American graffiti

Tom Wolfe's novels are placards of simplicity. His characters are capable of experiencing only one feeling at a time. They are advertisements for the self: Greed! Fear! Hate! Love! Misery! The people who phosphoresce thus are nothing like real people. Instead, they are big, vivid blots of typology: The Overweaning Property Developer! His Divorced First Wife! His Sexy Young Trophy Wife! The Well-Dressed Black Lawyer Who Speaks Too White! The Oafish Football Player! They race through huge, twisted plots, their adventures hammered out in a banging and brassy prose. Wolfe's writing follows American life like a shoulder to the country's highway, loyally co-terminous with its flares and crashes. His melodramatic fiction resembles a libretto written by a frustrated novelist who has exceeded his commission.

What is so curious is that Wolfe thinks his fiction is realistic, and has used it as an example of how the American novel should develop. In 1989, he wrote a bouncy manifesto called "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in which he championed "a highly-detailed realism based on reporting," like that of his own novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which had appeared two years earlier. He complained that too few novelists were interested "in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life," and had abandoned realism for what he called "literary games," minimalism, or various sterile, white-coated, avant-gardisms. Only by vigorously going out and reporting on US society could one bring it back and wrestle it into the novel. Zola had done this with French society. Sinclair Lewis had done this in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. It is reportorial detail which makes novels "engrossing" and "moving," said Wolfe. It is "the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude and make a novel gripping or absorbing." This is the modern novel's gift to us, its sentimental education, which we can see in Dickens or in Anna Karenina. "No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles, Moli?re, Racine, Sidney, Spenser or Shakespeare," Wolfe catechises in a remarkable sentence. But when Little Nell dies in The Old Curiosity Shop, everyone cries.

It is a curiously unliterary mind that has never been strongly moved by a Greek tragedy, let alone a Shakespearean one; and it is an orphaned realism that not only excludes, but actually sets itself against, Shakespearean character. (Who is more Dickensian than Falstaff?) In any case, contemporary American fiction has not been at all negligent in its realist duties. Perhaps a little avant-garde starvation occurred in the 1960s, but since then we have had John Updike's suburban sediments, John Irving's infantile robustness, Richard Ford's New Jersey real estate and Robert Stone's racy, piratical worldliness. Philip Roth has become Newark's archivist. And what was Underworld but an old-fashioned Dickensian novel about the bomb? There is far too much realism in American fiction; it has become an idle liberty.



Wolfe's essay reads as if he were not so much goaded by the failure in realism of American fiction as piqued by the success in realism of American cinema. One deduces this from his solution, which is cinematic: go out, fill up your notebook, then uncomplicatedly stuff all this reality into the novel. Shoot and don't edit. Treat language as if it were a neutral saturate, like light, and use it as the Hollywood hooligan uses it, to illuminate his melodrama. Like the commercial film director, Wolfe does not realise that his gaudy story-telling is mannered or sensational. Rather, he thinks that it is realistic because life is gaudy; he is like a man with a very loud voice who thinks he speaks like everyone else. Thus, although many writers have filled notebooks with "documentation," Wolfe prefers the cruder, more sensational examples of rewarded diligence such as Zola and Sinclair Lewis, writers whom it is now difficult to reread. Flaubert copiously documented the agricultural show which appears in Madame Bovary, and Thomas Mann, while planning The Magic Mountain, visited the sanatorium his wife was staying in. And Joyce... But Wolfe never mentions these more literary writers, because they demonstrate that what is done on the page with the petits faits vrais-their intellectual compression, the writerly theft that is meted out on them-is more important than their borrowed rawness. Wolfe is not in search of realism; he wants hot, brothy journalism.

All this would be scarcely worth saying if Wolfe were not now floating on a sea of smiles, with the press garlanding him as Dickens's heir. The Washington Post thinks that his new novel is "tough, demanding, uncompromising stuff... that calls to mind the work of Dickens." Newsweek says: "Right now, no writer, reporter or novelist is getting it [America] on paper better than Wolfe," Time quivers that "no summary of A Man in Full can do justice to the novel's ethical nuances." The New York Times judges Wolfe to have written "passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist." It is worth explaining that the gap between Anna Karenina and A Man in Full is not merely one of talent, but of genre; a fountain against an aerosol spray. Wolfe's novels are only crudely like Dickens's because they are not literary. Despite their bulk and their immense twisted colons of plot, their ambition is the management of simplification. But one of literature's ambitions is the surveillance of complexity.

By "realism," Wolfe means the recognisable. His characters are types: each is a special edition of generalities. The hero of the novel's title, for example, is a tediously obvious type: Charlie Croker is a southern, loutish, macho property developer who has fallen upon hard times. A former college football star, he is powerfully built and brutishly charismatic. Now 60, he has divorced Martha, his long-serving wife, and married Serena, a lithe 28 year old. He is one of the big men who has built Atlanta, where the novel is set. He dislikes his sensitive son, Wally. He bullies his way through life, throwing off racist and homophobic remarks. When his financial empire collapses, he reacts as you would expect him to, belligerently. Only towards the end of the novel do his anxieties about the money he owes force him into an apparent surrender which is actually a spiritual triumph. Until this moment of spiritual reversal-which seems an inadvertence on Wolfe's part-Charlie Croker never says anything surprising or interesting or eccentric or meaningful or beautiful or even especially funny in the entire book. When you expect him to be angry, he is angry. When you expect him to be sad, he is sad. He has no interesting or touching secrets, except his weakness, which is not interesting because it is the kind of weakness such men are expected to have. He is a cartoonish sliver of a man, as flat as a wafer.

