Welcome to Off The Shelf, a production of The Square Inch Newsletter. On July 1st The Square Inch will be a paid-only subscription. This preview is a reminder to free subscribers to upgrade now to continue receiving content! Just click the button below.
Dear Friends,
Over the past eight years I have often remarked that we are living in a Tom Wolfe novel. The quizzical looks remind me that a great many people have never read a Tom Wolfe novel. I need to come up with another description of our times, but I am loathe to do so because my analogy is just so perfect.
His novels are masterful portrayals of human folly—the incredibly absurd consequences of human depravity and frailty. And the scenarios he created were hilarious because, while absurd, they were so very believable. He lampooned and mocked not because he was a misanthrope, but because he loved his fellow man. He hated shallow souls and human beings acting no better than instinctual animals. He saw the great potential of humanity and saw clearly how short we fall. And his descriptions of how short we fall are just wildly entertaining.
He wrote of shallow greed and social climbing in Bonfire of the Vanities, the debauched world of college campuses in I Am Charlotte Simmons (be warned: that one’s Rated-R), and—my personal favorite—just how small and pathetic is the life of a grandiose, narcissistic, over-leveraged real estate developer in A Man In Full. Yes, that last one was almost certainly written with Donald J. Trump in mind as the template for his character Charlie Croker (this is way before Trump decided to enter politics). Read it and try not to have a beverage accident while laughing. Man, could he create a character.
Wolfe was a unique writer. He loved words. He played with them and mastered them. He made them up. He “verbed” nouns and made nouns of verbs. And his greatest skill was to write dialects of every kind so that the reader hears it in the dialect. He could write the drawl of a southerner, the sometimes indecipherable patois one hears on an inner city basketball court, or the barking of a Bostonian dock worker better than any other writer. What you read, you hear in your head exactly how it would sound. He was a genius.
But Tom Wolfe was not just a novelist. He was an intellectual in his own right.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Square Inch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.