BOOKS
Wolfe Man
A
MAN IN
FULL. By Torn Wolfe. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $28.95.
In
a 1989 essay for
Harper's Magaz ine,
Tom Wolfe called for a revival of
literary realism. "Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis
assumed
that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and
head out into society as a reporter. Zola cal led it documentation, and his
documenting expeditions to the slums,
theJolies,
department stores, whole–
sale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine
decks, notebook and pen in hand became legendary...." In Wolfe's view,
the novel of the second half of our century has lost its appetite for docu–
menting reality, having turned narcissistically inward. He warned novelists
that if they did not regain the appetite for reality, "the literary history of
the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took the rich–
ness of American life as their domain, but also seized the high ground of
Ii terature itself."
Wolfe himself had already displayed his ample gifts as an exemplary
practitioner of the New Journalism in such works as
The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test
and
The Right Stuff.
Shortly before the appearance of his essay, he
had published his first novel,
The Bonfire
if
the Umities-an
example, one
might say, of what a new realism might achieve. Now in
A Man in Full,
eleven years later, Wolfe has again attempted to capture his time with the
objectivi ty and fullness that we associate wi th the great epic novels of the
nineteenth century.
He was of course on to something in criticizing the contemporary
novel for its deficient social awareness, as many of his readers, novelists
among them, acknowledged. There is, however, a glaring omission in his
appreciation of the great realists of the previous centuries (Wolfe mentions
Richardson and Fielding as well as the great nineteenth-century novelists).
If they went beyond personal experience, they also went beyond reportor–
ial documentation. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Zola had a moral
vision of society which their reportorial skil ls served. Dostoevsky's char–
acters have a psychological complexity inaccessibl e to the reporter's eye.
Documenting reality was not an end in itself. Moreover, the essay, valuable
as it is as an antidote to the pervasive narcissism of contemporary fiction,
has served the reception of Wolfe's work poorly, for it has invited his read–
ers to hold him to standards to which he is inadequate. To the extent that
we apply the essay to his own achievement (reading him as haunted by the
presences of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac) , we fail to do justice to his
considerable powers and to his limitations as a novelist.
