Still Burning

I missed this appreciation of the 30th anniversary of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, published in the long-ago world of 1987. Bruce Bawer notes how Wolfe's first novel after a career of long-form journalism occupies a unique place in 20th century American literature. He measures it against some similar efforts by budding writers of the time and finds it still excels them, useful and productive to read in spite of its paleolithic pay phones and green-on-black CRT computer monitors.

Wolfe published three more novels. A Man in Full's exploration of class and race in the New South of Atlanta also drew praise, although Bawer noted that a few writers were less happy with it than with Bonfire. The third novel, 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons, took aim at the culture of political correctness and hedonism that decorates many modern universities. These were cows too sacred for a lot of modern writers and they subsequently downchecked Charlotte Simmons and Wolfe's abilities as a novelist entirely. He would return to fiction in 2012 with Back to Blood, a novel that revisited a lot of themes he'd already covered and sold poorly. Whether he went to the novelist's well once too often or, perhaps, without the fully-formed ideas that fueled his earlier three fiction books is hard to say. Since then he's stuck to nonfiction -- which is still often a more fun and challenging read than a lot of literary stuff decorating perfectly good blank pages today.