I was shocked when Tom Wolfe died, (May 2018), and also surprised that he was all of 88. He was born in 1930, but he never seemed to be of that generation, but rather perpetually dapper and youthful. I went to a lecture of his in college, and stood in the back near him as he was being introduced. Engaging, joyful, smiling he seemed like a happy guy. Always sartorially attired, with white suits and hats worn at a jaunty angle, he defied every attempt to characterize his vibe. He wasn’t a hippie or beatnik, but he certainly wasn't a straitlaced journalist either. He danced to his own music. Wolfe received a PhD from Yale in American Studies, which could well have just been a synopsis of his books. (Actually though, it was titled, “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942”. Hummm. A hint of what he really thought...)
My first encounter with his writing was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. It was also my first encounter with New Journalism, which he defined later in a non-fiction book called “The New Journalism”. I was smitten by the style, which ignored the distant, uninvolved, “objective” point-of-view, and placed the writer into the story up to their eyeballs. He influenced many writers. Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, and others followed, inserting themselves into their long form, journalistic odysseys. The style was breezy, and as the title suggests “electric”. The events described in “...Acid Test” took place in the early to mid-sixties and introduced a generation to Acid and Ken Kesey.
Wolfe wrote that he never took Acid (LSD) himself, yet his second hand descriptions of its effects set the standard for how the world today looks at the psychedelic experience, with the Peter Max-style wavy, primary colored art, (along with R. Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, and a host of others), underlying the laid back quasi-Buddhist, big Fuck You attitude to authority and social conventions, all transported in VW Vans to Haight Ashbury, overlaid with back to nature life styles. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” was one of the primary drivers of the social revolution among the baby boomers, even though in asides throughout the book, it was a cautionary tale of overdose and mental dissonance.
I read it in college, and it convinced me that it was worth the risks to “drop” acid. I spent the summer of 1972 stoned to the gills on it, and have few, if any, regrets. But, now looking back, I have come to know there were casualties, both on the streets, and among my once healthy bright friends from youth, who never stopped engaging with the “palinopsia”, or “trails”, the series of discrete stationary images trailing in the wake of otherwise normally moving objects. But I was careful, only took the “pure stuff” (orange barrel, or the “Owsley certified” blotter Acid), and never had a “bad trip”. There was a lot of bad stuff out there though, but I was fortunate to have never encountered it. .
Anyway, time marched on, and it took a few decades for me to understand how deeply conservative a product of the Old South Wolfe really was. I don’t think this conservatism was his second-thought delayed reaction to how his book “...Acid Test” was received by the world. I think it was a return to form, to the man raised in Richmond Virginia during the height of Jim Crow.
There was his New York phase, “Radical Chic: and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers” (New Journalism) and “Bonfire of the Vanities” (a novel) which completely skewered the greed and hypocrisy of corrupt Money and White-guilt Politics in the bastions of 1980’s liberal New York City. His disgust with that time and place is visceral, and his writing was brilliantly bombastic. Great reading, but hardly “objective”.
There are others, like “The Right Stuff” about the kind of American men who flew first in space, fearless college educated aviators who drank heavily and cheated constantly on their wives with “astronaut groupies”. And as he almost always portrayed in his work, he had the “other story”, the aside… That was the story of Chuck Yeager, who first broke the sound barrier, and was the most decorated test pilot of that generation, but who was not chosen to be an astronaut because he never went to college, and therefore didn’t have “The Right Stuff”.
