Tom Wolfe’s vision
J. Oliver Conroy
A nostalgic, or elegiac, sense that the most exciting and glamorous days of journalism and intellectual life are gone is no doubt part of what has driven a slate of documentaries, in recent years, on dead or dying writers, including Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill. Of course, Tom Wolfe should get the same treatment, and now he has in the limited-release documentary Radical Wolfe. Directed by Richard Dewey and drawing on a 2015 Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short), the film, narrated by the actor Jon Hamm, strives to get to the heart of Wolfe and his legacy. It only somewhat succeeds.
How many times, since Wolfe’s death in 2018, has it felt that the writer would punch a skeletal, white-suited fist through the soil of a graveyard and claw his way free? Material is everywhere, screaming to be satirized: A senile, octogenarian president battles his quadruple-indicted septuagenarian rival. Tech billionaires challenge each other to cage matches. Activist oil heiresses fight climate change. Guilt-ridden corporations endow millions of dollars to a “Center for Antiracist Research” that turns out not to do anything. A New Jersey senator is accused of hoarding gold bars from foreign dictatorships. Any day now, surely, a Cadillac spewing onomatopoeia and exclamation points — vroommm, vrrroo-OOMMMMM!!!!! — will careen around the corner, a cream fedora glinting behind the windshield.
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It would have to be Wolfe’s zombie, as he has no heir apparent. Few writers today have the zeitgeisty, mainstream appeal that Wolfe once had, nor his relish for sacrilege. Many of the magazines that published his literary cohort are shuttered or just clinging to life, and it is hard to conceive of those that remain doing anything such as New York magazine did in 1970, when it allowed the white, Southern-born, gleefully reactionary Wolfe to publish 24,000 words mocking “radical-chic” supporters of the Black Panthers. (Last year, New York published a 4,000-word feature about financial discrepancies in Black Lives Matter fundraising, with the author noting, apologetically, that he found the piece “heartbreaking” to write.)
Radical Wolfe marshals a solid cast of talking heads to give perspective, including Lewis and the writers Emily Witt, Tom Junod, and Christopher Buckley, as well as Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra Wolfe, and his agent, Lynn Nesbit. Gay Talese, reflecting on his contemporary and fellow dandy, observes, pithily, that one “would never know [that] such a polite person, with a pen in his hand, could become a terrorist.” Alexandra Wolfe notes that, as a child, hers was the only father she knew who wore a cape. Some of the interviewees are a bit odd, such as the conservative economist and historian Niall Ferguson and, even more surprisingly, the tech billionaire and libertarian activist Peter Thiel.
The result is an entertaining, if shallow, documentary that hits the important notes of Wolfe’s life, legacy, and flamboyant persona but offers little that journalism junkies (or readers of Lewis’s original Vanity Fair article) don’t already know. The film charts Wolfe’s origins as a child of the Virginia gentry, his early career as a beat reporter and frustrations with the staid conventions of newspaper journalism, his explosion onto the magazine scene and efforts to define what he called “the New Journalism,” and then his work to adapt his reportorial vision to big, sweeping novels about American society, the first of which, 1987’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, made him a bestseller and household name.
Radical Wolfe unearths some fun and telling details — Wolfe, as a young reporter, had an awkward run-in with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy — and tries to reckon with the fact that his writing, which critics accused of being glib and lacking in compassion, wasn’t always so fun for its subjects. Leonard Bernstein and his family, the film notes, were devastated by Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” piece and permanently humiliated. In a similar gesture toward evenhandedness, the former Black Panther Jamal Joseph is given some brief airtime to discuss his objections to that article, as well as to the racial politics of The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Yet the documentary, whose 76-minute length seems like a conscious choice to reject Ken Burns-style comprehensiveness and avoid belaboring things, is sometimes too zippy. Except for a few brief reflections from Alexandra Wolfe, we don’t learn much about Wolfe’s family life as a child or an adult. Wolfe’s feuds with writers, including Norman Mailer and John Updike, are mentioned in passing, but the otherwise mischievous and fun film declines, strangely, to go into detail. Mailer famously analogized reading Wolfe’s A Man in Full to “making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated.” Wolfe, in turn, called Mailer and Updike “old piles of bones” and said his critics were throwing a “wonderful tantrum.”
Radical Wolfe is not, however, resolutely hagiographical or sunny. A sudden turn to a darker tone about three-quarters into the documentary feels a bit like an attempt to force a dramatic arc. The film notes that Wolfe suffered a serious depression later in life. It also concedes that his books fell off in quality as they went on, though it misses the opportunity to dissect his work as a whole more critically, given that even the best early work has aged unevenly and was polarizing to start.
Lewis argues that one of Wolfe’s great interests and skills, as an outside observer and contrarian, was “drawing the attention of Blue America to Red America.” That sounds a little neat, a little too of the year 2023, but it has a ring of truth, too. Wolfe was an iconoclast with a relentless eye. We won’t see his like again.
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J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.