The Novel as Journalism

Tom Wolfe is the great American novelist of the past 50 years. He was a pioneer of the “nonfiction novel” but never one to follow the crowd blindly. His Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the nonfiction novel of the hippie movement. The Right Stuff (“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle...and wait for someone to light the fuse?) was a little more nonfiction and a little less novel.

He thought the world needed a nonfiction novel about New York City and tried to write one. Instead, a single scene expanded into Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The great novel turned into fiction: The Bonfire of the Vanities. It proved to be prophetic in two key scenes (that is, the fiction became nonfiction after the writing). One of those became the iconic news story of 1980s NY, but had to be cut from the book, causing him to ruefully quote Malcolm Muggeridge,

We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Wolfe reflects on the desire for new, specialized novels and shows why novels can do journalism better than journalism can.