Tom Wolfe’s novels are placards of simplicity. His characters are capable of experiencing only one feeling at a time. They are advertisements for the self: Greed! Fear! Hate! Love! Misery! The people who phosphoresce thus are nothing like real people. Instead, they are big, vivid blots of typology: The Overweaning Property Developer! His Divorced First Wife! His Sexy Young Trophy Wife! The Well-Dressed Black Lawyer Who Speaks Too White! The Oafish Football Player! They race through huge, twisted plots, their adventures hammered out in a banging and brassy prose. Wolfe’s writing follows American life like a shoulder to the country’s highway, loyally co-terminous with its flares and crashes. His melodramatic fiction resembles a libretto written by a frustrated novelist who has exceeded his commission.

What is so curious is that Wolfe thinks his fiction is realistic, and has used it as an example of how the American novel should develop. In 1989, he wrote a bouncy manifesto called “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he championed “a highly-detailed realism based on reporting,” like that of his own novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which had appeared two years earlier. He complained that too few novelists were interested “in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life,” and had abandoned realism for what he called “literary games,” minimalism, or various sterile, white-coated, avant-gardisms. Only by vigorously going out and reporting on US society could one bring it back and wrestle it into the novel. Zola had done this with French society. Sinclair Lewis had done this in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. It is reportorial detail which makes novels “engrossing” and “moving,” said Wolfe. It is “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude and make a novel gripping or absorbing.” This is the modern novel’s gift to us, its sentimental education, which we can see in Dickens or in Anna Karenina. “No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles, Moli?re, Racine, Sidney, Spenser or Shakespeare,” Wolfe catechises in a remarkable sentence. But when Little Nell dies in The Old Curiosity Shop, everyone cries.

It is a curiously unliterary mind that has never been strongly moved by a Greek tragedy, let alone a Shakespearean one; and it is an orphaned realism that not only excludes, but actually sets itself against, Shakespearean character. (Who is more Dickensian than Falstaff?) In any case, contemporary American fiction has not been at all negligent in its realist duties. Perhaps a little avant-garde starvation occurred in the 1960s, but since then we have had John Updike’s suburban sediments, John Irving’s infantile robustness, Richard Ford’s New Jersey real estate and Robert Stone’s racy, piratical worldliness. Philip Roth has become Newark’s archivist. And what was Underworld but an old-fashioned Dickensian novel about the bomb? There is far too much realism in American fiction; it has become an idle liberty.

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