Tag Tom Wolfe

Real buttonholes

In The Secret Vice (1966), Tom Wolfe claimed: There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the…

Typical!

Norman Mailer wrote in his 1998 review of A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe: …how can a book be so good and so empty all at once, able to tell us so much about America at its best and…

“Unpleasant… not completely successful satire”

Louis Menand injects literary criticism and a little theory into an obituary. Wolfe was a satirist. Politically, satire is a conservative genre. Satire is highbrow populism. Voltaire, Heine, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Orwell were all conservative populists. The novel for which he…

Wolfe’s breakfast

On Tuesday, The Guardian published an obituary for Tom Wolfe by Stanley Reynolds, who had died in November 2016, more than seventeen months before Wolfe. Forty-nine years earlier, in May 1969, The Guardian ran Reynolds’ perceptive and sympathetic review of…

Loamy

Tom Wolfe uses his trademark expression “loamy loins” twice in The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, and three times in I Am Charlotte Simmons. I have not yet read his fourth novel, Back to Blood, but…