Hooking Up

by Tom Wolfe

The book was also going to go behind the TV screen and lay bare the world of television news; and in due course I developed a plot twist in which a network magazine show would undertake an elaborate sting operation in order to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who are suspects in a murder case. So now I spent another eternity busying myself with network-news practices in New York and Army life at Fort Bragg and on the gaudy strip outside it, Bragg Boulevard. Eventually I did get something out of all this effort, a novella called Ambush at Fort Bragg that may be found elsewhere in these pages (175-245). But what did it have to do with A Man in Full, whose action takes place in Georgia and California? Nothing.

  God knows it took me long enough to do the reporting on matters that did turn out to bear directly upon A Man in Full: Southern plantation life today, commercial real estate development, banking and bankruptcy, the modern working class, prison life, Asian immigrants, black professional and political life in Atlanta, Atlanta’s social structure, manners, and mores, plus those of the 7-Eleven Land east of Oakland, California. I went to see the Santa Rita jail in Alameda County, California; duet apartments in Pittsburg, California; Sikhs and Eritreans in Oakland; and Vietnamese in Oakland and in Chamblee, Georgia, which is an old, erstwhile-rural town just east of Atlanta now swollen with Asian and Mexican immigrants. My Vietnamese did all right, but my Sikhs made it into only four paragraphs in the entire book; my Eritreans, only one.

  I emphasize these reporting stints for a reason beyond trying to explain why the novel took me so long. In 1973, while I was still exclusively a writer of nonfiction, fourteen years before I published my first novel, I wrote an essay on what was known back then as “the New Journalism.” In it, I said that the American novel was in bad shape, languishing from an otherworldly preciousness, but that there was “a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel or perhaps documentary novel,” a novel “of intense social realism based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New Journalism.”

  In 1987 I published my first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, with the hope of proving my point. Did I? Only others can answer that question. All I can say is that I was sufficiently emboldened by the novel’s reception to write an essay for Harper’s entitled “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast.” I argued that by now the American novel had deteriorated into a “weak, pale, tabescent” condition so grave, its very survival depended on somehow sending “a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas”—I had already identified Zola as the giant of the journalistic or documentary novel—“out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours to reclaim it as a literary property.” Since that was precisely what I had done in “documenting” (Zola’s term) and then writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, I shouldn’t have been surprised when some people found my words self-serving. Nevertheless, that was what I believed, and, in any case, I was already deep into the reporting for what I hoped would be another novel of Zolaesque realism, A Man in Full.

  As the years went by—two, four, five, eight, ten, and, finally, eleven—the suspense intensified. Not, I hasten to add, in the world outside, which seems to be able to successfully contain its excitement, if any, in such matters, but in me; the suspense down in my solar plexus, I assure you, was terrific. The years had been mounting, and given my own preaching about realism or “naturalism” (another of Zola’s terms), so had the stakes. My publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, upped them a bit more by announcing a first printing of 1.2 million for my new book when it finally came out in November 1998.

  My first inkling of how A Man in Full might be received by critics came when Vanity Fair assigned the writer David Kamp to do a story on The Man Who Spent Eleven Years Writing One Book and got hold of a Xeroxed copy of most of the 2,300-page manuscript. Kamp’s lead went:

  “He strides through the vestibule, a lean, courtly figure resplendent in—

  “No, no no! No scene setting! To the chase: is the book any good?

  “Relax, it is. The 11-year wait since The Bonfire of the Vanities was worrisome, but the new one, which is called A Man in Full, works quickly to allay fears that Tom Wolfe had only one decent novel in him … Lovely to have you back, sir.”

  So I relaxed, for the first time in weeks. What ensued was all that a man who had just spent eleven years writing one book could dare hope for.

  Before I continue with this story—and it is a story with a plot—and the plot soon thickens—please let me assure you of one thing: I realize as clearly as anyone else how unseemly it is for a writer to be anything but insouciant about book reviews, publicity, and sales figures. Rimbaud set the bar for insouciance about as high as it is ever likely to go when, in his early thirties, finding himself hailed by critics as the most important poet in France, he replied, “Merde pour la poésie.” But Arnold Bennett, the British novelist, author of a wildly successful book, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), wasn’t half bad, either, when he said, “I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.” So please believe me when I say I am only going into these crass matters—reviews, publicity, sales—in the case of A Man in Full because they are essential to understanding our story.

