Tom Wolfe's Barber, Though, Still Toils in Obscurity

As Tom Wolfe's tailor gets a moment in the sun, the NYTBR finally follows up its much-ballyhooed excerpt from I Am Charlotte Simmons with Jacob Weisberg's lukewarm assessment of Wolfe's third attempt to resuscitate the American novel, which includes one of my favorite sentences in any book review this year, pinpointing what appears to be one of the novel's most substantial flaws with a touch of wit: "There is some unintentional comedy as Wolfe meticulously delineates a drinking game he has discovered called 'quarters'..." My other favorite: "And at this point, it's just not that clever to call a law firm Dunning Sponget and Leach." (As the Significant Other quipped, though, "it's not as bad as calling the firm Dewey Cheatham & Howe.")

Not everybody's as down on Wolfe as that, though. At The Weekly Standard Joseph Bottum says IACS "shows [Wolfe's] solved the plot-construction problems that weakened the endings of his first two novels" in a "solid, well-reported page turner." After that, though, Bottum veers off on a tangent about how most of Wolfe's critics are frustrated liberals, jealous of the magic touch at the keyboard that makes Wolfe "still the best social reporter since William Makepeace Thackeray;" the final third of the essay backs off the political content to explore how Wolfe both approaches the mastery of a Dickens and ultimately falls short.

And in Slate, Virginia Heffernan and Stephen Metcalf spent the latter half of last week emailing each other about IACS. Metcalf thinks it "eminently foolish," though readers can "glide right through it without a hitch," while Heffernan provocatively claims "this book is date-raping me." Then again, at the end of that entry, she calls it a "big, gay book," which seems to be among the reasons why she liked it so much--their whole dialogue, somewhat unsummarizable to a man on tight deadline, is worth your careful perusal.