Wolfe’s superficiality is part of his charm, and it suits many of his subjects – lust, Las Vegas, customised cars. That must be how it is, we think, as Sherman McCoy reclines in the bucket seat of his $48,000 Mercedes sports car, in his New & Lingwood loafers with the bevelled instep, his classy mistress by his side, congratulating himself all the while. Yet The Bonfire of the Vanities is powerfully mimetic, not of how the world goes round, but of how we idly and crudely imagine it does. He is irredeemably, programmatically superficial. Wolfe uses a wealth of convincing circumstantial detail in the way thriller writers do, to disguise the hackneyed and often deeply implausible aspects of his books. I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘realism’.
Perhaps the confusion arose because, since The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Wolfe has cheekily tried to sell himself as a ‘realistic’ novelist (or ‘intensely realistic’, in his own phrase). And his plots are just a way of making these ciphers collide, setting off some fireworks and a few spring-loaded ironies in the process. And his characters are deliberately stereotypical, since, by his lights, a typical character is more revealing than an individual. Novels, for Wolfe, are ‘65 per cent material and 35 per cent the talent’ the really important thing is to incorporate as much as possible of ‘the lurid carnival of American life’. ‘Cramming’ is the word he uses, and he is often exhilaratingly good at it – probably the best example is his hippie book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). As far as he’s concerned, prose is a just a sponge, a holding station for slang, buzzwords, sociological observations, lists and pungent dialogue. They do, however, perfectly describe his bloody awful new novel I am Charlotte Simmons. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his bleeping books! Try reading one bleeping sentence! You’ll gag before you can finish it! He doesn’t even write literature – he writes … yak! He doesn’t write novels – he writes journalistic hyperbole!’ These comments, graciously reported by Wolfe himself, don’t seem entirely fair to me. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. For three decades he has been saying that his minutely researched books herald ‘a revolution’ in literature, which is bound to ‘sweep the arts in America, making many prestigious artists … appear effete and irrelevant’. Tom Wolfe is, in many ways, an outrageous figure – with his white suit and cane, his glib social analyses, and his delusions of grandeur.
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