Rod Dreher

Not The Country You Thought It Was

Anybody Reading The New Tom Wolfe?

By Rod Dreher • November 12, 2012, 6:45 AM

I bought a copy of “Back To Blood,” the great one’s newest. Gave up 15 or 20 pages into the first chapter. Why? This parody from The Guardian, purporting to sum up the novel in 400 words, pretty much says it all. Excerpt:

SMACK. Thadaboom. SMACK. Thahadaboom. The Safe Boat thadathunks its foam-filled fu**ery across Miami – MEEE-AH-MEE – bay. “Dere’s a fu**in’ Wetfoot at da top a dat fu**in’ mast a dat boat,” yelled Sergeant Kite. Officer Nestor Camacho rolled up his sleeves. His biceps were ripped. Taut. :::: What the f**k was he doing thinking like this inside this crazy, mashed-up punctuation? :::: Tappetytaptappetytaptaptap. KER-CHING! Tom couldn’t believe his luck. $10,000 per page to write on steroids. :::: Like taking candy from babies. That’s America, baby ::::

Somebody please tell me I bailed on this book too soon. I love Tom Wolfe. I spent cash money on this book. But I can’t find the wherewithal to push on through. Is it just me, and my usual difficulty sticking with fiction, or is the Wolfe book just not that good?

Posted in Books. Tagged Back To Blood, Tom Wolfe.

30 Responses to Anybody Reading The New Tom Wolfe?

Russell Arben Fox says:

November 12, 2012 at 7:24 am

I was a big Tom Wolfe fan for years–The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, Man in Full, his journalism, all of it. I had quotes from him that I gave out to my students. I’m not sure I ever thought he was a truly great writer, but I just plain enjoyed so much of his writing. But then the years went by with nothing new from him, and finally there was Charlotte Simmons…and I simply couldn’t get into it. It was as if I’d familiarized myself with every one of Wolfe’s tricks, and he didn’t have a single new one to offer. Now, the man has completely fallen off my radar screen. I didn’t even know he had a new novel out until I saw that very review you mention, Rod. And I kind of suspect that is the way it has gone more generally with Wolfe. He had twenty years (from the 70s through the 90s) of being someone that every informed person wanted to read….and now, in the age of Bush and Obama, he’s been completely eclipsed.
Beyng says:

November 12, 2012 at 8:10 am

So far as I’m concerned, every Wolfe book is “just not that good.” I’ve given him numerous chances, and I want to like him.

But his popularity as a literary elite tells me that our aesthetic standards went out the window sometime in the early twentieth century.
Matt in TX says:

November 12, 2012 at 8:42 am

One of the reasons that I haven’t read I Am Charlotte Simmons, despite the book sounding exactly like my cup of tea, subject matter-wise, is because I’ve heard from numerous sources that it’s written like this, too.
Roberto says:

November 12, 2012 at 8:49 am

I kind of gave up on Wolfe after “A Man in Full.” I dutifully slogged through “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” but his take on Miami, a city I know because half of my family lives there — my brothers-in-law are from Cuba and Nicaragua — does not interest me at all.
Sam M says:

November 12, 2012 at 9:00 am

I always liked his magazine work better than his books.

I was teaching at a college when Charlotte Simmons came out. I thought it was completely tone-deaf. His great claim to fame is writing vernacular, but I got about five pages into it and realized that he didn’t sound like college kids at all. He sounded like an old man trying to sound like a college kid.

Now. Did he lose his touch? Or did he always miss the mark like that? I dunno.
Ryan Stambaugh says:

November 12, 2012 at 9:13 am

I made it to around page 400 or so. Do I win something?

It seemed to venture into self-parody by accident, it was hard to like the characters when Wolfe clearly doesn’t. And the plot would make for a pretty ho-um CSI: Miami episode.

