tom wolfe = not my best friend

Here's the thing. I can't decide if I hate Tom Wolfe, hate his writing, hate his characters, or hate what he has to say about the world we live in.

I first read I am Charlotte Simmons. Blah! I really hated it. I hated it for two main reasons - I strongly dislike his prose. There is just something about it that drives me batty. He's hyperbolic all the time. He sounds so full of himself. And any time he comes near sex he makes me nauseous. I mean, "loamy loins"? Really? And his main character - ugh. Okay, I understand how a girl from a small town could show up at a large university and completely lose her moral compass. But she is just so utterly defeated that I ended up despising her. I guess what I'm saying is that she turns out to be very, very weak, which made me nauseous. Again.

In the end, in my opinion, she's totally unlikeable, and, in my opinion, very one dimensional. I suppose the book is meant to "capture the college experience" but it's so, so bad. It doesn't even come close. Every character is a cliche. The dumb jock, the womanizing frat boy. Nothing special here at all. And it's so long! 676 pages of crap.

Obviously, I really disliked this book. Most reviewers did too.

Anyway I just read The Bonfire of the Vanities. I still hate his prose. The plot is better here - but probably only because he doesn't attempt a deep study of just one character. It's about Wall Street in the 80s, racial tensions, vanity & ego. He does well with vanity and ego, either because that's really what he considers to be his characters' major flaw, or because he is himself full of it. I gather that when it was published it was timely and well-received, a scathing upbraiding of the behind-the-scenes machinations of NYC. Turns out I still don't much care for his writing. Everyone's so predictable, unlikeable, again, weak.

So I shall not be reading any more of Mr. Wolfe's work. Not unless I decide to give The Right Stuff (about the Mercury 7 astronauts) a chance. It's nonfiction, so it could be better. And I do like astronauts.

And I do agree with him about at least one thing: NASA needs money. And to get money, it needs a visionary. Even here I find his prose grating, but when I got to the end I agreed with what he was saying and I suppose that is what counts.