Tom Wolfe and the Decline of the American Novel

The term "Great American Novel" seems to me to be spoken much less often than in earlier years--I suppose because it belongs to a time in which contemporary culture was rather more print-centered than it is today. Indeed, when I think of examples of the Great American Novel I tend to think of books like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (or even This Side of Paradise), Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, all as Upton Sinclair certainly strikes me as aiming for such a novel with pretty much every one of his major fictional efforts with which I am familiar, and hitting more than he misses, with books like The Jungle plausible contenders for the title.

I feel less confident making broad pronouncements about the literary fiction of the post-World War II era--admittedly because little of it has engaged me in the same way. Reading them I didn't get the impulse to read any particular later author's essential works comprehensively, track down their "forgotten classics," acquaint myself with their non-literary production, learn something of their lives the way I did with a Dreiser or a Sinclair or a Lewis, with it seeming to me that this was in great part because of the difference in what they offer. The authors of that earlier period interested me as they did because of their breadth of vision, their interest in the big questions of their day, their readiness to approach received wisdom in a critical fashion, all of which has been far less evident in the wake of postmodernism, and the "cultural Cold War," with all that has meant for the ability of writers of that period, and since, to write a really Great American Novel. And sure enough, considering those post-war "greats" of whom I have read something myself and in whom I have seen at least some merit--a Kurt Vonnegut, a John Updike, a Philip Roth, a Richard Yates, an E.L. Doctorow--I doubt that any of them can be awarded these particular laurels, and even that they would claim them for themselves. Indeed, Roth's titling his novel of 1974 The Great American Novel would seem to have been a quintessentially postmodernist piece of irony rather than a really serious claim on his own behalf, while I remember all too well Doctorow's interview with Bill Moyers in which he himself pointed out that the Great American Novel as I describe it here was exactly the kind of work that those writers of whom people spoke as serious literary figures were not doing, that they were "Miniaturists" who were "ignoring the big story," with their craftsmanship only throwing into sharper relief the narrowness and slightness of their concerns, which often seems to be nothing more than themselves on the part of a cohort with far more than its share of raging narcissists.

All of this seems to me underlined by how profoundly unsatisfactory those books that have enjoyed some acclaim as Great American Novels have been from that standpoint, like Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. After all, this 659-page tale that is supposed to sum up New York and America in the '80s gives us . . . a rich man getting into a hit-and-run accident with his mistress that ends up making him the target of a racially charged criminal prosecution driven by the cynical careerism and vindictiveness of activists, liberals and the African-American community, all of whom ultimately get a well-deserved smackdown from the presiding judge in the form of a moralizing lecture on "decency."

This is the story of New York in the '80s, America in the '80s? I couldn't help thinking that this book completely missed the real story of New York and of America in that period, namely a decadent industrialized economy turning down the course of financialization and all that followed from it, not least the explosion of socioeconomic inequality, government tossing the less privileged under the bus, and its associated tensions. What, one might wonder, would a Balzac have done with New York in the '80s? Alas, not only was that truly great author long dead, but there was no literary successor to him anywhere near the American Literary Scene--for however much a Wolfe, who has spoken of Balzac's heir Emile Zola as his literary idol, may have thought himself to be working in the tradition of such, it is hard to think of a work more remote in its preoccupations from this. After all, where a Balzac was attentive to the machinery of modern civilization and its workings (just look at his attention to the machinations of the Baron De Nucingen, and how Eugene de Rastignac makes his ascent from poor law student from a house of ruined aristocrats to the top of French society), and Zola was nothing if not faithful to the Master in that way, had no interest in this side of things, the REALLY BIG STORY OF THE '80s AND THE WORLD IT MADE, whatsoever. Indeed, Wolfe's making the protagonist of this narrative a wealthy bond trader who fancies himself a "master of the universe," then putting him at the center of a scandal not in the world of high finance (or for that matter the scandal that is high finance) but rather a product of comparatively banal personal indiscretions (adultery, panic after a road accident, etc.) can seem like a characteristically postmodernist tease or provocation, making us think this will be a story about one thing, and then instead telling us a story about something else, something very different and far less substantial.

Glaring as the failure is I am sure there were some who pointed this out, but their criticisms were drowned out by the unhinged adulation with which the press lavished Mr. Wolfe, just as they drowned out any attention to the equally glaring fact that in his turning away from class and inequality in favor of race, and then treating that issue in his particular manner (rich White man persecuted by evil minorities and liberals). What we get here frankly appears not as a thoughtful conservative's examination of life's complexities but crude propaganda all too characteristic of man who has made a very, very lucrative career of punching left, and punching down, his whole life.

Admittedly there has in the nearly four decades since the book's release been some reevaluation of the work. However, reflecting the ascent of identity politics, the attention has gone to the book's racial politics, and not its class politics, which the commentariat continues to ignore in a way bespeaking the biases of the intellectuals of the 2020s as those of the 1980s. The so-called "liberals" of the mainstream, after all, are in the end centrists whose politics have never been so far removed from those of the right as both the right and they pretend, far more prone to call out politics in art when the left does it than when the right does it, and if anything highly approving of inattentiveness to such matters as finance, socioeconomic inequality, class, in flight from which they speak ceaselessly about race in the empty and obtuse way that characterizes the mainstream dialogue about that matter as it does all others.