobel Prize winner became what he would remain: the lord of the literary manor.

The distinction crucial to Roth’s 1961 essay was not between realism and post-realism but between the different realisms of private and public life. The retreat of serious American fiction into private life mirrored a similar, overwhelmed retreat on the part of much of the citizenry. But Roth’s essay was anything but a manifesto against realism per se. After writing it, he went on to write three fully realistic novels, including “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), the book that made him a household word.

Forgetting the ‘60s Bellow, misreading the ‘60s Roth, Wolfe singles out as the Zeitgeist incarnate Ronald Sukenick, the author of “Up” (1968). Sukenick, currently editor of American Book Review, deserves the thoughtful following that he continues to have; but he would be quick to laugh, I suspect, at the notion that his mode of fiction was sweeping the country in 1968. Some of the other formalist writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s may be better known than Sukenick; John Barth won a National Book Award in 1972. But it is ludicrous to suggest that these writers, rather than realist novelists like Roth and Bellow, defined the literary mood of those decades.

Wolfe, casting himself as the defender of realism, mentions John le Carre and Joseph Wambaugh as “writers whom literary people customarily dismiss.” But literary people do not customarily dismiss them. Wambaugh has been warmly praised in the Los Angeles Times by John Sutherland, a British critic teaching at Caltech and contributing regularly to the Times Literary Supplement--in short, by just the sort of transatlantic intellectual from whom, on Wolfe’s reading of things, the worst might have been expected. As for Le Carre, he is reviewed, again and again, with a tender deference before which the often-savaged John Updike must stand in wonder.

Let us even concede, for the sake of Wolfe’s argument, that writers like Wambaugh and Le Carre are “customarily dismissed.” Wolfe’s thesis still collapses, for its claim is that the influence of academic criticism has been so great that writers of talent have been dissuaded from mining the realist vein at all. If Wambaugh and Le Carre (British but with a huge American readership) are on hand even for the dismissal, academic criticism cannot have done the harm Wolfe claims it has done.

Wolfe uses, as a part of his manifesto, a long speech by a character in his novel who cries, of New York, “It’s the Third World out there!” It is indeed, but realistic fiction about the Third World in the First has been written by one British or American novelist after another. Wolfe ignores the work of Jonathan Franzen, Marianne Wiggins, Bharati Mukherjee and a long list of others.

More strikingly, he also ignores, or distorts, the work of John Irving, whom he mentions only once: “John Gardner and John Irving both started out in this (neo-fabulist) vein.” Perhaps; but if so, Irving--like Wolfe, a professed neo-Dickensian--quickly changed veins. Irving’s novels are populous, multi-generational, socioeconomically various, unabashedly sentimental blockbusters. Like Dickens, he often makes a child (in “The Cider House Rules,” an orphan) his central character. In short, his is just the terrain that Wolfe claims to have found a literary Empty Quarter.

And the list does not thin out at all quickly after Irving. Pat Conroy, E. L. Doctorow, Anne Tyler, Carolyn See--the entries are numerous and interesting. Writers like these are quintessentially American: warm-hearted, easy-to-like and with something to say--nothing, perhaps, as richly pondered as might have been forthcoming from a Thomas Mann, but something, all the same. Among literary possibilities, the one they enact is very like the one that Americans enact as people. Reading them is like spotting an American in a foreign city. Not everyone cares for that style (or for us); but for better or worse, it is our style, the unmistakable native manner. To have missed it, and Wolfe misses it completely, is to have missed the American literary reality.

A writer who demonizes criticism as Wolfe does cannot be too fussy about the border between popular and serious writing. After all, the critics are the ones who police that border. This said, I find it instructive to compare him to another writer whom critics do indeed customarily dismiss but who, like him, has taken New York as her subject and, like him, has made a fabulous income doing so. I write of Judith Krantz, whose most recent best seller was “I’ll Take Manhattan.”

Like Wolfe, Krantz has a background in journalism. Like him, she has a lively interest in fashion. She wrote, in her journalistic years, for McCall’s and Cosmopolitan. Like him, she does her homework. Wolfe admires Zola for going into an actual mine to do research for his novel “Germinal.” Krantz, for her novel “Scruples” drew on a lifetime of contact with fashion retailers. “I’m a stickler for detail,” she once told the Washington Post; “I don’t know anybody doing the so-called commercial fiction researches as thoroughly as I do.” Like him, she takes sex, class and power as her subject matter.

Most of all, Krantz, like Wolfe, revels in the brand name as telling detail, which is to say, of course, in the telling detail that tells you nothing unless you already know. At one point in his manifesto, Wolfe mentions Scully & Scully address books. If you’ve never heard of Scully & Scully address books or don’t know how they differ from other kinds of address book, well, help yourself to another Bud Light.

In a passage on writers whom he chooses to call “K-Mart Realists,” Wolfe summons up the memory of the late Raymond Carver in every way but by mentioning his name, mocking this widely admired writer’s style and sneering at his settings (“Rustic Septic Tank Rural”). As it happens, however, in places like Klatskanie, Ore., where Carver was born, and Port Angeles, Wash., where he died, rusty (did Wolfe really intend the redundant “rustic”?) septic tanks are what they use, and K-Mart is where they shop. Inconveniently for our literary manifestant, none of this is less real than Scully & Scully address books. It is simply less luxurious.

Here we come to the heart of the matter. After criticism, what Tom Wolfe is obsessed with is luxury. He’s not the first. He won’t be the last. The joy of goods, the mirth of merchandise, is the subtext in all his books just as it is in those of Judith Krantz. The difference between them is that while Judy laughs all the way to the bank, Tom, on the same trip, preaches.