Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?
9 comments
·March 4, 2025jksmith
jraines
the most dead-on part of the latter is when the main character is feeling a bit out of place at some meeting/hunting retreat in south Georgia and suddenly he remembers the cheat code: just talk about college football!
telesilla
Netflix did a fine rendition of this, I enjoyed the turns of speech and intrigue.
closeparen
I can't find this, are you referring to the 1990 movie?
qoez
I know negativity isn't encouraged on HN but man I do not like those covers (doesn't capture the world of Wolfe at all).
WillPostForFood
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test first ed. has a beautiful cover.
https://i.etsystatic.com/22376946/r/il/968f38/2238228249/il_...
MetaMonk
One time he came to talk at my school, and he spent the whole hour talking about sports.
He demanded that we pay the cost for a private jet to transport him, as well as his hotel costs.
TMWNN
>On the other hand, when someone demanded, “How could you know what he was thinking?” I always had a simple answer: “I asked.” If someone had grilled Wolfe about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they would have learned that everything he reported he had either seen or heard himself, found recorded elsewhere, or learned from people who were there.
Relevant: TIL why Tom Wolfe wore a white suit. The pioneer of 'New Journalism' said that the unusual clothing caused others to see him as "a man from Mars, the man who didn't know anything and was eager to know", so talked freely to him. The white suit became Wolfe's trademark from 1962 to his death. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1inpsa5/til_w...>
>During Donald Trump’s first term as president, The Washington Post calculated that he had lied 30,573 times. Yet somehow it was the media who lost the trust of half the nation.
The author isn't stupid. She answered the implied question above earlier in her essay, but can't outright say so, so has readers put two and two together with bits like:
>There is a sameness in our silos now; I find myself over-careful when I voice any idea that does not conform to the slightly-left-of-center canon where I generally feel most at home.
On the other hand, we get stuff like
>“You know who’s in charge of Voice of America now?” Wolfe’s purported editor might snap. “Keri Lake, a right-wing election denier who called journalists ‘monsters’ and promised to be our ‘worst nightmare’ back when she ran for governor of Arizona. Trump posted her mandate on social: to ‘ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.’”
Besides the misspelling of Lake's first name, no mention of her having been a broadcast journalist herself for three decades. If Lake calls her colleagues "monsters", maybe she has some basis for said description?
In Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," the main character, a lawyer, described the line of prisoners going into the back of the courthouse as "chow," as in chow for the system. I'll never forget that.
Also, for anyone who grew up in Atl, Wolfe's book "A Man In Full" drips with the kind of delicious look-in-the-mirror satire home grown Southerners love.