Tom Wolfe & ‘Back to Blood’ - What Happened?
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"Tom Wolfe is back — back with a new novel, of course, but also back with the big characters, the loud prose and the skewering of the cultural elite that have been the touchstones of his work. What he is not back with is some new object of stinging satire. 'Radical Chic' and 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' were such pleasures to read because no one at the time was saying what Mr. Wolfe was saying and how he was saying it. 'Back to Blood,' unfortunately, is the Wolfe novel we’ve all read before." --Micah Mattix, Washington Times, 10/26/2012
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/26/book-review-back-to-blood/#ixzz2ATDDxFNz
Good review. True, Tom Wolfe would be a hero even if he never wrote another word, but it is hard not to speculate. What happened?
As unusual as it was at the time to lampoon someone like Al Sharpton, today it is done routinely by just about everyone. But it is much easier to poke fun at the absurd manifestations of a crumbling civilization than to shine that same skewering spotlight on its underlying causes.
In the first case, although you might become unpopular among the politically correct literary intelligentsia, if you write brilliantly enough, you can still be acknowledged as a major writer. In the second case, ruling elites will declare you a pariah and your cocktail party invitations will dry up.
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