Wolfe Among the Pigeons

By DAVID AIKMAN

At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

The man who would lead this crusade has the proper mettle -- or at least the proper brass -- for the job. He is none other than Tom Wolfe, apostle of the New Journalism, archaeologist of radical chic and, most recently, best-selling author of Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which gleefully pilloried the greed and corruption of New York City life. Wolfe's summons to revolution, published in the November Harper's, pinpoints a new and surprising target: his fellow American novelists. This latest bonfire is already throwing off a lot of heat.

In a long, sharp-witted article subtitled "A literary manifesto for the new social novel," Wolfe lambastes the current crop of U.S. novelists, as well as academic critics, for leading American fiction since about 1960 further and further from traditional realism. Young writers, he complains, are being cajoled into an avant-garde wilderness populated by exponents of bizarre genres: absurdists, magical realists, even K mart realists. They have been persuaded by the likes of Philip Roth that American life has become too absurd to write about in a realistic way.

Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes as realistic novelists (Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck), by the '60s young writers and intellectuals regarded their kind of realism as "an embarrassment."

In Wolfe's jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme."

Faced with these developments, Wolfe decided to write Bonfire in order to prove a point, "namely, that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism . . . that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him." This realism, argues Wolfe, was what characterized the success of writers as varied as Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Lewis, whose Elmer Gantry prefigured the Jim Bakker affair by more than half a century. Nor is Wolfe too modest to add that such realism is what "created the 'absorbing' or 'gripping' quality" peculiar to his own novel.

Since the mid-1960s, university campuses have become battlegrounds of rival literary doctrines, all of them united only in a suspicion of the traditionally "obvious" or "natural" explanations of literature. + Impatience with such abstruse and often dogmatic theories has led to an outcry among educational traditionalists for a return to established and proven literary curriculums. Thus it is no surprise that the first wave of letters in reaction to the Harper's article, according to editor Lewis Lapham, has been strongly supportive of Wolfe's call for a return to fictional realism.

But there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing ((Wolfe)) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson."

Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe.