Tom Wolfe Finds His Champions

"It's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel," says David Brooks in an op-ed page defense of I Am Charlotte Simmons, "hundreds of people do it every few years." Unfortunately, the gist of Brooks' argument seems to be an "I'm OK, You're OK" chestnut: it's okay to be a crap stylist as a novelist if you have "moral intent" in what you write. He's convinced "Wolfe takes risks in his novels to describe the moral climate of the age," which is just plain silly--every fiction writer, consciously or unconsciously, describes the moral climate of the age, and frankly mystery writers do a better job of it than Wolfe. But the editorial suggestion that "it seems only fair that we at least take the chance his books offer to debate the more serious things he's trying to get at" does seem quite in line with the Times' apparent philosophy of the function of literature in a news-driven society...

Philadelphia Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano isn't having any of this anti-Wolfe malarkey either: he's all for IACS, and to hell with anybody who doesn't agree with him that the novel "bristles with authenticity." Especially Michiko Kakutani:

[She] jumped the Nov. 9 publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons to savage it as a disappointing amalgam of college-life cliches. Although her preemptive missile strikes on big-name authors now rank as a pathological cliche of their own, one can look at [it] that way...But to do so requires ignoring Wolfe's project from the beginning of his career. He passionately wants to construct definitive, lasting portraits of parts of our lives, using nothing more than words (OK, and lots lots lots of punctuation tricks). Any definitive seizure in art of a man, institution, or slice of life must deliver cliches, or realism goes out the window.

Color me skeptical--and color me even more skeptical that "just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms about war, or The Great Gatsby about evanescent success, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years as a bracing document of those four years in which, more than at any other time in our lives, before becomes after." I don't believe that at all for two crucial reasons: (1) we read those books about war and evanescent success because for many of us they remain vicarious experiences at a level of extremity that a four-year college education doesn't reach, and (2) we read those books because our junior high English teachers assign them just before Catcher in the Rye, and I'm willing to bet no junior high in the country is going to assign any Tom Wolfe novel any time soon. Or any high school, for that matter. Because the school year's too short.

Meanwhile, Tim Adams of the Observer takes what's rapidly becoming the more traditional approach to Wolfe's third novel, judging it "a virtual certainty for the shortlist of another of the year's distinguished prizes: The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award."