Creatures! Birdbrains! Rosebuds! Goyim! ...Welcome.
Last year, the first book I read was the delightful, mysterious, beautiful and sublime Piranesi, which reigned unchallenged at the top of my best-of-year list all the way to the end. This year, the first book I read was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. On the one hand Bonfire is not really what the philosophers call “good,” although it has its charms. On the other hand, though, it’s an odd little mirror image of Piranesi, and it got me thinking about varieties of hysterical narration.
I generally enjoy hysteria in my narrators. Maybe especially in the men? In women I like skulking, a furtive and dodgy quality; this plus the lesbian undertones were what I liked in Ottessa Moshfegh’s ultimately unsatisfying Eileen. In men I like yelling. My favorite Philip Roth novel, which is a thing that I have so that already tells you something, is The Breast. And it will surprise nobody that some of what I like about the hysterical narrator is the humiliation.
But the thing is, the truly hysterical narrator gains his power from the blatant truth of what he’s saying. It actually is really bad to be turned into an enormous female breast! How horrible! You should feel sorry for him! And he’s got insight into human nature, too, this yelling breast—that makes it worse! The truly hysterical narrator is a perfect combination of discredited and accurate. There’s a joking-not-joking quality, a persecution-and-the-art-of-writing kind of thing. Who knows but on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?, to quote one of the greatest hysterical narrators in literature.
And I think it’s this undermined quality that Bonfire eventually loses. So okay, what is it, it’s the story of a 1980s Wall Street trader (iirc this novel coined the term “Masters of the Universe” for these people) who misses his exit while picking up his mistress late at night and ends up in THE BRONX, where he confronts a black kid he thinks is a mugger. He gets back in his MERCEDES BENZ with his mistress behind the wheel, and as she’s speeding away, she hits the possibly-mugger’s sweet-faced friend. They hit and run, obvs, and the trader is consumed with guilt, unraveling as he learns that the kid they hit is in a coma. Political and raciopolitical machinations make him a tempting target for prosecutors, so there’s an all-out manhunt for him, and we all learn just how BITTERLY IRONIC THE NAME “JUSTICE SYSTEM” truly is.
This kind of book lives or dies on the accuracy, or at least believability, of its satire on its time and place. Tom Wolfe’s satire of white ethnics and white rich folk felt pretty sharp to me. He’s too garrulous and self-impressed, but he can hit real heights of synaesthetic writing (the boiling teeth, the “itching slums”), and there are also strange sublime passages like the “masque of the red death.” The hangover phone in its filthy Streptolon “nest” (some real poetry of hangovers here), the nightmarish police interview where they stealth Mirandize the bond trader, the too-bright office about whose designer someone says: “The woman had watt fever.”
Tom Wolfe when a couch is uncomfortable:
There was another couch across from him. On it were two men and a woman. One man had on a blue-and-white running suit with two big panels of electric-blue leather in front. The other man wore a trench coat made of some dull, dusty, grainy hide, elephant perhaps, with shoulders cut so wide he seemed gigantic. The woman wore a black leather jacket, also cut very large, black leather pants, and black boots that folded down below the knee like a pirate’s. All three of them were squinting, just as Sherman was. They also kept sliding forward and then twitching and squirming back up, and their leather clothes rustled and squeaked. The Leather People.
Tom Wolfe writing the most accurate review of Yale Law School I know:
“Freddy tells me you went to the Yale Law School. When were you there?”
“The late seventies,” said Killian.
“What did you think of it?”
“It was okay. Nobody there knew what the fuck I was talking about.” Tawkin. “You might as well be from Afghanistan as Sunnyside, Queens. But I liked it. It’s a nice place. It’s easy, as law schools go. They don’t try to bury you in details. They give you the scholarly view, the overview. You get the grand design. They’re very good at giving you that. Yale is terrific for anything you wanna do, so long as it don’t involve people with sneakers, guns, dope, lust, or sloth.”
And contemporary readers will note that Bonfire has an exceptionally pungent portrayal of public shaming. The thing about Sherman, the bond trader, feeling that his inner self has been turned into a cavity that anyone can enter and everyone does—all of the passages with that visceral metaphor are painful and feel real. Even the thing I disliked most about the book, its third-person narration’s increasing willingness to take Sherman’s side (he’s not so hysterical after all!!!!!), can be considered a psychological comment on the way shame, rather than provoking guilt, can come to replace and deaden it.
Anyway so the thing I disliked second-most is everything to do with black people, whose speech patterns Wolfe tries and fails to mimic and whose psyches present a blank wall to him. He knows the mask exists and he thinks saying he knows that is some kind of insight into what’s behind it. Even that might be giving him too much credit! If you want caricature Al Sharpton, I suggest Fires in the Mirror, where the man does it himself. If you want caricature black New York, Spike Lee has always had your back. You may notice that Spike Lee and Anna Deavere Smith share a certain visible personal characteristic that Tom Wolfe signally lacks! Like, not to be all essentialist about it, anyone can be funny about anything probably, but maybe we should start calling “sensitivity readers” comedy readers, because if there’s one thing you really need an insider for, it’s telling you where the jokes are. And where they aren’t.
So, Piranesi. One of the many impressive technical feats of that book is the way the ingenuous, grateful, humble narration at certain points exposes its strenuousness. Piranesi is trying to be this docile creature, the Beloved Child of the House. He pounds the table a bit for it! You rarely get a docile narrator—it’s probably harder to do than to do a hysterical one—and to get a docile narrator who has that willful streak running underneath, I know you think I’m crazy and damaged but I’m right!!!! (when he is crazy and damaged, and also, in some important way, right)—now that is a rare joy.
O Reason not the need!
Jesse Walker is probably my favorite Reason writer, not least because he’s blithely unconcerned with the chaste goddess after which that libertarian magazine is named. He’s also watched a ridiculous number of movies. Each year he does a year-end roundup of the best movies not from the past year, but from ten years ago, and twenty, and thirty, etc. Here’s the most recent, taking us from 2013 almost to the best zoetropes of 1893.
He also traveled to Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown, and wrote a really good introduction to Black self-rule in the USA.
Now Playing
Warren Zevon, “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” And if California slides into the ocean/Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/until I pay my bill.
Photo of the Bronx in 1982 by Gerd Eichmann, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
Thank you for the lyrics from the late genius Warren Zevon. From "Desperadoes under the Eaves" to "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Veracruz" and so many other songs, he really knew how to write and string a melody together. I was thrilled to see him live once. May he Rest in Peace.