In Sheep's Clothing

TOM WOLFE OOZES expense account lunches. To watch him move in a restaurant, to hear him talk--even to read his stories--is to know that this man pays for very few meals. He's not worried about money, nothing as simple as that. No, Wolfe wants control, the security of knowing that he has mastered the system, and can knead it to serve his desires.

A big blue limosine carried Wolfe around during his latest trip to Boston, a pilgrimage to the Boston Globe book fair to promote his latest anthology, In Our Time. and the paperback version of his bestseller, The Right Stuff. The limo suits him fine, he tells a passenger, but he would rather be at home in New York City. "I've become a terrible, doting daddy," he says, the fine purr of Virginia landowner still evident in his voice. A daughter has arrived in his life since his last conversation with the passenger. "Forty days old," he says; his pride mixes with a chuckle about the obscurity of the landmark.

Successful, married, relentlessly domesticated, Wolfe sits serenely among the American pop-intellectual gentry. He has lots of money, and, after The Right Stuff, an invigorated reputation with the critics. He revels in his success, seems actually to enjoy it--none of the tortured artist pose for him. Yet for all the success and the play at exuberance, middle age has crept into his writing. The writing itself hasn't changed much--the sentences still go on for several multi-adjectived, vocabulary-taxing, punctuation-packed clauses--but the narrator has changed entirely. Wolfe has stepped away from his subjects into the sound-proof booth of cynicism. In other words, so long New Journalism.

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Wolfe stood among its founding fathers. In fact, the 1973 anthology ("The New Journalism") he edited and for which he wrote an introduction served as a pivotal milestone: the New Journalism's first look back at itself. And look back Wolfe did, with an affectionate and thoughtful and funny essay on the form's roots and early days. His generation's attitude towards the novel was the foundation: "It's hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the 1960s. The Novel was no literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever." And it was inaccessible. Who wanted to publish these newspaper reporters' bilge anyway?

So they--Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Wolfe and a few others--began adopting the techniques of the novel in the features they wrote for the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement, or Esquire or anywhere. Symbolism, multiple perspectives, even self-indulgence: it was all there. What's more, it was all true. Actual Journalism. These journalists staged a shocking coup d'etat against their respected big brothers, the novelists. Soon the oldsters wanted to play, too.

"Saturation Reporting," as Wolfe called it, was the crucial innovation. If the writer could move inside (and sometimes in with) his subject so that the two of them felt absolutely natural together, only then could the journalist begin to unearth the story. The Literary Gentleman With A Seat in the Grandstand gave way to George Plimpton playing football with the Detroit Lions. Novelists fumed. But some signed up, people like Gore Vidal, William Styron and especially Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who began to use journalistic techniques in their writing.

YET FOR ALL his insight into the birth, care and feeding of this new genre, Wolfe avoided mention of its central concern. The New Journalists cared about their subjects. Sometimes the journalists hated their subjects, but they always tried to understand, and get inside. This leap of empathy--even if it wasn't necessarily sympathy--separated the new breed from their predecessors up in the bleachers.

But Wolfe has returned to his seat. The new collection of articles and cartoons reveals the author as social commentator and trend observer, ogling the pathetic goons and trendies who inhabit America. The centerpiece of the collection is an article that appeared in Esquire last year called "Entr'actes and Canapes," a series of short takes and pot shots about or at assorted trends, events and people of the seventies. Wolfe snipes at everything and everyone: the digital calculator, designer jeans, Roots, Jonestown, Woody Allen and the fall of South Vietnam.

"In 1972," Wolfe writes, "the most exquisite form of torture imaginable would have been to have found yourself locked inside a Seaboard railroad roomette just north of Jacksonville on the Miami-to-New York run with the radiator sizzling in an amok, red-mad psychotic overboil and George McGovern sitting beside you, telling you his philosophy of government." Boom! "In the late seventies there was the bottle of Perrier, a French soda water. The fashionable American expense-account lunch drink became lighter and lighter, but not cheaper and cheaper. The soda water sold for $2.50 a glass in Manhattan restaurants." Zap! "The success of People was due to three things: (1) it always showed you other people's living rooms...(2) it always showed you where other people's libidos were plugged in (3) it was a print annex to the TV set." Pow! American popular culture comes splattering to earth like a gunned-down F-14 fighter.

Wolfe's eye for the ridiculous is just as sharp as ever (he hates sidewalk stereos); his flair for language just as captivating (Jimmy Carter is an "unknown down-home matronly-voiced Sunday-schoolish soft-shelled watery-eyed sponge-backed Millenial lulu"). But all the caring is gone. Wolfe doesn't let his subjects hang themselves anymore (as he did so exquisitely in "Radical Chic," his description of Leonard Bernstein's fund-raiser for the Black Panthers); he must open the trap-door himself.

The change began with The Painted Word in 1975, Wolfe's broadside against modern art--virtually all modern art--because it existed, he said, solely to perpetuate art criticism. Without criticism, the art was nothing. Except ugly. Wolfe did have a point, but he stretched it to ludicrous proportions to prove himself correct. He crossed over the line to mockery, and the result was more Mencken (bad Mencken, that is) than Mailer (good Mailer).

Wolfe's New Journalistic heritage resurfaced last year in The Right Stuff, a book he worked on for eight years. The book showed Saturation Reporting at its best but the empathy was gone; enter the solemn sneer. Wolfe spent lots of time with the astronauts, talked to them for hours, but never in The Right Stuff does he show them anywhere near the amount of respect that he displayed toward stock car racer Junior Johnson or the girls in the Women's House of Detention, both subjects of '60s Esquire articles.

Success made it more and more difficult for Wolfe to put himself on the line with his subjects. When people begin to look to you as a contemporary observer of the popular scene ("social secretary to the intellectuals," as Wolfe likes to call himself) you're less likely to risk paying attention and more likely to ridicule. So Wolfe ridicules. The style remains, the souped-up narrative hectoring, but nothing else.

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"I'm writing a piece for Harper's now on architecture," he says, adding, "a sort of Painted World of architecture." He has trouble coming up with any buildings he likes: "I'm a fan of Saarinen," he says, and "a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright works." Then nothing. He has no trouble detailing what the doesn't like. That's the purpose. But architecture can't hold his entire attention at the moment. With an almost embarrassed laugh, he says, "I'm writing a novel of all things." After almost 20 years of wading in the new literary form he helped create, he's abandoning it, going back to find the dream of his youth: the Novel, big game. Wolfe announces his new projects as if it were a surprise, but, given the direction of his work, it seems the most natural thing in the world.