Reply to Tom Wolfe

The Chronicle of Higher Education

To the Editor:

It seems that Tom Wolfe is a victim of identity theft.

Someone using his name published a letter ("Tom Wolfe Replies to Robert S. Boynton on 'The New New Journalism,'" The Chronicle Review, April 15) responding to an article I wrote ("Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience," The Chronicle Review, March 4). In short, "Tom Wolfe" wrote a parody, deftly employing some of the signature stylistic flourishes of the real Tom Wolfe: hysterical narration, outlandish hyperbole, deliberate misreading, false rhetorical questions, baseless hypotheticals, etc. In fact, "Tom Wolfe" did such a good job that he had me going for a while. Until, that is, I realized that "Wolfe" had made so many errors that the letter couldn't possibly have been crafted by the famously fastidious writer.

The first clue to this deception is that in his search for anything that might discredit my argument, "Tom Wolfe" distorts the meaning of the last line of a long paragraph introducing a few of the writers I discuss in my book, The New New Journalism. He reads the line "Michael Lewis --Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (W.W. Norton, 2003) --chronicles big business" to mean that I am identifying Lewis's most recent book, rather than its author, with the subject of "big business."(Moneyball is, however, a book about the business of a game, the business of baseball -- and Lewis is a writer who has, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the baseball diamond, chronicled the world of American business.) Whoever this "Wolfe" is, his reading skills are abysmal. It isn't an enormous error, but poor "Tom Wolfe" prattles on about it for four paragraphs, slipping in an obvious parody of the real Wolfe's style -- "gibber-gibber ape-shrieking" -- so dated and awkward that it couldn't possibly have been written by him.

It gets worse. "Tom Wolfe" continues in this vein, screeching about the way "he" uses Weber's notion of "status," when it would be clear to any reader -- even the addled, fictional graduate student "Wolfe" employs as a rhetorical device -- that it is not Tom Wolfe's definition of status I take issue with, but the way he employs it in his work. Of course, status can mean "the entire range of ways in which human beings rank one another," as he puts it, but my point is that Wolfe (and here I mean the real Tom Wolfe) tends to focus his considerable reporting skills only on the status details of those who are wealthy and white (ethnic minorities and the poor are usually relegated to caricatures).

Finally, "Tom Wolfe" makes an elementary factual error when he questions my statement that Wolfe considers "ethnic and ideological subcultures" to be "terra incognita" -- an assertion I drew directly from a 1974 interview with the real Tom Wolfe ("I've completely relished this terra incognita, these subcultures, these areas of life that nobody wanted to write about," Conversations With Tom Wolfe, Page 39). For reasons known only to him, "Wolfe" then launches into a free-associating discussion of neuroscience ("Whose hookah has the elf been smoking?"). Perhaps a CAT scan is in order.

And on it goes. Anyway, as you can see from the above, there is little danger that any student of Wolfe’s would mistake the letter for his work. Tom Wolfe couldn’t possibly have written such an unworthy epistle. Could he?

Sincerely,

Robert S. Boynton New York University

Source: www.newnewjournalism.com