I write in praise of Tom Wolfe.

He is, I know, a hard guy to like -- a smug, snooty patrician in a silly white suit with a look on his face that says I’m better than you are, and we both know it.  I mean, what kind of an intellectual braggart can claim in a single working lifetime to have both created a new literary genre and resuscitated an old one?   

Thirty-five years ago Wolfe (rightly) accused American journalism of being unequal to the task of chronicling the weird place America had become.  He and several of his New York cronies were experimenting with a brand of scene-setting, storytelling journalism that better suited the times, he said.  Never mind that others, many others, had been practicing the form long before he came on the scene (anyone for John Hersey? Truman Capote?  Daniel freaking DeFoe?), Wolfe claimed ownership and exercised the father’s prerogative:  He named the form -- New Journalism – and proceeded to practice it, in newspapers, magazines and series of oddly titled books, through the late 1960s into the late 70s. 

Okay, so he didn’t invent New Journalism. And claiming that he did showed both an overblown ego and an underdeveloped sense of history (and this from a guy with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale).  But there’s no denying that Wolfe was one of New Journalism’s consummate practitioners.  From his hyperkinetic re-creation of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country bus trip (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), which captured ‘60s counterculture like no other piece of writing ever has, to his astute exploration of the inner world of early astronauts (The Right Stuff), Wolfe has shown himself a master of subculture reporting.  His eye is keen; his wit is sharp, his approach fresh, vibrant and outrageous.  Almost always, his intelligence trumps his arrogance. 

Kurt Vonnegut called him a genius. Terry Southern proclaimed him, in the argot of times past, a “groove and a gas.”  He is “more than brilliant… more than urbane, suave, trenchant…Tom Wolfe is a goddamn joy,” gushed one critic.  To that I say:  Yes, yes, yes.  And so I am inclined to forgive him both his lapse of memory about the origins of the genre he claims as his own and his, as Anatole Broyard so cuttingly put it, his “cheap capital letters, adjectives yoked together by violence and spastic punctuation.” Pish, posh.  The man is dazzling. 

At the top of his game twenty years ago, Wolfe changed direction, first publishing an inflammatory essay proclaiming that the Great American Novel was not all that great anymore -- and then setting out to personally rectify the sad state of American letters.  What made him dazzling as a reporter now made him equally dazzling as a novelist.  Bonfire of the Vanities may have erred on the side of parody (and been damaged by a horrendous film adaptation), but A Man in Full was pitch-perfect and his new one, I am Charlotte Simmons, is both as flawed as critics say and sinfully, outrageously good.  

So he hasn’t, as promised, single-handedly resurrected the Balzac-ian novel.  But he writes some of the smartest social commentary around.  And he has done something that few others have:  He has successfully, masterfully translated his skills as a reporter into a career as a major novelist.  In fact, it’s clear that he remains indebted to his reportorial past.  To prepare for I am Charlotte Simmons, for example, Wolfe did all the legwork he would have done had he been working on a piece of New Journalism.  He spent significant time at a number of college campuses around the country, observing, listening, interviewing, part sociologist, part cultural anthropologist, part journalist, immersing himself in the strange and disturbing subculture that is American college life in the 21st century.

His unsparing, ruthlessly amusing and, for those of us in the know, dead-on, portrayal of everyone from college athletes to college intellectuals to PC professors is the work of a man in full.  His biting send-up of U.S. News and World Report’s college ratings is a gem.  And his hilarious linguistic exploration of the many and astonishingly varied uses of the words shit and fuck in the college students’ vocabulary (Wolfe calls this speaking the “shit patois” or the “fuck patois”) is the product of a writer deeply, seamlessly, gloriously embedded in the world he is chronicling. 

Wolfe’s years as a reporter taught him how to listen, which may be the single most important talent – yes, it is a talent -- a writer can cultivate.  And so as a novelist, he listens not only to what all novelists claim to listen to (The Muse) but to real live people.  He is out in the world seeking material to create a literary world that is both just shy of being factual and undeniably true.  As a New Journalist, he helped pioneer (and, as is his wont, name) the use of what he called “status detail,” the sharply observed everyday habits of people, to explore character.  Again, this talent transfers beautifully to fiction. 

Reading Tom Wolfe the journalist and Tom Wolfe the novelist shows just how close literary nonfiction is to literature.  And how, in the right hands, both can lay equal claim to being important, resonant chroniclers of the human condition.

It also helps answer the question posed earlier:  What kind of an intellectual braggart can claim in a single working lifetime to have both created a new literary genre and resuscitated an old one?  Answer (with minor reservations and quibbles):  One who has.   

LAUREN KESSLER (www.laurenkessler.com) is the editor of Etude. Her latest book, Clever Girl, was just released in paperback.