[Originally posted on MuchTooMuch]

I read Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The Three Stooges” last night, which you can find in his book, Hooking Up. The essay is his response to the negative criticisms that John Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike leveled against Wolfe’s bestselling novel, A Man in Full.

The essay then becomes a “State of the American Novel” piece, where he argues in favor of naturalism and New Journalism (which was new almost fifty years ago), two schools of writing that seemed to have lost the Battle of the English Professors to all the European isms that came over to our shores in the sixties and seventies.

While naturalism means that “the artist had to know how to combine the sublime with the intensely real,” the other isms allowed technical, formal ingenuity to be ranked higher than mere storytelling, which meant that critics appreciated authors who no one could understand more than they appreciated authors who wrote books that readers actually enjoyed.

The result: no one reads books anymore.

Wolfe’s three stooges (Updike, Mailer, and Irving) bemoan the fact that no one reads “literature” anymore. They blame it on the idiotic readers, who are too busy filling their faces with popcorn at the latest Jerry Bruckheimer flick to recognize art when they see it.

Wolfe, on the other hand, thinks it is just this kind of elitist mentality that inspired our ancestors to leave the shores of aristocratic England and found a democratic America.

And here we come upon the supreme irony of American literary history so far. In the twentieth century the United States outstripped Europe in every respect save one. In matters intellectual…we remained sweaty little colonials forever trying to keep up with Europe. [And when] France’s distaste for naturalism made its way to American literary circles in the early 1950’s, [young American writers of the sixties became] educated in literary isms, all of which were variants of French aestheticism, products of the notion that the only pure art is art not about life but art itself.

And when books of that sort started coming out, the unwashed masses didn’t respond. They wanted stories instead. And thanks to folks such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola, “the novel itself lost the hold it once had on the imagination of college students and young people in general.”

The people wanted stories, and what they got was books that tried their best to be plotless. Novels about European ideas written in stylish isms.

From which Wolfe concludes:

The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs…food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty unslaked thirsts for…America…as she is right now. It needs novelists with the energy and verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with ravenous curiousity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye….Feed me! is the cry of the twenty-first century in literature…The revolution of the twenty-first century…will have a name to which no ism can be easily attached. It will be called “content.” It will be called life, reality, the pulse of the human beast.

That sounds great; it does. But I disagree with almost everything Wolfe says. It’s not because it doesn’t make sense (it does, on some level), but because, if America is as vast as he implies, then “the American Novel” is a myth.

There can be no book that speaks to all 270 million of America’s souls. In a place this big, there is a spot for Tom Wolfe and three spots for his three stooges. If we were confined to physical bookstores, maybe he would have a valid argument, not for theoretical reasons, but simply for practical ones. But we live in the age of the long tail, and there is a spot on the virtual shelf for everyone.

From a theoretical standpoint, however, Wolfe is completely off. He still seems to be working from the idea of “America as a melting pot,” as opposed to “America as a tossed salad.” The America of today is not a place of assimilation, but a place of diversity. The very concept of the “American Novel” is a hold-over from the European way of thinking that Wolfe would have American authors toss aside.

Wolfe talks about the American irony, but what he doesn’t seem to get is that the irony is still contained in his essay. He wants the singular “American Novel” that will be able to hold its head high in a European court, a novel that will describe what it is, in full, to be an American. But he criticizes this desire at the same moment as he acts upon it.

We may be sweaty little colonials, but the whole point of becoming colonials was to escape the heirarchical class system of Europe. Not just in politics, but in art as well. And yet, Wolfe would have us believe that the perfect naturalistic novel would have four elements, the most important of which seems to be, in Wolfe’s mind, “the notation of status details, the cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order…” His novel is the novel of the human beast, in all its ugliness and beauty. But that leaves no room for the human human, no novel that pushes us forward into what we could be, rather than what we are.

America is supposed to be a classles society, where someone from the small town of Grinnel, Iowa can become a billionaire in Silicon Valley; where a man can create his fortune, not inherit it. While this is far from true for most folks, it is the American dream. While what I’m talking about is not the naturalism of Wolfe (in which a writer describes what he finds, not what he wants to see), it doesn’t seem true that the American Novel has to be nothing more than description. Can’t it also be inspiration?

It’s as if Wolfe buys into the idea that “art” is only one thing, and that someone wise somewhere can tell us what that one thing is (someone who, I don’t know, has become a cartoon character in a white suit, perhaps?). But this whole argument between Wolfe and his three stooges is nothing but a bunch of old, white men debating what true art really is, while the truth is that they are more ignorant than the masses they deign to educate. They have no idea that the rest of us have all decided that there is no such thing as the one true Art anymore. It simply is what you say it is.

Further, Wolfe doesn’t understand that most of these ideas have become truisms, and that it’s not new journalism anymore. Thanks to his efforts, it is simply journalism.

But the saddest part is that Wolfe’s entire project, to describe America as it is today, is utterly useless, and Mr. Wolfe has no idea. America is too big and moves too fast for anyone to describe, even this fast-paced writer. That’s what makes her so beautiful. At the core of it, Wolfe’s attempt at capturing the America of today is against the very idea of America. She can’t be captured. She runs free.

America isn’t Bush, Cheney & Wolfowitz, Inc., nor is it MoveOn.org. It’s not the dying farms of the Mid West or the semiconductor factories of Silicon Valley. It’s not the colleges in Cambridge, MA, or the empty towers of Atlanta.

America is NOTHING! Not because it is empty, but because it is too full to be contained in a single word, picture, idea, or novel.

There is no “American Man in Full.” There is only “America, overflowing.”

And Tom Wolfe has no idea. And so he has become what he hates. An anachronism.