A book a day: Tom Wolfe: The years of the riot

Original Language: English

Títutulu Original: Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
Translation: José Luis Guarner
Year of publication: 1976
Valoración: advisable

Maybe it is worth raising a relevant issue someday. It would be if literature has to follow, such as other artistic, or cultural aspects, the trends of the moment, with the risks of certain works to be invalidated to which the demands of the moment or, on the contrary, must be subscribed, must be placed by Above that issue and shine on my own merit, whatever its temporary scope. Perhaps in that need to reduce literary merit to its most pure manifestation we would end up renouncing the intellectual or subjective aspect and staying in pure sound expression. Personally, it would seem like a subversion.

In spite of which, read Tom Wolfe in The years of the riot He has left me at least, bittersweet. It is not that Wolfe is not sharp, acidic, even vitory, as in his other works. It is not that his style remains from that thematic dispersion. It is that, in this context, and I do not deny that also because of the expectation generated by that mention to the 70s, some of their writings have sounded rancid and starchy. Like the necks of those shirts that seem to be their obsession (it is worth remembering the curious aspect of the writer, dressed in a rigorous target when he was already a celebrity), many of these writings accuse a resonance – very New York by the way – between the Pedantry and the bourgeois need of Epatar. And as if it were a different writer, in the short format, the acclimatized writer of works such as The bonfire of vanities or the undervalued A mantoo many times I have had the feeling of reading an excessively pending writer to demonstrate his vast urban culture, his status as first level literary star in the nerve point of global culture. As if he felt too comfortable in that watchtower and as if he had a something elitist of his condition, an overflowing security in which his opinions were going to be held and assumed.

Here their stories and the different themes addressed also do not help to place these texts in that utopian scenario of timelessness, because we must remember that, above all, these are articles published in US media and very assigned to the environment: Vietnam, figures of the scene American cultural, or any subject by prosaic or frivolous that is allows Wolfe unleashing its corrosive prose, uninhibited, acid and overflowing. A relative double handicap for absolute enjoyment: a certain self -referential tendency to that restricted and endogamous world that is the New York intelligence, and an obvious ascription at the time and moment in which these writings were generated. Those 70s to which the title refers that (unless Trump decides, any day, the opposite) now seem effectively distant.

More Tom Wolfe books reviewed at Ulad: here