I do not like to give up on books, but with another 300+ to go, it just seemed too big of a hill to climb. And, like others I’ve generally liked Wolfe’s work, and was looking forward to this one believing it might re-create the magic of “Bonfire of the Vanities” (now, I’m afraid to even re-read that one).
Frank OConnor says:

November 12, 2012 at 9:27 am

BtB is vintage Wolfe, the energy is still there (he’s 81 years old) and the theme’s are pretty much the same: sex as the new religion, ethnic/racial politics, the fraudulance of the art world, the skewering of the rich, the normalization of pornography (see today’s NYT op-ed page if you think Wolfe is out of date), and the general gleeful exploration of dehumanization at the core of the rational liberal state.
If you think Wolfe is irrelevant, please read all the main stream liberal media (NYT, New Yorker etc.) who are so quick to give prominent take-downs of his new novel. They don’t think he’s irrelevant.
I understand why the MSM hates him, but that conservatives are abandoning him is sad. Like all those white voters who stayed home on election day, has the fight gone out of us.
By the way, this is a minority opinion, but “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is his masterpiece and brilliantly depicts where the school of sociobiology and the brain as computer theorists are taking us.
Rod Dreher says:

November 12, 2012 at 9:41 am

I understand why the MSM hates him, but that conservatives are abandoning him is sad. Like all those white voters who stayed home on election day, has the fight gone out of us.

Huh? So I’m supposed to pretend a book that’s not very good is actually great because it offends liberals? That’s substituting ideology for critical judgment.

I am ideologically predisposed to agree with Wolfe. I thought “Bonfire of the Vanities” was terrific. I thought “A Man In Full” was pretty good; it certainly kept my interest. I got part of the way into “I Am Charlotte Simmons” — and you know I am extremely predisposed to agree with Wolfe’s view on the eroticization and decline of culture — and I just couldn’t hang with it.

It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with his views on cultural politics. It’s about whether or not he can still tell a story.
Frank OConnor says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:04 am

Rod, I find no decline in his story telling or narrative abilities. The msm doesn’t hate him because he is so bad, but because he’s so good.
Mike says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:19 am

I found A Man in Full boring and repetitive, and got very tired of seeing lists of possessions as a substitute for characterization. Wolfe also managed to completely mess up the basic facts of Bay Area geography; so much for his “meticulous research”.
Paleo Retiree says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:24 am

I often find Wolfe’s pop-baroque style a little wearying, but I usually enjoy Wolfe’s journalism, and I admire him to the max for being such a wicked observer and satirist.

That said, I didn’t find the “fiction” part of “Bonfire of the Vanities” very convincing. Loved and enjoyed the atmospherics and the sociology, but found the madeup part of the book — the people and the stories — less convincing than a typical episode of “Law & Order.” So I haven’t bothered with his more recent novels. (Even when fiction is satirical, I want to get caught up in the story and characters in one way or another.)

But a friend I trust tells me that “Charlotte Simmons” is worth the effort, so I may wind up giving that one a try eventually …
thehova83 says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:28 am

All people are different. But I tend to end up liking books that I disliked the first 30% of and often end up disliking books in which the first 30% I loved.
James Kabala says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:32 am

Wolfe got the sex right in I Am Charlotte Simmons but got most other stuff wrong. The most realistic character was probably Charlotte’s trampy roommate – people like that (of both sexes) really are thick on the ground in college. The four main characters were supposed to have more depth, but they were all being obviously filtered through the worldview of a seventy-three year old man. A real Adam, for example, might well have had contempt for weight room culture, but he wouldn’t have approached it in the anthropologist-among-the-natives way he did in the book – that was clearly Wolfe talking through him.

Also, there were so many factual errors about college life. Basketball games in quarters? That was just the tip of iceberg; at the time I must have counted a dozen or more things that were different from the way things work at every real college (or at least 99% of them). The apparent non-existence of a college bookstore was another one. I know, I know, deeper truth counts more than strict accuracy, but he claimed to have done so much research.
Rod Dreher says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:46 am

But Frank, *you* find no decline in his storytelling abilities. I do — but the reason I put the question to the room is that I have a lot more difficulty with fiction than most people, so I’m not sure whether my opinion that Wolfe has declined is more widely shared.

