American literary heavyweights trashed the bestselling novels of Tom Wolfe … but now he’s fighting back with gusto
Julian Borger
T he literary world loves a good punch- up, and as feuds go, this is the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila all rolled into one.
The feud has brought together John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving to take on Tom Wolfe. And the prize, as usual, is literary greatness – entry to the 20th-century pantheon alongside the likes of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
Former journalist Wolfe has staked his claim in the last two decades with two blockbuster epics. The first, Bonfire of the Vanities, took on a class/race struggle between Wall Street and the Bronx. His long-awaited second tome, A Man in Full, which came out in 1998 after a 17-year pause, did the same for the South. It is now in paperback.
The public loved both books and bought well over a million hardback copies of A Man in Full, which narrates the fall from grace of an Atlanta property developer. But is it art? And more to the point, is it that Holy Grail of US literature, “The Great American Novel”?
The response to both questions has been a contemptuous “no” from Updike, Mailer and Irving, hitherto the leading lions in the literate-but-accessible category.
John Irving, at 57 the dauphin of the trio, said, “It makes you wince.” The author of The World According to Garp added that on any page of a Wolfe novel he could “read a sentence that would make me gag”.
Updike, in his New Yorker review, imperiously concluded, “AMan in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.”
Mailer, writing in the New York Review of Books, compared reading the weighty Wolfe novel to making love to a 300lb woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.”
The message has been blunt and clear: Wolfe may sell a lot of books but he belongs on the airport shelves alongside Stephen King and all those self-improvement manuals, not in the hallowed hall of the greats.
Wolfe, however, is not the sort to turn the other cheek. He has instead launched a one-man verbal onslaught against his detractors, flinging entrenched reputations aside with a ferocity that has scandalised even the jaded and scarred New York book world.
“It’s a tantrum. It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said on a talk show. “A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.”
He described Updike and Mailer as “two old piles of bones”. Irving, he said, “is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe … it must gnaw at him terribly.”
The feud has evidently drawn blood all round, but it is still only in its early rounds. Wolfe has a score-settling essay in the pipeline, called The Three Stooges (no prizes for guessing who). It will be published later this year in a collection of short pieces, Hooking Up.
The Wolfe-Mailer feud is by far the oldest and cattiest of the three. As far back as 1989, Mailer remarked: “In my mind, there is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.”
Wolfe brushed off the sartorial attack, simply pointing out that “the lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass”. To which Mailer quickly responded: “It doesn’t mean you’re the top dog just because your ass is bleeding.”
Deep below the multiple layers of bitchiness, it is possible to pick out a substantive battle over the future of American novel. The line followed by Updike, Mailer and Irving is that there is a qualitative leap from journalism to literature which Wolfe has tried but failed to complete.
Updike puts the argument most clearly in his New Yorker deconstruction of A Man in Full: “So much local information, so many well-lighted settings, so much news do not quite knit into a novel powered by the human spirit as it gropes and struggles for focus. Wolfe has perhaps too many opinions for a novelist: his characters have a hard time breaking out of the illustrative mold in which they are cast.”
Wolfe does not disown his past as a hack. Instead, he claims to have transformed his former trade into something higher – New Journalism, a breathless running-commentary narrative style he pioneered in books like The Right Stuff, about the early astronauts. It is a style which has left its mark on a generation of magazine writers.
Now Wolfe is arguing that the New Literature should grow out of the New Journalism, embracing “full-blooded realism”. “In abandoning social realism, novelists also abandoned certain vital matters of technique. As a result, by 1969 it was obvious that … magazine writers … had also gained a technical edge on novelists.” Of his enemies, he says: “All three have seen the writing on the wall,” he said, “and it reads: A Man in Full.”