Long-term readers may recall this post of mine about my admiration of Tom Wolfe and my inability to finish his most recent novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Well, I can report that I gave the book one last chance during my recent holiday in Amsterdam. I again found it strangely unbreachable, so I left it propped up outside the city centre’s Waterstones branch which sells English-language books. I hope it found a good home.
lol. nice touch.
LOL – I wonder what would happen if lots of people did the same sort of thing – leaving teir books outside bookshops? I don’t think the owners would be happy…though if it was still in a saleable condition…
C
I hope it found a good home.
Bless you.
I have not read this book by Wolfe, but Bonfire of the Vanities is a classic and Wolfe deserves credit for using the term “Masters of the Universe” about bankers. One of my favourite chapters in a novel is in Wolfe’s A Man in Full. Relatively early on in the book, he has a chapter devoted to the meeting by Charlie Croker, the book’s central character, a real estate developer who has bitten off more than he can chew with his latest development. The meeting is with Croker’s bankers and a work-out meeting on the debt that he is struggling to repay. Wolfe describes in wonderful detail how the bankers want to make him sweat. Their aim is such that he sweats so much that the sweat patches under his shirt get larger and larger to the point where they join together and form “saddlebags.” At that point, they know they have won.
It is a shame that I no longer find the time to read novels.
I was hoping you’d swing by, Mikey.
I agree with all you say. There are two other brilliant chapters in A Man In Full. The horse-breeding one (disgusting but awesome) and the one where one of the other characters gets lost, loses his car etc – the way the day spirals out of control is so powerful.
I agree that Charlotte Simmons is dire. I find it astonishing that an author as able as Wolfe produced such a terrible book. I’m hot-and-cold on A Man In Full but Mikey is correct that Bonfire… is a classic.
though if it was still in a saleable condition…
Far from it. I’d had it for many years and had tried to read it a few times, so it was in ‘used’ condition.
Chas:
I haven’t attempted Charlotte Simmonds, but here’s a tip that might have worked for you. Whenever I have a hard time getting into a novel written by a favourite author, I skip in until I find a chapter that hooks me, then I go back to the beginning. This worked for me with two Mordechai Richler novels (“St. Urbain’s Horseman” and ” Solomon Gursky was here”, and also with Saul Bellow’s “Humbolt’s Gift”.
I have just read Christopher Hitchens’ review of A Man in Full (originally published as “Running on Empty” in The London Review of Books, January 7, 1997 and reproduced by Hitchens in his book, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, [Verso, 2002] pp. 379-388)
Hitchens’ review is amusingly critical. He argues that Wolfe has failed in his “declared chief ambition to have himself described as Dickensian.” His opinion is the plot is simple, that descriptions of certain things in sections of the book closely resemble what he had previously written in Bonfire of the Vanities and comes up with this classic which is well worth repeating:
Wolfe does concede that the saddlebags chapter is a strong one and that “Two episodes involving beasts – the capture of a giant rattlesnake and the mating of two bloodstock horses – are marvellously written.”
Despite this phrase, I cannot imagine that Wolfe would have been happy with this review, in fact, I would think if he read it he would have been fuming. It does not surprise me that Hitchens includes this review in a section of his book entitled “Enemies List…”
I have not yet finished reading all of Hitchens’ Unacknowledged Legislation but I think it is highly probable that I will enjoy it much more than I enjoyed A Man in Full. Go out and purchase a copy!