Professing to like an author’s work because he’s politically agreeable is as groundless as disliking his work because he’s politically disagreeable. As I keep saying, I am on Wolfe’s side in the culture war, but morals and aesthetics are not the same thing.
thomas tucker says:

November 12, 2012 at 11:45 am

Rod- did you buy an e-version, or the actual hard copy book? And why, as opposed to the other option?
Charles Cosimano says:

November 12, 2012 at 11:47 am

I think Wolfe is a good example of a writer never knowing when to retire.
Mary Russell says:

November 12, 2012 at 12:01 pm

I listened to his book interview on NPR, where he admitted that he still uses a typewriter and can’t get the hang of computers. I sympathize; he’s in his 80s after all, but what can somebody who can”‘t use electronic media doing writing pop fiction about American culture?
J says:

November 12, 2012 at 12:02 pm

He’s the male Doris Lessing.
Anne says:

November 12, 2012 at 12:38 pm

“Charlotte Simmons” was a reporter’s notebook thinly disguised as a novel. Most of the dialog was totally unbelievable as a conversation between the characters in question, but totally believable as something the character would have said to a famous, older reporter. For example, there are several occasions where Charlotte doesn’t get her popular preppie roommate’s slang, and the roommate and all her preppie friends will drop whatever they were talking about and define their slang for her politely and at length. This makes no sense in a conversation between a popular girl and an unpopular girl, but I can believe it is how a popular girl talks to Tom Wolfe. There’s also a scene where Charlotte’s best friend from high school explains to Charlotte the perspective from which the hook up culture is enjoyable, and it’s just ridiculously thoughtful and philosophical for a conversation between two 18 year olds. But again, I can believe an 18 year old said those things to Tom Wolfe after he warmed her up with a lot of probing questioning.

It is good reporting though.The scene where Charlotte loses her virginity captures perfectly the grey area between seduction and rape.
Eric K. says:

November 12, 2012 at 2:16 pm

I read The Right Stuff and Bonfire and loved them both. Then I read Charlotte Simmons and didn’t care for it at all. It was abrasive and didn’t tell that good a story. I didn’t even know Wolfe had a new book out until I read this blog post. If it’s not any better than CS I doubt I’ll pick it up.
Kirt Higdon says:

November 12, 2012 at 5:22 pm

I’m up to about page 150 of Back to Blood and so far enjoying it immensely. So far it seems like Wolfe at the top of his game. I liked Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full even more because I had two heroes to root for instead of just one. I Am Charlotte Simmons was well plotted but depressing because there were no real heroes and barely any sympathetic characters, at least from my viewpoint. Back to Blood seems to be developing at least one hero and perhaps another as far as I have read. I hope I’m not disappointed by the remainder of the book.
James Kabala says:

November 12, 2012 at 7:15 pm

On the slang: I could never figure out if Wolfe made up “sarc one” or if some student made it up and convinced him it was a real thing (like the famous grunge slang hoax of the early 90s).
Anne says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:45 pm

Yeah, a lot of the supposed slang seems more like an in joke of some particular group he interviewed. I couldn’t figure out whether Wolfe understood this, maybe he was just reporting on the general attitude of kids these days which leads to in jokes like these. Like “sarc one” is not real slang, but sarcasm sure is fashionable and is ripe for slang treatment. Come to think of it, did people use the word “snark” so much back when the book came out?
MattSwartz says:

November 12, 2012 at 10:49 pm

I’m 200 pages in, and most of what I’ve read is funnier and smarter than were the first thirty pages. I don’t mind Wolfe’s obsession with detail and external observation, but it was the seething, bubbling, hypersensitive internal monologues of the characters that convinced me to spend the money.

Wolfe’s tics (double colons on both sides of words, ALL CAPS, descriptive colloquial titles standing in for names, etc) can get annoying, but he’s doing a sort of punk-rock reaction against the lukewarm, bloodless, anhedonic writerly-ness of, say, a Jonathan Franzen or the rest of the New Yorker tote bags-and-chamomile set.

