The man who gave us New Journalism, The Right Stuff, A Man in Full, From Bauhaus to Our House, the Painted Word, and of course such classics as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, has suddenly crashed against the buffers of British satire. Yes, Tom Wolfe, one of the grand men of American fiction, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award for a truly cringe-making passage of sexual dialogue in his latest novel.
Can he recover? Does this titan of American literature, who has mocked the lunacies of modern art, brilliantly described the feats of Chuck Yeager and the Mercury astronauts, bounce back from this potentially mortal blow? Let’s hope so.
Any publicity is good publicity…
I heard two separate radio interviews where Wolfe said that he purposely made the sex part of the book clumsy, overwrought, and passionless to reflect the clumsy, overwrought, and passionless youths whose fornication is captured on page.