I discovered Tom Wolfe later in my reading career, mainly because the first book of his I picked up, The Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test, annoyed me stylistically so much I resolved never to read any of his terrible prose again. I still feel he often overwrites, but that he gets the concepts and characters correct, and so is more profound than many who are better at stringing together sentences. In this he reminds me of William Gibson and Michael Crichton, both of whom often write bready text that discusses the underlying and invisible issues of the day that most people don’t know how to tackle.
If you’re going to read Wolfe, in my view, the book to read is A Man in Full, which is about heroism as an alternative to the ethic of convenience that makes people think they’re succeeding and escaping the errors of our time, but really lays the fertile seeds for future misery.
But reading was the sort of thing you did in idle hours if you didn’t want to go out and play. I just read constantly. I’m sure if I was that age today, I would be watching as much television as anybody else, but it’s a huge advantage if you ever start writing.
I began to notice, when I was working on magazines years later, I kept looking over my shoulder for the new talent that would be coming along which would be competition for those of us who had reached the ripe age of 37 or 38, and it wasn’t there. It just never got there. And part of it is that today, I think, so many talented writers want to go into television, or they want to go into movie writing. Those are the hot industries. But without that reading, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to turn out to be much of a writer.
Now my daughter Alexandra, who’s 24 now, she went to a very tough all-girls school here in New York. And that school is so hard, she watched exactly one hour of television a week. Not because my wife and I said, “You can’t go near that set.” We never said that. She would watch Beverly Hills 90210. That was the only thing she ever watched on television. She read and read. And now– you don’t mind a father bragging a little, do you? So today she’s 24 and she’s got a book contract. She’s worked on two newspapers. She worked on the New York Observer, a weekly here in New York, and she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and a publishing house approached her and gave her this book contract. And I think it’s partly because she read, she read, she read, she read, she read. It got to the point where she didn’t care about television.^
I refuse to own a television, but like his daughter, I don’t even face the issue. There’s too many other activities on which I would rather spend my irreplaceable time than watching television. Every time I do watch a movie or TV, I end up sitting there afterwards with a slight depression, because I gave hours of my life to someone else’s (badly expressed) dream and it made me no richer.
[...] mentioned Tom Wolfe on this blog before, as I’ve mentioned William Gibson and William S. Burroughs. What I like [...]