Atlanta in the 1990s is a forest of typologies, all of them swaying in Wolfe's gale-force prose. Around Charlie Croker sways the venomous Harry Zale, of PlannersBanc, who is determined to retrieve the money his firm has lent to Charlie. Elsewhere in the city, Fareek Fanon, a black footballer at Georgia Tech, has been accused of raping Elizabeth Armholster, the daughter of one of Atlanta's richest and most powerful men, Inman Armholster. The shrewd black mayor, fearful that this story will tear the city apart, decides to try to get the famous Charlie Croker, who once played for Georgia Tech, to say a few public words on Fareek's behalf. The mayor uses as his courier Roger White, a suave black lawyer who dresses fabulously but who is afraid of seeming too white-as his college nickname, Roger Too White, reminds him.

But none of these people are individuals. Even the minor characters are typological. "Buck McNutter was a prototypical Southern white boy." Or Kenny, one of Charlie's employees in California: "He was one of those raw-boned young California Okies, to use the local term for Redneck." Or Fareek Fanon: "You could see the dense muscles and cable-like tendons of the real ghetto boy." Wolfe is always writing that someone is "prototypical," or that he is "the kind of man who," or "the archetype of."

Well, Wolfe has certainly been out to collect his petits faits vrais. And look: they are rows and rows of spangled typicalities. Here is another: "She had Black Deb written all over her. Her parents were no doubt the classic Black Professional couple of the 1990s, in Charlotte or Washington or Baltimore. Look at the gold bangles on her wrists.... Look at the soft waves in her relaxed hair... probably went to Howard or Chapel Hill; belonged to Theta Psi."

"She had Black Deb written all over her." In fact, it is Wolfe who has "written all over her," so that she is covered, like a billboard, with the advertisements of her type. As if Wolfe is aware of these dangers, he tries to agitate his typology by making his characters physical gargoyles in a pseudo-Dickensian manner. Many of his men are huge: outsize physical specimens, bursting out of their clothes. The quickest way to make somebody interesting is to make them physically eccentric. So Wolfe's men are gargantuan. Take Buck McNutter, the Georgia Tech coach: "His neck, which seemed a foot wide, rose up out of a yellow polo shirt and a blue blazer as if it were unit-welded to his trapezius muscles and his shoulders. He was like a single solid slab of meat clear up to his hair."

Wolfe's typology, his ideal of reportorial fidelity, pushes him into melodramatic exaggeration. On the one hand, Wolfe gets the facts, harnesses America's sociological tides; on the other hand, in reaction to the prosaic factuality of his information, his people are teased into grotesquerie in order to make them more than merely typical. But then they are just grotesquely typical. What they fail to be is individual. They are skins only, pithless. Rushing to shiny extremes of characterisation, Wolfe neglects the subtly glamorous median. The Los Angeles Times, in a generally negative review, conceded that Wolfe's characters, "like Dickens's, are to a greater or lesser degree grotesques." But Wolfe's people are unlike Dickens's in every important literary respect. Dickens's grotesques are not recognisable, but unrecognisable and strange. Wolfe's prose always sheds the most ordinary, the most vulgar word, his descriptions are always the most ordinary details, without any capacity for simile or metaphor (which is one of the absolute definitions of the literary). But Dickens finds the unexpected detail, the vivid simile. Think of Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, "with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites." Or, in David Copperfield, Dora's cousin "in the Life-Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else." Or Uriah Heep in the same novel, his mouth "open like a post office." The delight of such wit has little to do, at times, with accuracy; a mouth never really looks like a post office. The joy, the literary joy, is in the local fizz of each detail, and in the relation of each detail to the other, and then in the moral revelation that such similes provide (Uriah Heep is like a post office: that is, he is everyone's willing courier).

Literature is not always like life. Why should it be? Sometimes the real itself is not always realistic, because it is incredible. Dickens used to walk in a cemetery at Cooling where you could find a grave with 13 little siblings, all from the same family, all of whom had died as children. When he stole this grave for the cemetery scene at the beginning of Great Expectations, he reduced the number of dead children to a less sensational five. What is good "documentation," good reporting, may be lousy literature. There is another way in which the heavy documentation of detail is not necessarily realistic: it is not through documentation that most of us absorb or present or remember detail. We do not boil in a fever of petits faits vrais; we shiver in the cool temperature of particulars.

