Okay, this has been on my ass for about 25 years, now.

[Fredfredly ⊂(◉‿◉)つ]

I have no clue who this is 

[Freeky]

Me either...

[Cramulus]

The only Wolfe I've read was the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which I enjoyed. I liked the mix of historical account and novel-like narrative style. I liked how Wolfe managed to show us what the Merry Prankster inner circle was like, down to the little quirks and social tensions in their conversations. He also didn't flinch in showing the naiveté in their idealism.

[kingyak]

The only Wolfe I've read was the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which I enjoyed. I liked the mix of historical account and novel-like narrative style. I liked how Wolfe managed to show us what the Merry Prankster inner circle was like, down to the little quirks and social tensions in their conversations. He also didn't flinch in showing the naiveté in their idealism.

tangent warning:
Haven't read any Wolfe, but I caught the Magic Trip doc over the weekend. Could have used a little tighter editing, but I enjoyed it. Of course, I actually didn't know more than very basic stuff about Kesey and crew going in, so a lot of it might all be old news to people who are more familiar with the Merry Pranksters.

[Richter]

Tom Wolfe was a fucking hack.

There.  I said it.

I feel better, now.

Never could get into the tosser's stuff.

[Triple Zero]

His shit from 1968-1972 was fucking TERRIBLE.  "The Electric Koolaid Acid Test" was an unreadable pile of LOOK AT ME.

The only Wolfe I've read was the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which I enjoyed. I liked the mix of historical account and novel-like narrative style. I liked how Wolfe managed to show us what the Merry Prankster inner circle was like, down to the little quirks and social tensions in their conversations. He also didn't flinch in showing the naiveté in their idealism.

NOW I AM CONFUSED

SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?

WHO OF YOU TWO IS MY SPIRITUAL ADVISOR AGAIN?



Additionally The Right Stuff is apparently a great book if you're really really into airplanes and piloting and all the flying stuff according to one of my friends who is a crazy sailplane/glider nut. Which leads me to conclude it would most probably be fairly boring to anybody else.

[Pæs]

TITLE LED ME TO BELIEVE THAT THIS WAS GOING TO BE ABOUT BUTTS.
THREAD DOES NOT DELIVER.

[Luna]

His shit from 1968-1972 was fucking TERRIBLE.  "The Electric Koolaid Acid Test" was an unreadable pile of LOOK AT ME.

The only Wolfe I've read was the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which I enjoyed. I liked the mix of historical account and novel-like narrative style. I liked how Wolfe managed to show us what the Merry Prankster inner circle was like, down to the little quirks and social tensions in their conversations. He also didn't flinch in showing the naiveté in their idealism.

NOW I AM CONFUSED

SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?

WHO OF YOU TWO IS MY SPIRITUAL ADVISOR AGAIN?



Additionally The Right Stuff is apparently a great book if you're really really into airplanes and piloting and all the flying stuff according to one of my friends who is a crazy sailplane/glider nut. Which leads me to conclude it would most probably be fairly boring to anybody else.

TFYS...

[bds]

Tom Wolfe reminds me of an early version of Martin Amis, for some reason.

That is not a flattering comparison, by the way.

Cain,
can't stand Amis

really? I'm reading Time's Arrow for my Lit coursework at the moment and I'm enjoying it so far. The narrative style is BIZARRE but I want to compare it with Slaughterhouse-Five so it works pretty well... Having said that, I'm only like 60% through and I've heard people say that the payoff at the end is not worth reading the rest of the novel for, so we'll see I guess

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

TITLE LED ME TO BELIEVE THAT THIS WAS GOING TO BE ABOUT BUTTS.
THREAD DOES NOT DELIVER.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Tom Wolfe reminds me of an early version of Martin Amis, for some reason.

That is not a flattering comparison, by the way.

Cain,
can't stand Amis

really? I'm reading Time's Arrow for my Lit coursework at the moment and I'm enjoying it so far. The narrative style is BIZARRE but I want to compare it with Slaughterhouse-Five so it works pretty well... Having said that, I'm only like 60% through and I've heard people say that the payoff at the end is not worth reading the rest of the novel for, so we'll see I guess

I enjoyed Time's Arrow. I can't believe I read it when it was first published; I'm old.

Yes, the ending is weak.

[Cain]

I more meant Amis as a person.  He's a smug little shit, sucking up to the British literary elite to get his books published, then dumping his "friends" the moment he's made the contacts he needed.

He's also an appalling racist.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I more meant Amis as a person.  He's a smug little shit, sucking up to the British literary elite to get his books published, then dumping his "friends" the moment he's made the contacts he needed.

He's also an appalling racist.

No shit? I had no idea what kind of person he is. What a douche.

[Cain]

In The Times Magazine, Amis was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It's a huge dereliction on their part".

As for his nauseous social climbing...

Hitchens' parasitism isn't unique. His long-time crush, Martin Amis, has the same career-building strategy: getting his hands on as many father figures as possible. The main reason people noticed Amis in the first place was because he had a successful novelist for a father. So, he figured the more daddies, the better. The mileage he got from Amis Sr. wasn't going to last forever, after all. He was quite successful with Saul Bellow. I still remember his introduction to More Die of Heartbreak, describing how he and Bellow visited a world conference of "Bellovians." Amis can't resist mentioning how Bellow confided in him that he found the papers boring. Surely this was a sign that he was the chosen heir. Then again, set against a mouldering mass of Herzog specialists, anyone could have been Bellow's chosen heir.

