I am charlotte simmons6/12/2023 The latest novel, his third, is the weakest-saddled with the familiar leering terminology (“loamy loins,” “stiffened giblet”) but containing no news more startling than that college students are erotically overheated and intellectually distracted. By now it’s plain that Wolfe’s fiction, while often featuring hilarious set-pieces of social embarrassment and lubricious yearning, is no match for the best of his journalism, which is still as fizzy as when it was first uncorked. In the sixties, he advertised a “New Journalism,” full of narrative punch and “status detail.” (Shades from Defoe to Liebling were curious to learn of these new developments.) Then, in 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay that called for a rambunctious, muscular new “social novel” to embrace the carnival of American life. Not since the days of the manifesto-happy Surrealists has a writer declared his intention to dazzle with such hip-waggling brio as Tom Wolfe.
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