I loved Bonfire, and I’m really liking this. Admittedly, I want to like this, because the Centrist Manhattan Deadtrees hate it, but that has been the case before, and I’ve set a lot of preachy garbage down, even when the sermons were micro-targeted right at me.

The start was weak, but there’s some good here.
Juan C. Marrero says:

November 13, 2012 at 10:04 am

As someone of Cuban background, I am sick of the stereotypes this book peddles. Cuban-Americans, it seems, are all loud, over-sexed and not terribly bright. I do not recognize anyone that reminds me of my quiet, bookish, moderately neurotic Cuban friends and relatives in this book. Stereotypes are offensive because they are reductive. They carry a “this is all you need to know” imprimatur that is dismissive and patronizing. Also, to stereotype is to eschew analysis or depth of any kind. It is the hallmark of lazy writing.
Rod Dreher says:

November 13, 2012 at 10:22 am

Cuban-Americans, it seems, are all loud, over-sexed and not terribly bright. I do not recognize anyone that reminds me of my quiet, bookish, moderately neurotic Cuban friends and relatives in this book.

I think you’re being too quick to take offense. Wolfe writes social satire in a realist vein. In “Bonfire of the Vanities,” nobody looks good, but every character is a recognizable version of real people, or rather, a type of person. The ironic joke is you come to feel sorry for the morally unworthy character at the center of the narrative (the Wall Street guy), not because he’s any good, but because everybody else is so much worse.

My favorite novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” is filled with characters who do not paint a positive picture of Louisianians. The only unambiguously positive character of the lot is Burma Jones, the jive-talking janitor. It’s a comic novel! So what! If Wolfe wrote a novel satirizing the culture in which I live, and that produced me, I probably wouldn’t see myself in the narrative, strictly speaking, but I bet he would get a lot of things right about the general shape and style of the culture. All satirists paint in vivid colors. If you’re expecting photorealism, you’re expecting the wrong thing.
AndrewBH says:

November 13, 2012 at 10:23 am

You just finished “The Odyssey.” The next book is bound to be a little anticlimactic.
Juan C. Marrero says:

November 13, 2012 at 1:10 pm

No one would take Ignatius Reilly as a “typical” resident of Louisiana or New Orleans–or anywhere else for that matter.

As a graduate of Loyola/Uptown and a NOLA resident until Katrina, I enjoyed COD for capturing the quasi-Caribbean, funky Catholic atmospherics of the Crescent City circa 1965.

But the book’s depth comes from irony–that the simple Irene Reilly somehow produced the bloviating, pretentious Ignatius; that the most educated character, again Ignatius, was the least productive, that the character with the best work ethic, Miss Trixie, was, unfortunately, well into the fog of dementia, and that that officious intermeddler, Santa Bataglia brilliantly managed to ruin the lives on those on whom she lavished her attention.

The characters from the Wolfe book are “recycles” from that execrable movie “Scarface” (1983)–one dimensional and predicatable. It’s not that I want “unambiguously positive” characters, just characters that are unambigously real. There is little irony in the Wolfe book, just clanging cymbals.

But, chacun a son gout. Or, “a cada uno su gusto.”
Ken Zaretzke says:

November 13, 2012 at 3:38 pm

Haven’t seen his new novel but I love Tom Wolfe. I have to admit, though, that *The Guardian* parody is hilarious. If only it was much longer. Parody is one place where less is NOT more.
Buzz Baldrin says:

November 24, 2012 at 7:13 am

Sorry for this late response. Consider it my early Christmas gift suggestion to Rod.

Please finish reading “Back to Blood.” Though the Guardian parody was dead-on about the book’s beginning, it failed to mention that Wolfe toned down the SMACKs for the rest of the novel.

With the SMACKs removed, you get the dead-on wit of “Bonfires” fired at modern art, America’s pornography addiction, status climbing in multicultural America, the decline of journalism, and, not available in any other fiction, the neuroscience of race.

Sure Wolfe would have hit these subjects out of the parks as journalism, but, as the book illustrates, paper journalism in America is on the skids. At least his novels have a chance to be read.