The big bad Wolfe

James Wood's review of Tom Wolfe's new novel Back to Blood is a veritable tutorial on Wolfe-bashing.

Wolfe has staked claims to being a "real" novelist and has distanced himself from those who remain cloistered in "enervating" studies and the "filtered formalisms of postmodern prose."

Wolfe grafts himself into the tradition of celebrated writers who, in their effort to represent reality as it is, have valued a certain journalistic approach to fiction writing. As cited by Wood,

In "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" and elsewhere, [Wolfe] has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because american novelists are not looking at the world [...] They have retreated into from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola and Sinclair Lewis, because they have exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. 

Wood appreciates Wolfe's hat-doffing to Zola, but cuts through his observation on the receding of realism from contemporary American fiction.

If anything, American fiction suffers from a glut of realism these days, says Wood. What American fiction needs is "careful artifice" and sufficient "pressure at the level of form and sentence." It is in the department of "artifice" and "form" and "sentences" that according to Wood, Wolfe lacks severely. 

Wolfe is no Zola; at best he is a second-rate Zola and his fiction with their putative adherence to the "real" "reproduces not the real but "realism"--narrative as a set of contrivances and conventions, a style, that, in fact, gets in the way of the real."

Wood believes Wolfe shows immaturity in blindly overvaluing the "real":

His almost religious belief that the novelist's imagination can never rival reality's force results in weak fiction and forceful facts.

Further:

The important details, the one's that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up the sidewalk.

Wolfe, according to Wood, produces "weak" fiction by not quite subjecting the "facts" he wants to represent--as objectively as a camera, one guesses--to the artifices of fiction. In Back To Blood, the details of present-day Miami, the city in which the novel is set, are slavishly reproduced and nothing about Wolfe's Miami surprises the reader.

Tom Wolfe likes to champion "ordinary life." But "ordinary life" Wood says is complex, prismatic and contradictory. With his formulaic eye for the "ordinary" and the "real", Wolfe misses out on the real ordinary life that Wood talks about.

Mere energy of "verisimilitude" isn't everything.