“A Man in Full” also has an aside, that other story, tacked on to the main tale of money and power (social and political) in late 20th century Atlanta Georgia. The other story is about Conrad, the son of hippies who went to San Francisco, (perhaps led there by Wolfe's own book). Conrad’s family grew, then fell apart, and he spent his teen years struggling to hold his family, and himself together. (It might have been interesting if he had broken the “Third Wall” and had Conrad’s reading “...Acid Test” - in fact I wonder if it even occurred to Wolfe how he helped create Conrad’s situation…)
Wolfe is a writer of constant, unending “asides'”, breaking off of the main narrative, with big fonts, and social media-like CAPTIALIZATION to tell another somewhat related point - as I am doing here. Netflix has recently released a multipart movie of “A Man in Full” starring Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker (I’ll get to Charlie in a minute). In the Netflix version, Conrad becomes an Atlanta black man who is laid low by circumstance and his own justifiable willfulness. It changes the whole tenor of the story, making the movie almost exclusively about race, which - anyway no one is ever satisfied with a movie version of a book they liked…)
So - Charlie Croker was a man about 60 in the late 90s, who had been a football star at Georgia Tech. He then made millions in real estate, and food processing, divorced his first wife, married a woman half his age. But now because his investments are going south he is being hounded by a bank, (and its repo team, led by a Harvard trained loser who is trapped in a paternity suit and has been taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife). The Repo team surprises Charlie at his quail shooting “plantation” and repossesses his G-5 jet, and that is only the beginning of their threats.
Meanwhile the Black mayor of Atlanta is gearing up for reelection. He is the symbol of the Atlanta “miracle” (“we’re too busy to hate”), which purports to be bringing Blacks and Whites together, while forging ahead to make Atlanta a top-tier city with money and culture. His problem is that the current football star at Georgia Tech is a local black kid who,( it is rumored), supposedly raped the daughter of a prominent (white) local businessman and good friend of Charlie’s. No one has brought charges, but the rapidly spreading rumor is threatening the city’s image (and the mayor’s reelection) by exasperating racial tensions.
The Mayor enlists Charley to help settle the city down, in return for helping call off the Repo dogs... and that all plays out - but the really interesting part of the book is the story of Conrad - the poor white kid who loses his job at one of Charlie’s food warehouses as Charlie’s financial empire crumbles. Conrad lives outside San Francisco, and is doing all the right things - working long hours in a food freezer, taking care of his wife and two kids, struggling with deadbeat relatives, and then like Job, has his world obliterated. Through incredibly bad luck he ends up in jail, but a California earthquake opens the his cell and he escapes and moves to Atlanta and becomes Charlie’s in-home aide (Charlie has knee replacement surgery and needs help getting around. ) Conrad finds a book on the Roman Stoics that he picks up by chance, he becomes a Stoic and converts Charlie to that way of thinking.
If good fiction is about how characters grow and change, then this part of the story is the most important. But I think most people will focus on the Atlanta angle. Wolfe dives into the City and tears it apart in the same way he tore apart NY in “Bonfire of the Vanities”. His depictions are spot-on and hilarious - of “The Piedmont Driving Club”(the social club of the white power structure), of the houses and relative social hierarchy in “Buckhead”, where Charlie, and all his rich friends (as well as his well off ex-wife) live without any sidewalks, (which cause the black servants to walk in the middle of the street on their way to work in the kitchens, and gardens of the Buckhead residents in the morning) - tidbits upon tidbits of gossipy portrayals of insecurity and envy - that is what most people would get out of this monster (787 pages) of a book.
With all that, Wolfe also talks about the Black mayor trying to raise money to “pay” people to vote. He discusses how some people know people who can get poor black residents to shake off their apathy and vote - $30 per voter is the going rate. It is a very cynical look at politics in Atlanta that Wolfe passes off as true, and I am sure one that MAGA America believes. But New Journalism has its downside. I can’t believe Wolfe got close enough to really know that vote buying on that scale was a fact. New Journalism doesn’t require objectivity.
Anyway, as I said, Wolfe was a son of the Jim Crow South, and for all his acerbic wit and close observation of social mores, as far as I know, (and I have not looked close at Wolfe to be honest) he never seemed to be bothered by some of the ramifications of what he wrote.
(For a longer, more complete and perhaps more interesting, view of Wolfe and "A Man in Full" see When Tom Wolfe Wrote Atlanta - Lee )
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