I never met Tom Wolfe, even though we shared friends and editors and agents and both lived for a long time on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I remember seeing him once, on a fine summer’s day, stepping out of Isle of Capri, which I’d heard was his favorite lunch place, onto Third Avenue. I should’ve said hi. After all, he’d begun his introduction to my friend Terry Teachout’s 1990 essay anthology Beyond the Boom by citing my contribution: “As Bruce Bawer says in these pages, no generation in history has ever been more lavishly analyzed, dramatized, mythologized, and agonized over than the Baby Boomers.” I still remember what a thrill that was. But no, I left him alone.

What to say about Wolfe? Born in 1930, he died in 2018. How many young Americans today know who he was? Nowadays, even the biggest reputations collapse quickly. Which is why I was delighted to hear that somebody had made a new documentary about him. In Radical Wolfe, Richard Dewey, who has previously directed films about the artists Chris Burden and Larry Bell, covers Wolfe’s life and career in 76 minutes. I’ll say right off that I wish it had been longer. I wish it hadn’t mentioned his trademark white suits so often. I wish it hadn’t deviated even for a moment into the works of his fellow New Journalists Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. Seventy-six minutes is short enough time to spend on an oeuvre like Wolfe’s, even without detours. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Joan Didion: The Narcissism Never Dies)

The film does have its entertaining parts. It’s fun to hear again how Wolfe became famous. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, he studied English at Washington and Lee, took American studies at Yale, and worked as a reporter at the Springfield (Mass.) Republican and then the New York Herald Tribune. After being fired from that job, he managed to talk Esquire into sending him to California to write a story about custom cars — only to find, after a couple of weeks’ research, that for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to write the piece. In desperation, he spent “eight or nine hours” typing up his notes “at top speed” in the form of a memo to his editor, who judged it “a masterpiece” and ran it as is. Written in what would become Wolfe’s trademark voice — breathless and spirited, complete with sound effects (“Varoom! Varoom!”) and quirky punctuation — it made him famous and inaugurated what he would call the New Journalism, an engaged, energetic style of reporting in which the writer doesn’t pretend to be disembodied and objective. 

Wolfe’s style was one thing; his choice of topics was another. Over images of Allen Ginsberg and other Beatniks, Dewey notes the attention Wolfe paid to “the beginning of the hippie culture.” He also points out that unlike many other writers of his day, Wolfe wasn’t scared to address the topic of race in a frank and serious way. Then there’s the fact that, long before anybody talked about “red states” and “blue states,” Wolfe sat at the “uncomfortable intersection” between the two, interpreting flyover phenomena (e.g., stock-car racing) for the enlightenment of coastal urbanites and criticizing elitist tastes and values from a point of view with which middle Americans could identify.

Two books in which he certainly did the latter were The Painted Word, a blistering assessment of modern art, and From Bauhaus to Our House, a lively putdown of modern architecture. I was disappointed to see the documentary rush past both of these short masterpieces, each of which could have lent itself to effective visual treatment. Dewey does devote ample time to Wolfe’s classic 1970 essay “Radical Chic,” about Leonard Bernstein’s Jan. 14 fundraising party for the Black Panthers — which Wolfe brilliantly immortalized as the ultimate example of foolish rich people coddling barbarians who were out to destroy them. But I confess that I absolutely hate the way that Dewey handles this episode. For some reason, he considers it appropriate to challenge Wolfe’s take on Bernstein’s party. We’re told that Wolfe, by writing “Radical Chic,” “crossed the line … into cruelty” and was “hurtful.” Hogwash. All he did was report on what he witnessed — and what he witnessed that evening was utterly abominable. 

Dewey actually interviews Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther who is identified onscreen as a professor at Columbia University. Joseph says that he “was released as a result of that fundraiser” and accuses Wolfe of “trivializing” and putting “a derisive label” on the Bernsteins’ party, which, he says, “was good work because consciousness was being raised.” Dewey provides no pushback against this nonsense. A more responsible filmmaker would have made it crystal clear that the Black Panthers were murderous terrorists, would have mentioned that Joseph spent six years in Leavenworth, and would have noted that Joseph’s faculty position, far from being evidence (as is implied here) that he’s cleaned up his act, is one more example (Angela Davis and Bill Ayers being others) of the obscene welcome given to violent left-wing thugs by top universities in the 1970s and thereafter. 

“Tom Wolfe,” somebody complains in this film, “makes the Bernsteins look ridiculous.” No, they made themselves look ridiculous — and far worse. 

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read “Radical Chic.” Maybe a dozen. To read a work by Wolfe is to look eagerly forward to reading it again and again. Apropos of which, I don’t think I’ve ever read any essay, by anyone, more times than I’ve read Wolfe’s hilarious takedown of the New Yorker that was published in 1965 in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune and reprinted, at long last, in his 2000 collection Hooking Up. Wolfe’s essay (whose two parts are entitled “Tiny Mummies!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets”) was the ultimate in irreverence, exploding the overblown image of a dusty, cobwebbed institution that, under the editorship (1952–87) of William Shawn, had the reputation of being some holy object — a weekly dose of wit and elegance, of perfect, gem-like prose, of the very Highest of High Culture. Wolfe, however, demonstrated that Shawn’s rag was, when you really sat down and looked at the thing, a safe and (in large part) pretty boring weekly aimed primarily at affluent housewives — and hence a wonderful vehicle for ads for pricey clothing, jewelry, and other high-end merchandise. For all the hype, its short stories tended to be tame little suburban vignettes, formulaic and trite, and altogether inferior, on the whole, to the fiction published in Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post.

Then there’s his 2000 essay “My Three Stooges.” While most critics had showered Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full with well-deserved encomia, three celebrated novelists, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, had panned it condescendingly, and at length. In his review for the New Yorker — where else? — Updike, who was typically generous with praise for (or, at least, was very gentle in his criticism of) his generation of front-rank American novelists, dismissed A Man in Full as “entertainment, not literature”; Mailer, for his part, dared to assert that Wolfe — whose two novels (at that point) were both better than anything Mailer had ever written — wasn’t a legitimate part of “the literary world.” Wolfe’s counterstrike was, at least in the cases of Updike and Mailer, thoroughly justified: noting that, in A Man in Full as in its 1987 predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, he himself had responded to the bonanza that was contemporary American life by painting big, vivid, naturalistic canvases, his three “stooges” had “turn[ed] their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history.” The most recent novels by Updike and Mailer were lazy, dull, and unimaginative, while Irving’s A Widow for One Year, set largely inside a house in Bridgehampton, Long Island, was downright claustrophobic. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Norman Mailer Was an Out-and-Out Psychopath)

At its best, which it frequently was, Tom Wolfe’s work was spectacular, which makes me feel that a documentary worthy of his legacy should also be — well, if not spectacular, then substantial, absorbing, stylish. Radical Wolfe is just fine. But I wanted more. I wanted to get a better sense of Wolfe as a person. I’d like to have heard from one or two of his editors about what he was like to work with. Finally, once again, the film feels rushed: I’m glad I know Wolfe’s writings as well as I do, because I kept feeling that a viewer less familiar with them might easily have been confused by the often exiguous treatment given to several of his major works. That said, I’m glad to have seen Radical Wolfe, thanks to which I’ve taken down a few of his books from my shelves and have spent a few delightful hours rereading some of my favorite bits. I can only hope that viewers who haven’t yet read a word of Wolfe will also be inspired to dive into his oeuvre. What pleasures await them!