Rating: 
Summary: Wolfe on the rampage
Review: Wolfe's unique position as the resident elf of American letters has allowed him the licence to expose the mountains of hypocrisy and hype that form the fabric of our modern and now 'post modern' society, with out ever having had to reveal a point of view of his own. Most of his work is presented with a raconteur's relish. It moves just slightly outside and slightly behind the Next 'New' Thing, taking voyeuristic glee in adjudicating its pretensions and contradictions. The impression, though, is often that of a dilettante rather than a crusader, a writer with gifted perception but lacking a sense of mission. But in his older years he has come on a cause that he has approached with some passion. The state of the novel and his own contribution to it.The centre piece in these essays is the one dealing with his 'Three Stooges', Norman Mailer, John Irving, John Updike. For this he has abandoned all of his trademark irony and journalistic distance. The scathing critiques by America's literary elders on his last novel. 'A Man in Full' has left him on full counter attack.. That is all the more magnetic because the claims on both sides are nothing less than the mantle of Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy, Twain and the future of the novel as realism or aestheticism-- Wolfe's resonant social, morally definitive panorama or aestheticism's metaphysics, ethereal 'exquisiteness' and subjective ethics. Of course this strain has its own illustrious champions, Melville, Henry James, Proust, Joyce. His case is interesting, but inconclusive, as to why these two forms can't coexist. He is clearly sensitive to all the barbs from the literary 'aristocracy' and his essays are personal and at times bitter. Still, the spectacle of these over bred egos taking on one another in the media spotlight must have been irresistible to Wolfe, even if he is one of the participants. Surely he must be able to see a little of his own antiheroes Sherman McCoy and Charlie Croker, though, in all their puffed up self righteousness, in his own indignity. The wide ranging social essays and a novella are braced by his articulate, robust language. One is left with the suspicion, however, that his carefully chosen representations cover issues that are much more complex and nuanced than he gives credit. Anecdotes of such self contained sophistry as post structural literary criticism or 'socio-biology' are easy to lampoon, but a deeper look at the eschatology of middle American culture is never attempted. Wolfe inserts himself as a traditionalist, but in an intellect that is really much too sharp, flexible and transient to represent Middle America. The cast of characters would provide some colourful academic contrasts for any Park Avenue soiree, however. That is where Wolfe shines, as an intellectual vagabond, in an epoch that is providing no end of entertaining subject matter.
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