First up was Tom Wolfe.
The white-suited chronicler of the latter half of the American Century—from the space race to the acid tests to the Me Decade and beyond—died May 14 at the age of 88. Of the so-called New Journalists, that coterie of penmen who told nonfictional (maybe fudging a bit here and there) stories in the manner of fiction writers, Wolfe was arguably the best. Like some of the others in this class (e.g., Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Norman Mailer), he could switch smoothly between richly written histories (The Right Stuff), on-the-spot reporting (Radical Chic), cultural commentary (From Bauhaus to Our House), and literary fiction (The Bonfire of the Vanities).
Unlike some of the others (e.g., Hunter S. Thompson), Wolfe never self-destructed despite being given ample opportunity. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I picked up after his death, is alternately fascinating and terrifying, a vivid, visceral document of a country trying to tear itself apart. His style—the ellipses and em-dashes and poetry, literal poetry, reported poetry, just kind of jammed in there to give you a sense of the rhythm of the life novelist Ken Kesey and his fellow acidheads were living—was at its most Wolfean in Electric Kool-Aid, but all that linguistic creativity was necessary to help the squares and the stiffs like your humble narrator grok just what the world of these people resembled.
For instance (all punctuation and italicization in the original):
And that’s a restrained example. The syntax Wolfe used in relating the acid tests themselves (essentially raves in which the psychedelic was distributed willy-nilly) would look like gibberish in the excerpted, context-free form.
A little more than a week after Wolfe’s passing, Philip Roth, 85, died. Reading American Pastoral—which I cracked open after Electric Kool-Aid and two shorter Wolfe books, From Bauhaus to Our House (about modern architecture) and The Painted Word (about modern art)—felt both disruptive and strangely linear. Roth’s style is cleaner and more straightforward than Wolfe’s, at least on the surface—at least until you get halfway into the novel and realize you’re on your third, or possibly fourth, digression, traveling back through the memories and tragedies of Swede Levov. The Swede appeared to be the Americanized ideal of the immigrant experience: the third-generation son who excelled at sports, bought a big house with lots of land out in the ’burbs, and had three bright, shining boys.
But the idyllic life the Swede constructed for himself is little more than a mirage. His daughter from his first marriage, Merry, joined the Weathermen, set some bombs, killed some people. And while her story is very different from the one Wolfe tells of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, there’s the same sense of strangeness, of a nation that should be fat and happy and at peace with its place in the world instead committed to destroying itself.
American Pastoral is part of a venerable tradition, one that holds that the American Dream is actually the American Nightmare, that we’re all covering up something ugly and dirty with our white pickets and perfect perms and hot apple pies. American Beauty would win the Oscar for depicting this sort of thing a few years after American Pastoral won the Pulitzer. But while American Beauty has diminished in the intervening years—it feels more like a caricature of critiques of the American Dream than effective satire, at this point—American Pastoral has only grown more shocking, more powerful. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise too much that a novel about a wealthy, worldly people papering over their problems to hide the fact that they are trying to tear themselves apart resonates now more than ever.
While reading American Pastoral, I morbidly wondered which deceased author I’d be reading next in an effort to catch up. The next day Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a French hotel. The chef, TV host, and bestselling author had committed suicide at the age of 61.
Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s best-known book, is part memoir, part exposé, part guidebook to a strange and foreign land: the professional kitchen. A land of macho posturing and reckless self-endangerment, Bourdain’s portrait of a chef’s life caused a stir with folks shocked, shocked to find out that restaurants reuse uneaten bread and push less-than-fresh fish on customers the day before the next delivery comes. But it’s far more interesting as a sketch of life on the edge, of the ways in which self-destructive people keep it together just long enough to distribute $30-per-plate dinners to a bunch of diners who have no idea of the psychic turmoil that went into making that truffle-infused risotto.
Victorino Matus has described Bourdain as “a born writer who happened to attend cooking school”; his fiction proves that point. The Bobby Gold Stories is a breezy, uncluttered read, perfect for an afternoon at the beach; not terribly complicated or demanding, and requiring only about 100 minutes of your time, it’s the story of a small-time hood who is a bit too smart for his line of work and virtually indestructible. Think Elmore Leonard if Elmore Leonard were obsessed with the ways in which the thumb-breaking biz intersects with food dispensaries.
Bourdain’s death probably hit the hardest of the three, despite my being less familiar with his oeuvre and less in awe of his prose. There was an attainability and approachability to his labor. He was a hard worker who found a niche right as an entire market exploded—a market he arguably helped create. Plus, his motivations felt familiar: In Kitchen Confidential, he cites spite as an early instigator of his love of food; it was spite that had just driven me to American Pastoral, after wags on social media shrugged off Philip Roth’s death: Just another dude, a white one, one who was mean to women, who will miss him, who needs his deeply problematic work in these more enlightened times?
Well, I do. And maybe you do too. The summer reading season is the perfect time to catch up with old friends recently passed—or make some entirely new ones.
