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Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?

No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.

They would never dream of saying “owies” for “always” or “electrizziddy” for “electricity or “for the moment” as “footer moment.” And oh, did clothes signify: “One does not want to arrive ‘poor-mouthing it’ in some outrageous turtleneck and West Eighth Street bell-jean combination, as if one is ‘funky’ and of ‘the people,’” he wrote in “Radical Chic,” voicing the secret consternation of the liberal elite. A succession of journalists were caught plagiarizing; creating composites, glomming various people they had interviewed into a single, named character; hiring other reporters to go to the scene and feed them details; or, not to put too fine a point on it, making shit up. Imagine how he would skewer Trump’s bloated avarice and desperate narcissism, and what fun he would have with the huuuuge crowds, the childish insults, the gaudy gold, the sniveling tech bros who secretly want to rule the world but must ride to power on the president’s made-in-China coattails.

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