November 16, 2004
CONFUSED BY HIS AMBITIONS:
'Moral Suicide,' à la Wolfe (DAVID BROOKS, 11/16/04, NY Times)
It's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel; hundreds of people do it every few years. First, out of the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right, you pick out some he gets wrong (thus establishing your superior hipness). You mention that he obsesses over the superficial details of life while you ignore his moral intent (thus hinting at your own superior depth). Then you graciously allow that many of Wolfe's scenes are hilarious, while lamenting that his characters are not fully developed. Then you call it a day.But since Wolfe takes risks in his novels to describe the moral climate of the age, it seems only fair that we at least take the chance his books offer to debate the more serious things he's trying to get at.
His latest, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is about a young woman who leaves Sparta, a small town in North Carolina, and enters an elite university. She finds all the rules of life there are dissolved: the rules of courtship, the rules of decorum and polite conversation.
The social rules have dissolved because the morality that used to undergird them dissolved long ago. Wolfe sprinkles his book with observations about how the word "immoral" now seems obsolete, about how sophisticated people now reject the idea of absolute evil, about a hypermaterialistic neuroscience professor who can use the word "soul" only when it is in quotation marks.
Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away. Everybody is left swirling about in a chaotic rush of desire and action, without a coherent code to make sense of it all.
Charlotte, like other Wolfe-ian heroes, is caught in a maelstrom.
The reviews of Man in Full were so uniformly prodiuced with that cookie cutter that you had to assume the reviewers hadn't even grasped the moral intent of the book nor its remarkable achievement, so focussed were they on the trivial. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2004 11:29 AM
I enjoyed A Man in Full immensely.
Apart from the bit where the earthquake allows the chap to escape from prison. That was daft.
Apart from the bit where the earthquake allows the chap to escape from prison. That was daft.
Miraculous or otherwise extraordinary escapes from prison are often spoken of in the Bible, specifically the book of Acts. (Including the funniest of them all, when Peter gets sprung from the Antonia thinking it's all a vision, realizes it's for real, and bugs out to a shall-we-say "interesting" reception.) Was Wolfe attempting an echo or parallel of those?
I haven't read the book, but the SF Chronicle review was critical in part because the sex was "not erotic." I thought it amusing that the reviewer didn't consider that, perhaps, that was intentional on Wolfe's part.
Posted by: PapayaSF at November 16, 2004 01:47 PMI haven't read the book, but the SF Chronicle review was critical in part because the sex was "not erotic." I thought it amusing that the reviewer didn't consider that, perhaps, that was intentional on Wolfe's part.
Posted by: PapayaSF at November 16, 2004 01:48 PMI listened to NPR's interview with Wolfe. He said that the sex was deliberately written to not be erotic or romantic, because the sex these kids are having is not erotic or romantic, but rather Tab A Slot B sort of stuff.
Posted by: AML at November 16, 2004 01:57 PMI live in Atlanta, though I'm not a native. Folks I know who are natives or very long term residents tell me they were astonished at how accurately Wolfe managed to peg any number of local traits, social behaviors, etc. They acknowledge faults in Wolfe's picture, but are way more impressed by what he got right.
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Posted by: jean-paul at November 16, 2004 02:29 PMI listened to NPR's interview with Wolfe. He said that the sex was deliberately written to not be erotic or romantic, because the sex these kids are having is not erotic or romantic, but rather Tab A Slot B sort of stuff.
i.e. "Ram meat into meat. Any orifice will do. Pump away. Repeat."
I've concluded (after living my life near Ground Zero of The Sexual Revolution) that the last thing you want in erotica or romance is sex. Sex is like smallpox or Ebola. Once you introduce it into anything, it first takes over completely, then destroys it. Just like a virus infecting a cell.
Posted by: Ken at November 16, 2004 02:29 PMAML:
When have kids ever had erotic or romantic sex ?
It takes a while to learn the art, which is probably why younger women often like (relatively) older guys.
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