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)

One of My Favorite Books: Of Time and the River

Of Time and the River (Thomas Wolfe)

As I write this journal entry, I'm sitting on my front porch swing with my two St. Bernards looking out into the woods surrounding my home. The woods remind me of this passage from OF TIME AND THE RIVER by Thomas Wolfe:

"All things are lost and broken in the wind: the dry leaves scamper down the path before us, in their swift-winged dance of death the dead souls flee along before us driven with rusty scuffle before the fury of the demented wind. And October has come again, has come again."

OF TIME AND THE RIVER is my favorite book of all time and I believe I picked it up after reading about editorial legend Maxwell Perkins. I wanted to read all the books Perkins ever guided through the editorial process at Scribners. (If you are interested in publishing, I feel it's important to read about the time of Max Perkins. Two suggestions: MAX PERKINS by Scott Andrew Berg, and UNSHAKEN FRIEND by Malcolm Cowley.)

OF TIME AND THE RIVER is a coming of age story that encompasses just about everything in life. A word of warning: It is a tough read. A friend of mine says Wolfe is just too verbose. And to tell the truth, I often find it laborious to wade through the verbiage until I hit a passage that is so striking in its use of language that it is worth the time and attention. What’s fascinating is that when I reread the book, I find sections that did not affect me at all on an earlier read, now make me catch my breath and marvel at Wolfe’s genius all over again.


Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

Writing Historical Novels

The journalist Chris Peachment interviewed various novelists about ten years ago about why they were writing historical novels, expecting some answer about paradigms of contemporary reality, and got the same answer from all of them. They wanted to write in a more elaborate, more complex way, in longer sentences, and with more figurative language. (from A.S. Byatt's On Histories and Stories)

Quote: Revising

I have written often, several times, every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures. (Vladimir Nabokov)

Naipaul & Melancholy

The news Naipaul brings us from far-off and nearby places in The Writer and the World is disquieting more often than not. His writing is suffused with a great melancholy and loneliness, and one feels about him that he is - like the alcoholic consul in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano - "homesick for being homesick." He has discernible flaws; there is a cruel streak running through many of his observations, and a tendency to overrate the sustenance provided by bourgeois comforts. But his is a many-angled way of seeing the world; he speaks to us in a voice of necessary lament and, unlike so many who set themselves up as secular prophets, he is in no way inauthentic. One can accuse him of an excess of gravitas, but that is precisely his point. For Naipaul is determined to "give us the gloom" as the black woman from North Carolina in the opening of "A Turn in the South" puts it after she listens to a description of the sober book he intends to write about her part of the country whether we like it or not. Even the spurned Theroux concedes, "all his dire warnings have been fulfilled." I suppose one way of shooting the messenger is to parody him or ignore him altogether, but we do so at our own peril. Far wiser, I think, to pay close attention.

from "Suffering, Elemental as Night" by Daphne Merkin a New York Times review of The Writer and the World by V. S. Naipaul

Quote: The Cheap Shot

If you are getting the worst of it in an argument with a literary man, always attack his style. That'll touch him if nothing else will. (J.A. Spender)

A Novelist's Bulls**t Dectector

I do think that all of us have this little bell built into our brains, a bulls**t detector that rings when things are false or wrong, and I think all of us know to respect that. No matter how faint it is, we hear it ringing and we keep working until the damn thing stops. One of the things some of us notice with younger writers in workshops is that they think maybe the bell is wrong. They think they can bring their story into class and everyone else will say, "Don't worry about the bell, it's wrong." But the bell is never wrong. (Peter Carey)