But Wolfe's characters are always presented to us as tumuli of data and, oddly, they appraise one another like this. The description of the young woman who "had Black Deb written all over her" is actually seen through the eyes of Roger White, the smart black lawyer, who is watching her dancing in the street. Perhaps Roger White, who is conscious of status, might be just the man to flood the young woman in sociological detail; but he is more likely to have noticed something odd about her ears. When Levin, in Anna Karenina, nervously runs to bring the doctor to his wife, who has begun labour, he does not, as a Wolfean character would do, build an obtuse observational jigsaw for us-say, the fashionable street the doctor lives in, his obviously cheap haircut, his eau de Cologne from Paris (rue Diderot), his shirt from the well-known shirtmaker Pavel Suvorin in St Petersburg. No: in his beautifully clumsy male anxiety, his first-time father's mistaken belief that his wife is about to give birth at any moment and that the doctor is being horribly slow, Levin fixates on the "thick cigarettes" which the doctor insists on smoking before leaving his house. The thick cigarettes make literature. In the whole of A Man in Full, there is nothing like the thick cigarettes. But then, such details are generally imagined, not doggedly "documented."

the kind of "realism" called for by Wolfe, and by Zola or Ibsen, is always realism about society, never realism about human emotions, motives and secrecies. To be realistic about feeling is to acknowledge that we may feel several things at once, that we waver. This is Shakespeare's realism-Shakespeare who has never moved Tom Wolfe: to see how eloquently unfinished our inner lives are, how disappointed we are about the stories we tell, and how private and unknowable are our tragi-comedies. Realism about emotion acknowledges that human stories are always junctions of difference, never merely one thing or the other.

But Wolfe's characters have only their hide-like simplicities. Charlie Croker is, clearly, partly modelled on Robert Maxwell, who died in mysterious circumstances, leaving his financial empire in tatters. But Charlie's cartoon-like simplicity, his lack of depth as a fictional character, is made more acute by reflection on a real tycoon such as Maxwell. Like Croker, Maxwell seemed cartoonish. He was huge, brutal and coarse. But just because he was cartoonish, we know that Maxwell was much more complicated than a cartoon. Maxwell, Jewish, born in Czechoslovakia, who made himself into an unconvincing English gentleman, who was a tyrant apparently loved by two loyal sons, who was a capitalist but a supporter of the left, who published fawning biographies of Mao. Maxwell had many interesting contradictions. Croker has none. He is only the bigoted, "prototypical" Southern businessman, as cartoonish on the inside as on the outside.

At least Wolfe's characters have vivid inner lives. About the only interesting aspect of his fiction is that Wolfe has a finely old-fashioned commitment to the stream of consciousness, the interior monologue. Wolfe devotes whole pages to the drifting internal anxieties of his characters. Sometimes, by dint of sheer perseverance, by sticking with a character's train of thought, a weak power is transmitted. As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe's characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period or their Sad Period. But they never have them at the same time, and so the potential flexibility of the stream of consciousness, its lifelike randomness, is nullified. The reader finds his eyes skipping to the end of each long patch of interior monologue, because he knows that its garish unity will be boring. And because these people think only one emotion, they feel their emotions robustly, all the time; all the stream of consciousness in this book is excitable and melodramatic in the same way, with screeching italics and arrow-showers of exclamation points and ellipses like hysterical Morse code. The great novelistic tool of individuality, the stream of consciousness, ends up demonstrating that everyone is the same. Everyone is scrawled with the same inner graffiti.

On an early page of the book, Charlie Croker blusters to himself about his wife's rudeness: "Why, the... the... the... the... impudence of it!" Yet 200 pages later, his ex-wife, Martha, is sitting at a concert and thinking angrily in exactly the same language: "She had... had... had... had... well... created! the Charlie Croker the world had come to know, and now after three decades, he had the audacity (the audacity!) to shuck her, to cast her off like any old piece of worn-out baggage, as if she had been merely lucky enough to come along for the great ride, as if he had introduced her to all the wonders of the Buckhead life rather than the other way around!"

The delicacy of the stream of consciousness is that it both discloses the movement of the mind and also gestures to what cannot be said; it is the soul's stutter. Wolfe may think that he is capturing some sort of mental stutter with his buffoonish "Why the... the... the... the," but the very facility of this convention, and the fact that it is spread evenly among all the characters, suggests the opposite. It announces a complacency about how the writer captures the brokenness of thought. Wolfe says, in effect: here, this is how you do it, by repeating the definite or indefinite article four times, and tattooing some ellipses all over the page. In the process of apparently announcing the strenuousness of his realism, he proclaims its easy conventionality. In life, no one thinks to himself, "Why the... the... the... the... impudence of it!" Wolfe's realism, veering between the typologically drab and the monstrously melodramatic, is a set of unreal devices in which people breathe "stertorously," and think in conveniently spaced ellipses, and have two-page daydreams from which they are always jerked by the reality around them with a neat dash: "Oh, he felt-Just then a burst of static..." Acceptance of this kind of writing as literature is dangerous not because anybody will confuse it with life, or think "this is what life is like," but because readers may read it and think "this is what literature is like." That this bumptious simplicity-this toy-set of literary codes essentially indistinguishable from the narrative techniques of boys' comics-would call itself realism, and then be praised for its "unsparing" brutality, its capacity to reach the "innermost soul" of the human being, is an awful contemporary deformation.