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A L AN TRACHTENBERG
WHAT'S NEW?
THE NEW JOURNALISM. By Tom Wolfe, with an anthology edited by
Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. Harper and Row. $10.95.
The New J ournalism
heralds an epos. Fiction is dead. The
novel is out as " literature's main event." Long live New Journalism.
Twenty-three "examples of the genre" make up Part Two; two of them
are by Tom Wolfe, who also takes up all the space in Part One.
It
is really
Wolfe's book throughout : his blurbs present each selection, calling roll
like an announcer at the figh ts. "Hunter Thompson's career as a 'Gonzo
J ournalist' began after he wrote his first book,
The Hell's Angels, a
Strange and Terrible Saga.
Infuriated because
Playboy
wouldn't run a
story they had commissioned ..." The blurbs tell the story of the story.
And they point out the thing to notice. "The up-shot was a manic, high
adrenal first-personal style in which Thompson's own emotions continu–
ally dominate the story." Or they thrust bits of know-how at the reader,
making sure he doesn't miss such fine points of the new genre as "any
time a nonfiction writer uses an autobiographical approach, he is turning
himself into a character in the story." This shrewd observation gets us
into Mailer's contribution,
Armies of the Night--"quite
a charming
book," considering that the author is normally a " very shy reporter,
reluctant to abandon the safety of the Literary Gentlemen of the Grand–
stand. "
Your true New Journalist has long since abandoned the safe grand–
stand. Only a decade or so back you joined a newspaper to see the world,
thinking all the while that the job was "a motel you checked into over–
night on the road to the final triumph. The idea was to get a job on a
newspaper, k eep body and soul together, pay the rent, get to know 'the
world,' accumulate 'experience,' perhaps work some of the fat off your
style--then at some point, quit cold, say goodbye to journalism, move
into a shack somewhere, work nigh t and day for six months, and light up
the sky with the final triumph. The final triumph was known as The
Novel. " Then sometime in the sixties the tables turned. Mysteriously the
novel drifted from its path, turned its back on "experience," on how
people really live, and became "Neo-Fabulism"- - " a puzzling sort of fi c–
tion . . . in which characters have no background, no personal history."
Meanwhile, feature writers for mass-circulation newspapers and their
Sunday supplements were making an extraordinary discovery: " It just
migh t be possib le to write journalism that would . .. rcad like a novel."
For Wolfe himself the moment came in 1963, unexpectedly, screndipi–
tously. "A great many pieces of punctuation and typography [were]
