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Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and waning male dominance in literature

Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth have died – two writers who seem like night and day. Regardless of the differences in their origins and their practice, they have one essential thing in common: they were central to America’s very male literary establishment and their deaths represent a shift to a broader spectrum of voices in the world of books.

Roth reached the age of majority as the Jewish community in the United States was reeling from post-war trauma, feeling collective guilt over its ascension from poverty into the ranks of the nouveau riche just as Hitler was conceiving of his final solution.

Official Jewry in America responded to devastated Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. with the admonition “It’s over now, let’s not talk about it,” while urging American Jews to assimilate. Don’t let your Jewishness garner too much attention. Have your bar mitzvahs, sure, but in the larger world, make like you’re just like everyone else.

Then along came Roth, openly Jewish, viciously funny, brazen, libidinous – so much so that the rabbis complained. His first book of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, satirized Jewish aspirations in the U.S. and won the National Book Award. But it was his 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, that caused a nationwide uproar. Its title character, whose essential trait was his horniness, made his mother the source of all his unhappiness.

The prolific Roth went on to write 28 more books and win major awards along the way, including the Man Booker International Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards.

Though Wolfe was two years older than Roth, he seems more like a writer from the next generation. After working at the Washington Post on the city beat, where he occasionally applied fiction techniques to his articles, he went on to become a bona fide literary inventor, creating a new journalism that took investigative reporting to heights never seen.

Typically, investigative reporting came out of of intensive interviews with the major players in the story, but Wolfe went deep inside his subject’s milieu for protracted lengths of time, for the most part to observe. His 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – where he followed the antics of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and the burgeoning counterculture they inspired – not only made Wolfe famous, it opened up possibilities for a new generation of journalists. Hunter S. Thompson doesn’t exist without Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe later coined the term The Right Stuff as the title of his 1979 book about U.S. astronauts. He had already become adept at devising snappy phrases to describe social phenomena, including “radical chic,” the term he used to describe wealthy intellectuals and artists who hosted fundraisers to support radical causes. The article Radical Chic mocked Leonard Bernstein for supporting the Black Panthers and the phrase went on to refer to wealthy people who espoused causes in ways that made them look hip, but failed to take into account how these same causes worked against these supporters’ actual interests.

His novel Bonfire Of The Vanities was a huge hit (though it went on to become a terrible movie) and he wrote two important books about art, including From Bauhaus To Our House and The Painted Word, which ripped into elitist art criticism. But it was his influence on non-fiction that made him a legend.

On the surface, he and Roth are completely different characters. Though Roth always identified as fundamentally American and resented being lumped with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud as a kind of Jewish literary mafia, he was Jewish to the core. Southern gentleman Wolfe, born in Richmond, Virginia, was decidedly not.

Roth was happiest in literary retreat, whereas Wolfe was a fixture on the social scene, which he couldn’t resist writing about, and loved to be seen. He was famous for his sartorial choice of the white suit, which he wore year round, vexing the fashion establishment. He was indeed his own brand.

Their career paths went in opposite directions. Roth just got stronger and stronger as a writer, throwing Portnoy’s Complaint into the world like a grenade in 1969, then deepening the intellectual content of his work, which examined political turmoil in America – 60s radicalism, McCarthy’s blacklists – and culminated in a series of books about his relationship to aging.

Wolfe, on the other hand, kind of petered out. His last book in 2016, The Kingdom Of Speech, attacked Noam Chomsky’s language theories with weak supporting ideas. And his penultimate novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, is a mess. It takes place on a faux Ivy League campus and addresses college men’s bad sexual behaviour, plagiarism and the pressures on the college basketball prospects yearning for stardom in the NBA. A credible basketball team at an Ivy League school – really?

But both authors shared an interest in walking a fine line between fiction and reality and revelled in the debates over the ways they blurred invention and real life.

Wolfe wrote his famous journalistic pieces as if they were fiction, creating scenes and writing dialogue to bring his subjects to life. It was called the New Journalism but it also sowed the seeds of what we now call creative non-fiction.

Roth was unabashedly autobiographical, even using his own name as a main character, and often deployed his fiction as a form of revenge by creating characters based on people he wanted to expose: Irving Howe, who eviscerated Portnoy in his review, became the snotty critic Milton Appel in The Anatomy Lesson. His ex-wife Claire Bloom became the less-than-appealing protagonist in I Married A Communist.

And both were true literary lions, great innovators and male to the core. Both had mammoth egos – it’s no coincidence that Roth wrote mainly about himself, and Wolfe was a preening presence wherever he went. Roth never lost his obsession with his libido, and his female characters, starting with Portnoy’s mother, were written with bitterness bordering on antagonism. Jewish mothers everywhere had a right to be outraged.

Wolfe also seemed to consider women as an afterthought. It’s Ken Kesey who’s celebrated – with almost no critical comment – in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test while the women are described as adjuncts, never mind the way they’re treated. That was the way it was in the 60s, to be sure, but by the time The Right Stuff came along in the late 70s, Wolfe was still preoccupied by boys and their toys. I Am Charlotte Simmons may have a woman as a protagonist, but the female characters are either mean or naive and all of them are superficially drawn.

These two authors’ deaths signal a shift in the literary landscape in the U.S, with the male dominance that defined the literary scene turning into a thing of the past. Celebrate these writers for what they contributed, but know that new generations of writers, with women leading the way, will – while appreciating past invention – doubtless be creating new priorities.

susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole

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