About Tom Wolfe

" . . . inspect [Tom] Wolfe's [author of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and others] dependency on mannerism and iteration. 'Sullenly, sulkily, surily, Roger sank back...'; 'he had suffered a dreadful, shameful, humiliating defeat'; within half-a-dozen lines a dancing girl is described as 'salacious', 'lubricious' and 'concupiscent'. Well, they're all in my thesaurus too. Later on, it occurs to Wolfe that a crowded party is like a sea; so in ten pages, we get a 'regular Typhoon', a 'roaring sea', a 'shrieking sea'. A 'roaring swell' and a 'boiling social sea' (complete with 'boiling teeth' -a steal from BONFIRE). There would also appear to be something wrong with Wolfe's typewriter: a faulty repeater-key, perhaps. Or maybe he meant to write 'Oooooooooo' and 'Ahhhhhhhhh' and 'Nahhhhhhhh' and 'Hmmmmmmmmmmmm'." (Martin Amis in The War against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000)