Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Jack Dunphy ·
August 12, 2012 at 5:54am
If the Ricochetti will indulge a brief diversion from all the Paul Ryan talk, I note with glee that a publication date for Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood has finally been announced. The book hits shelves on Oct. 23, and I look forward to it as a kid does to Christmas.
I devour every word Wolfe puts to paper, and if I have a complaint about his writing it's that there isn't enough of it. His last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, may have disappointed some, but not me.
Are there any other Tom Wolfe fans out there looking forward to Oct. 23 as much as I am?
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Jul '12
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Thanks for the update. Big fan.
Mar '12
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Answer: Yes!
Apr '12
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
YES! His last novel was an exact snapshot of university and it's culture. It was too true and depressing but I still enjoyed it.
Aug '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I loved The Bonfire of the Vanities. But that's the only book of Wolfe's I've read. Thanks for letting me know about this book that my husband will be getting me for our wedding anniversary. (We were married on 10/23.)
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I interviewed Wolfe in the green room of a local suburban college a year before "Charlotte" - he was dressed in his trademark attire, relaxed, witty and genial. He had a quality rarely found at that level of success and esteem: a great generosity of spirit towards admirers and people he could otherwise safely dismiss without damage to his reputation or popularity. Like Tom frickin' Wolfe needs a write-up in a Minneapolis paper.
We talked about his two great works of brisk artistic evisceration - "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House," slender volumes that did the fabled kung-fu trick of yanking out the enemy's heart and showing it to him in his last seconds of life. Decades after the publication of the broadsides, both subjects - art and architecture - still animated his brilliant mind.
He's the best model of a cultural conservative, a porcupine in a room of gas-filled balloons. May he live to be 110, but when he passes, he'll get a third of respect accorded to a bilious snake like Gore Vidal. That "speaking truth to power" thing only works in one direction, apparently.
Aug '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I love his non-fiction, as well. His takedowns of modern art and architecture in "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus To Our House" were immensely entertaining for this deplorer of brutally inhuman human creations.
Apr '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Finally! I've been watching out for this for a long time. I hope he hits the date. It's been slipping for quite a while. He captures subcultures so well and has a fairly conservative outlook. He turned me on to stoicism (Man in Full). There is apparently a documentary about the research he did for Back to Blood
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
While we fans of Tom Wolfe begin our two-and-a-half month wait for the publication of Back to Blood--thanks, Jack, for pointing this out--here's an especially lovely one minute and fifteen seconds of the man.
Dec '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Wolfe is brilliant. One of his essays, in fact, fundamentally changed my life. Not in some aesthetic way, but in what I actually do for a living, and how I conceive my place in that world.
The essay was "Sorry But Your Soul Just Died." You can find it here.
If you read the whole thing, the last sentence has a twist to it not unlike the end of The Sixth Sense. But more important.
It is my understanding that many of the themes in that essay were in an unfinished book with a working title of The Human Beast. This book being unfinished, I think, explains the huge gap in his work prior to A Man in Full.
It is, I hope, the book that will come out after he dies, may that day still lie well in the future.
May '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Did anybody else enjoy A Man in Full as much as I did?
May '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
loved A Man in Full, and Sorry But Your Soul Just Died is a terrific essay (it's in his essay collection Hooking Up)
Edited on August 12, 2012 at 8:11amDec '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I found that A Man in Full got better on the subsequent readings, for me. I am not much for magic realism in fiction, and some elements of Conrad's story felt that way to me on first read. Especially the sequence leading to his...I will say "freedom" to keep away from spoilers.
On subsequent reads this objection sort of melted away. I think my problem is that-- for stretches-- Wolfe comes off as such a journalist stylistically that when improbable things happen they seem especially unbelievable. But once I was able to remind myself that I was reading fiction I just adored it.
And, on the flip side, have you ever read a more believable character from the business world than Peepgass? Everything about him was pitch perfect. And the minor characters can be so great, too. Mustafa Gunt and Harry Zale, for example. Saddlebags!
Apr '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I'll have to reread A Man In Full. I reread Bonfire recently after reading about the Travon Martin incident. It's amazing how he accurately predicts how these things unfold in society and the media.
As far as Sorry But Your Soul Just Died, I recall reading Derbyshire's We are Doomed where after being shown some presentation on the brain he says: "You mean I'm just being dragged through life by a lump of meat?"
Wolfe also coined a great phrase: The Right Stuff. I liked the book and movie.
Edited on August 12, 2012 at 11:08amJun '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I love the Dianne Sawyer portrayal in Ambush at Fort Bragg. After the two art criticisms I always referred to my sculptural work as Craft rather than Art. A move which removed the the expectation and necessity to have lengthy BS riddled verbal explanations of the work. For those who have not read them The Painted Word and From the Bauhaus to Our House are both riotously funny. For instance:
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
Jan '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
I've been partial to his non-fiction and loved theThe Right Stuff (read the book after I saw the movie and enjoyed both, for different reasons).
After reading these comments, am thinking I should re-read Bonfires andIn Full.
Mar '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
he is a national treasure, and I'm with Lileks -- massively underappreciated. I read The Right Stuff in college and was hooked on everything he did subsequently. Bonfire came out right as my own Wall Street career was getting started and I thought "wow he must have a mole somewhere at one of the bulge bracket firms" -- it was that incisive.
looking forward to his next.
Aug '10
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Bonfire was like a peek into the future. Al Sharpton should have been finished after that, of course the MSM just built him up from there on . To see him in his whites, perfect Panama hat, and cane is awe-inspiring.
Feb '11
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
There was a plan to make a movie from A Man in Full...wonder what ever happened to it?
Apr '12
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Man in Full is brilliant. The motivations of each character spun out so well.
Re: Tom Wolfe's New Novel Coming Out at Last
Peter,
Thanks for the video clip. For those with considerably more time to spend with Mr. Wolfe, a three-hour interview with Brian Lamb is available here, at the C-SPAN video archive.