The Man in White

When American culture seems to go haywire, Tom Wolfe is usually there to tell us about it.

love Tom Wolfe. Maybe too much. Whenever some big bizarro thing happens in what he calls ''the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000,'' I want him to give it his electric Kool-Aid acid test. I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhaustive reporting, turn the labels inside out and the hypocrites upside down, skewer the puffed-up phonies and pruned-down lemon tarts, and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his.

I am dying to know, as the Time Warner-AOL merger careers along, how he would satirize the fascinating Henry James collision of the old print world and the new dot-com world, the anxious wriggling food chain of Bob Pittman, Steve Case, Gerald Levin and Ted Turner. How would he limn all these awful dinner parties where Old Media kisses up to New Media, with Old Media desperately trying to be more casual by casting off its tie, and more hip by droning on in tiresome digibabble? What would Wolfe make of the dread synergy, the bumper-car game of Disney values and ABC values and Leonardo DiCaprio's star turn as ABC White House correspondent? And how gleefully the Wolfe-man could have carved up the chundering, blundering parade of House Torquemadas in the risible and overblown impeachment scandal, and the bevy of leech women, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp.

When Wolfe wrote ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' in the mid-1980's as a column for Rolling Stone, he had a hard time getting in front of his satire. He couldn't mock the masters of the universe as fast as they could make mockeries of themselves on the front page. By the time we got to the Molière bedroom farce of Clinton and Lewinsky, America had grown so wacky and gossipy and shameless and solipsistic and materialistic, satire was simply redundant. ''Saturday Night Live'' struggles weekly to parody pols like George W. Bush. But how can you write mordant material better than W.'s own, like his irritated response to Gail Sheehy's claim in Vanity Fair that he is dyslexic: ''The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never interviewed her.''



Jacques Lowe/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Tom Wolfe
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Unfortunately, ''Hooking Up'' has hardly any new Wolfe, and even the new tidbits feel reheated, being mostly arguments about why he was right about this or that, and iterations of his exhortations to wade out into the human beast and report. The title piece, published in The Tatler last year, is a millennial survey, Wolfe crying wolf about our monetary and sexual excesses. The tone is oddly unpleasant, churlish and stuffy, and the info not particularly fresh.

''In the year 2000,'' he writes, ''it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades' standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter's -- in short, she was no longer sexy.'' Actually, that has been standard practice for a few decades now. And Wolfe already spent a lot of pages in his 1998 best seller, ''A Man in Full,'' obsessing on first wives with thick backs getting discarded. That stuff about subcutaneous packing gives me the creeps.

He has a few paragraphs on teenagers hooking up, as in getting down, and then concludes that ''the continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men.'' That is another big ''Duh.''

His vintage pieces include the saga of the guys who invented the Internet (Al Gore is not included, for some reason), the Ayn Rand-like struggle of the late sculptor Frederick Hart and ''Tiny Mummies!,'' Wolfe's hilarious 1965 slam dance on the mummified New Yorker, in which William Shawn is presented as his own Mini-Me, or ''mini-momaniac,'' turning Harold Ross's witty, vibrant magazine into an eccentric and pretentious glass menagerie. (Long after Wolfe's piece, it turned out that the amber atmosphere nurtured by Mr. Shawn -- always whispered, reverentially -- bred some writers so Olympian that they no longer felt required to observe the niceties of nonfiction in nonfiction writing.) ''Humility has come to be a very important thing here,'' Wolfe wrote, ''and lately The New Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically, that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college. After the age of 40, one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to hard-finished worsteds.''

Even after the cascade of bitter and nostalgic books written about the magazine by Shawn protégés, Wolfe's sendup is still a scaldingly funny, perceptive portrait of the weirdo Whisper Zone, horsehair-stuffing days of Shawn. Fury over the piece, which ran in New York, The Herald Tribune's magazine, reached from Walter Lippmann to President Johnson's aide Richard Goodwin to J. D. Salinger, who burst out of his reclusiveness to send a furious telegram to Jock Whitney, The Trib's owner and publisher, but Wolfe weathered it because he was lucky enough to work for an editor whom I was once lucky enough to work for at The Washington Star -- James Bellows, a newspaperman with verve and bravery in equal measures, who always backed up his reporters and who loved nothing better than to do a joyous rain dance in a hail of criticism.

In an afterword written for this book, Wolfe speculates that New Yorker acolytes freaked out at his piece because he said how close Shawn was to his star writer, Lillian Ross. In her 1998 memoir, ''Here but Not Here,'' Ross wrote about her 40-year affair with Shawn and described in rapturous detail the sexual charms and sensual tastes of the Little One we had presumed to be so ascetic. (He lusted for Whoopi Goldberg, Madonna and fat, busty women, ''the fatter the better.'')

BOOK EXCERPT
"By the year 2000, the term 'working class' had fallen into disuse in the United States, and 'proletariat' was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky."

-- from the first chapter of 'Hooking Up'
Wolfe calls Ross's offering ''embarrassing,'' and says it never occurred to him, back in '65, that the relationship was more than editor-protégée. ''If someone had come to me back then and shown me chapter and verse of their 'affair' -- I wouldn't have believed it,'' he writes. ''I'm sorry, but they weren't affair material.''

''Hooking Up'' has only one previously unpublished essay, ''My Three Stooges.'' Not since Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman have we had such an amusing literary catfight as the one that began when John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving trashed ''A Man in Full.'' Wolfe bites back, calling Updike and Mailer ''two old piles of bones,'' ''two old codgers'' and ''exhausted carcasses.'' ''I was 68,'' he writes, venomously, recalling the Grumpy Old Men spleenfest that his book sparked. ''I knew how it must have drained them. . . . 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.''

He says his three attackers were ''encapsulated in their neurasthenia,'' and had ''wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them,'' by ''turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history.''

IN defending his own brand of reported novels, which he says are in the tradition of Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Balzac and Zola, Wolfe -- who probably could have predicted the new rage for ''Survivor''-style reality programming -- offers this polemic: ''Instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., 'the literary world,' or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed thoughts of Jesus.''

''The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence but of anorexia,'' he declares. ''It needs . . . food. . . . It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye.'' I'm not sure we should be aiming to achieve the artistry of moviemakers, since Hollywood can barely seem to turn out any movies anyone wants to see. But I agree with the general pulse-of-the-beast idea. And any time Tom Wolfe wants to take a fresh bite of our lurid carnival, I'll be there.

Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed page columnist for The Times.

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