  First, the reviews. Every publication that people immediately check to gauge a new book’s success or failure was generous with praise, more generous, to tell the truth, than I could have ever hoped, starting with gauge number one, the all-important New York Times Book Review. Over the years I’ve come off well in the Times now and then, and I’ve taken my drubbings, but this round, I must say, went my way. The reviewer, Michael Lewis, wrote: “The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written—not merely by a contemporary American novelist but by any American novelist”; and he added: “The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.” In The Wall Street Journal Andrew Ferguson called it “a masterpiece” and “a greater achievement than ‘Bonfire’: richer, deeper, more touching and more humane.” In Newsweek Malcolm Jones said: “Right now, no writer—reporter or novelist—is getting it [the Zeitgeist] on paper better than Tom Wolfe.” In the daily New York Times, Michiko Kakutani didn’t care for the book’s ending, but in light of what she had to say about the rest of A Man in Full, I certainly couldn’t complain. The pièce de résistance, however, was a long review and profile by the highly respected Paul Gray in Time, not to mention my picture, which was on the magazine’s cover. “No summary of A Man in Full,” wrote Gray, “can do justice to the novel’s ethical nuances and hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction?”

  On second thought, I have to mention that cover of Time, after all. Honestly, I do blush easily, and I pledge you my word that I go into the following only because it is essential to understanding what other people were about to do. In any field in the United States, the news that So-and-so “made the cover of Time” has always had a unique ring to it; and over the preceding two decades the picture of a novelist on the cover of Time had become a rarity. But there I was, not only on the cover, but on the cover wearing a white double-breasted suit and vest and a white homburg and holding a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a white walking stick in the other. The headline said in big letters: TOM WOLFE WRITES AGAIN. Beneath, in smaller letters, it said: “The novelist with the white stuff is back with A Man in Full. More than a million copies, before anyone has read a word!” Not only that, for the first time in its history Time printed its logo, the famous TIME, in white against a white background, with only a gray undershading to let you know the four letters were even there. The entire cover, graphics and all, became an overture to “the novelist with the white stuff.” I didn’t realize it at that moment, but this was premonition music, a
s they say in cinema circles, for what was about to occur.

  And sales? This is the most embarrassing subject of all for me to be talking about, and I do apologize, but I have no choice; as we are about to see, others insisted on bringing it up. Sales of A Man in Full skyrocketed from the moment it reached the stores. The Wall Street Journal ran a feature on the book’s depiction of the city of Atlanta with the headline “Tom Wolfe Burns Down Atlanta,” and former Atlanta mayor Sam Massell announced he was withdrawing an invitation to me to speak before a business group, the Buckhead Coalition. So I didn’t know what to expect when I reached Atlanta on my book tour the following week. They were waiting for me—in lines at the bookstores. My first night in town, at the Borders bookstore in Buckhead, I signed books for 2,300 people in four hours. Borders is a vast place, but the line spilled out onto the sidewalk on Lenox Road. The book sold so rapidly, it didn’t have to climb its way up the New York Times bestseller list. It jumped on at number one and stayed at number one for ten weeks, throughout the Christmas season and well beyond. It sold in hardcover like a paperback bestseller, at a rate three to four times that of the usual number-one bestselling hardcover. Not only did the huge first printing sell out, but so did seven subsequent editions of 25,000 each.

  It’s uncomfortable being compelled to sum things up so baldly, but here, in as few words as possible, is what we have: a critically acclaimed novel selling at an astonishing clip in a blaze of publicity. The scene is now set for the extraordinary thing that happened next. I have searched, and I can come up with nothing else like it in all the annals of American literature. Three big-name American novelists, heavy with age and literary prestige—John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving—rose up to denounce A Man in Full. Three famous old novelists rousing themselves from their niches in literary history to declare a particular new novel anathema—if anything even remotely comparable had ever occurred before, it had certainly escaped my attention.

  John Updike, who was sixty-six, went on for four pages in The New Yorker before concluding with considerable solemnity that A Man in Full was not to be taken as literature but as “entertainment,” not even—he continued, as if to make sure his readers understood the crucial distinction between a pleasant experience and the higher things—not even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a “journalist.” Henry James, said Updike, has taught us that literature must be “exquisite,” and this journalist, Wolfe, had “failed to be exquisite.” Norman Mailer, who was seventy-five, went on for six pages in The New York Review of Books—six pages in a newspaper-size journal dense with print—to reach the verdict that A Man in Full was not to be taken as literature but as a “Mega-bestseller.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a “journalist” who “no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did!)” but has moved away and now “lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers.”

  “Us?” I remember saying to myself. “Did he say us? Who is us?”

  Frankly, I was amazed, not that the two of them didn’t approve, but that at this stage of their lives they had taken the time. “My God, those two old piles of bones!” I said to the reporters who began clamoring for interviews. “They’re my age!”

  I was sixty-eight. I knew how it must have drained them. How could they have spent those untold hours, ground out those thousands and thousands of words—the two old codgers had gone on for pages—pages!—to review a novel? How could our two senior citizens have found the energy in those exhausted carcasses of theirs? In interviews Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip.

  The way John Irving, who was fifty-seven, joined his fellow oldsters in this obsession with A Man in Full did not involve such debilitating toil, but his emotional toll may have been even greater. Irving threw a temper tantrum on television.