But Amis' most successful grab was Nabokov. Everyone associates Amis with Nabokov, though no one is entirely sure why – they just assume there's some kind of deep connection. The Guardian gave him the job of reviewing The Original of Laura when it came out last year. He's written the introduction to the Everyman Lolita. I've heard him called "Nabokov's heir" a million times: in the culture sections of big newspapers; on Amazon; in conversations with journalism students and book club presidents. A present-day Dictionary of Received Ideas would doubtlessly have an entry reading "Amis, Martin (1949-): expert on Islam; source of healthy controversy; adopted son of Nabokov." I imagine Amis spent most of his youth lost in a single daydream of sitting on his trophy daddy's lap, having his cheeks pinched and his hair ruffled (at the very least), and, after hours of fondling, hearing the most magical word in the world: "synochik." (In my own generation, Y, a lot of people had the same designs on Updike.)

Unfortunately, Nabokov did the same thing to Amis that "Rabbit" did to every literary careerist born between 1980 and 1990. He died before Amis became a major writer, or anything other than "Kingsley's son." The ultimate snub! If Amis had been born 17 years early, he would have been perfectly positioned to leech off Nabokov and still find warm blood – it worked for Updike and Pynchon. But, with his idol lurking around the big playground in the sky, Marty was in a bit of a fix.

Luckily, women tend to live for about a decade longer than men and prospective trophy daddies often leave widows behind. As Anita Thompson's case demonstrates, widows aren't necessarily sharp enough to notice leeches and tell them to get fucked. So, in 1981, Amis interviewed Vera Nabokov and Dmitri (the real synochik.) The Observer article that came out of this, "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov," isn't very long and doesn't give readers much they can't find in Strong Opinions. Amis spends a great deal of time distracting readers from just how brief his encounter was: a paragraph on how Vera offered him a drink, another on how she insisted on paying for the booze, a few paragraphs on stuff everyone already knows about Nabokov's relocations from Pityer to Berlin to Paris to New York. As for original information: Vera mentions her petty disputes with various editors and academics; she gets offended at any suggestion that Nabokov had flaws (calling him "good" is an insult in her book); and she tells an unexceptional story of how she met him and fell in love – her father was one of Nabokov's publishers.

The interview ends with one of the most useless question and answer exchanges I've ever read:

Eventually, she said, 'These questions you will ask. Where are these questions?'

    'Well, there were one or two things,' I said. 'Your husband dedicated all his books to you, every one. That's very unusual, isn't it?'

    'Is it? ... What should I answer? We had a very unusual relationship. But that you knew before you asked. Anything else?'

    'Was he – was he great fun?' I asked helplessly. 'Were there lots of jokes? Did you laugh a lot?'

    'Oh, yes. His humour was delightful. He was delightful,' said Mrs Nabokov. 'But that you knew too.'

All in all, Amis's meeting with Mrs. Nabokov could have happened in less than an hour, and judging by the padding, it probably did. It wouldn't be remotely interesting if it wasn't for the way Amis used it to build a career. In 1993, two years after Vera's death, he shamelessly released a book called Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions. Everything implied by that title is a lie. If "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov" is supposed to be the book's main essay, it sure doesn't look like it – his interviews with Greene, Burgess, and Updike are longer, with more original information, and the book has large essays on mutually assured destruction and the 1988 Republican Convention that are at least passably interesting. Mentioning "other excursions" is just as misleading. It gives the impression that Amis's 60-minute interview (which took place entirely within the Montreux Palace Hotel) was some kind of epic butterfly hunt through the rolling Swiss countryside.

In fact, I doubt Amis even wants people to read Visiting Mrs. Nabokov – the title is the part that does all the work. People see it on a bibliography page and assume his "excursion" was important enough to become the title of an essay collection. Nobody knows what's important about it, but that's the whole point. Only a minority of readers would bother with a book of essays – it's novels that sell – so Visiting Mrs. Nabokov isn't really a book, so much as a meme. And it's worked extremely well, giving Amis the third daddy he's always wanted.

I'm not going to overrate Nabokov: my admiration for him peaked at 18 and has steadily receded ever since. At the moment, I think of him as a highbrow, Eurotrash version of Ayn Rand. Most of his books (aside from Lolita) are a 50-50 cross between The Fountainhead and Finnegans Wake. There's always a sensitive, intelligent libertarian protagonist fighting an evil mob of looters and straw-man communists. We know he's sensitive and intelligent because he makes lots of observations and puns involving butterflies, which, like nymphets, are invisible to looters. The looters torment him until he becomes a martyr for libertarianism. Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, and Invitation to a Beheading all have the same hackneyed plot with prose soaked in Tyrian purple.

The question is, does Amis really write like Nabokov? Is it Nabokovian to write: "a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast across our bows"? How about: "The people ahead of me are all Venusians, pterodactyls, men and women from an alternative time-stream."? Hmm, pterodactyls. Wasn't there a much better writer who used reptile motifs to describe crowds of people and shark motifs to describe cars? Who also wrote a book about drug-sozzled misadventures in hotel rooms and airports? Yep. Amis's way to seem original is to take two or so authors as official influences and adulterate their styles with a phantom third. To middlebrows, this makes him look like he's 'maturing' and 'departing from his roots.' Hiding influences is just as important to the good careerist as snatching father figures.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ooh burnnnnnnn! That article has bite.