  He was in Toronto appearing on the show Hot Type, plugging a book about how he had retreaded his novel The Cider House Rules for the movies, when Hot Type’s adept and provocative young host, Evan Solomon, brought up A Man in Full, knowing full well the rise it had gotten out of Updike and Mailer. I found the next five minutes riveting when I got a glimpse later on videotape. Irving’s face turned red. His sexagenarian jowls shuddered. He began bleeping. It was all the show’s technicians could do to hit the bleep button fast enough. “Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his bleeping books! Try to read one bleeping sentence! You’ll gag before you can finish it! He doesn’t even write literature—he writes … yak! He doesn’t write novels—he writes journalistic hyperbole! You couldn’t teach that bleeping bleep to bleeping freshmen in a bleeping freshman English class!”—and on and on in that mode. It was spellbinding. I don’t pretend to be a lip reader, but it took no particular expertise to decode bleepos that began with such bitterly lower-lip-bitten fs. Evan Solomon kept covering his face with his hand and smiling at the same time, as if to say, “How can the old coot make such a spectacle of himself—but, wow, it’s wonderful television!”

  Evan liked it so much, in fact, he called and asked me if I would like to appear on Hot Type and respond. I told him if he would be so kind as to come to New York for the taping, I’d be delighted. So he did, and the tape rolled, and he asked me:

  “One of the foremost novelists in the United States, John Irving, says you simply can’t write. You’re not a writer. Does that make you feel bad?”

  “Bad?” I heard myself saying. “Why should I feel bad? Now I’ve got all three.”

  All three?

  “Larry, Curly, and Moe. Updike, Mailer, and Irving. My three stooges.”

  Stooges?

  Seemed like the right word to me. A stooge is literally a straight man who feeds lines to the lead actor in a play. My three stooges were so upset by A Man in Full, they were feeding me lines I couldn’t have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for them.

  “Are you saying they’re envious of your success? Is that all it is?”

  By no means. Granted, the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as A Man in Full, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor. “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens,” I told Evan. “I think he would like to be compared to Dickens. But what writer does he see now, in the last year, constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe. It must gnaw at him terribly.” And who was it who had “made the cover of Time”? Knowing my three stooges, that all by itself would have been enough to send them ballistic. “It must gall them a bit that everyone—even them—is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.” But no, I didn’t think it was jealousy in the simple sense of displeasure at a rival’s success.

  Did I think there was any personal animosity at work here, any old scores that hadn’t been settled?

  Oh, people had suggested that, but I didn’t think so. Years ago, when I was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, back before I had ever written a book, I had reviewed a novel of Mailer’s, An American Dream, and called it a clumsy paint-by-the-numbers knockoff of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (Which it was, or else Jung’s concept of synchronicity is truer than he ever knew.) About that same time, I had made fun of Updike in a couple of newspaper articles. (One, it so happens, is available on pages 255-87 of the book before you.) But all that was decades ago. With Irving the screen was an absolute blank. We had no old scores, settled or otherwise.

  Then what was it?

  Something much more obvious, I told Evan. A Man in Full had frightened them. They were shaken. It was as simple as that. A Man in Full was an example—an alarmingly visible one—of a possible, indeed, the likely new direction in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literature: the intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social re
ality of America today, right now—a revolution in content rather than form—that was about to sweep the arts in America, a revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.

  All three had risen up as one to make not merely an accusation but a plea. The plea was that A Man in Full be regarded as … out of bounds. Each cry was the same. Each of our seniors had cried: “Anathema!”

  Updike had said: Look, we’re not dealing with literature here, not even “literature in a modest aspirant form,” but, rather, “entertainment.” Irving had said: Look, we’re not even dealing with a novel here, much less literature, we’re dealing with “journalistic hyperbole,” with “yak,” with bleep. Mailer had said: Look, we’re not dealing with any sort of legitimate creature here, but with a bastard, a “Mega-bestseller” whose dissolute creator “no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did!).” Us. And who was us? Why, us was we who belong to “the literary world,” in Mailer’s terminology. A Man in Full and its author inhabited another place entirely, “the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers.” In other words, Wolfe and his accursed book were … beyond the pale, a pale (originally synecdoche for fence) being an area of permissible conduct with definite boundaries. That which is beyond the pale does not count … and us members of the literary world do not have to be measured by it.

  Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Zola, Ibsen, and Shaw, not to mention Mark Twain, all of whom were enormously popular in their own day—Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola published their novels serially in magazines—Ibsen and Shaw gloried in their box-office appeal—all would have been highly amused by this attempt to place literature here on this side of the fence and entertainment and popularity over there on the other. How could my three stooges ever have maneuvered themselves into such a ludicrous position? That wasn’t hard to explain. You only had to think of the sort of novels they had been writing.