I once spent a summer reading everything he wrote (this was prior to his turn to fiction). He was not just one the most astute observers of the 20th century, he was also a great explainer and dramatic license was his tool of choice. Like many young adults, I was inundated in the binary -- the tribal conflicts of the moment -- Tom Wolfe showed me they were merely symptoms of something deeper in human nature, simultaneously less important but more troubling. If you've been following any of the commentary upon his death, you can see I am not alone in being greatly influenced by him.
He worked both a lesser and greater theme. The lesser one was subcultures. His early work marked the "discovery" of subcultures, from cars to hippies to the Manhattan art world. What followed from that was the larger theme: status. With ideas from sociologist Max Weber he saw human interaction as, after life-or-death necessities, a striving for status. Looking at his subcultures he saw how the people within jockeyed to impress others and increase their perceived value through their words and deeds. It jibed not only with his reading of Weber, but also his personal experience in academia.
From this realization, casting his eye about the world he found endless fodder. Everywhere he looked he saw straight through the elevated and the pompous to see their narcissistic motives. Moreover, he described it all in lacerating prose that, to my ear, cut as sharply as Waugh or Trollope. Needless to say, this did not endear him to those he skewered. (Interestingly, one of the things he never got around to skewering was politicians. As a result folks in political circles often commented highly on him since he was always pointing and laughing at other people.)
We now have something that we haphazardly refer to as the Rationalist Community or the Intellectual Dark Web. You can get a taste for it by visiting sites such as Slate Star Codex and Overcoming Bias
, where a good deal of time is devoted to understanding the source of our behavior beyond the surface explanations. Robin Hanson, of Overcoming Bias, recently co-authored a book entitled Elephant in the Brain, devoted to understanding the "real" motivations behind our behavior (it's on my reading list). I can see a pretty straight line from Wolfe to Hanson and many others of the same stripe, suggesting to me that as much has he has been acknowledged as an influence, he is probably still underrated.
His fiction sold well, and is quite infamous, but I would start with his earlier work. General consensus is that The Right Stuff is the pinnacle, but Wolfe himself said his favorite was Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. He said wouldn't change a word of it, so I would start there. In it, Wolfe made savage fun of the smug, oh-so-elite guests at Leonard Bernstein's party who, safe and wealthy on the Upper West Side, had adopted the loathsome Black Panthers as a cause du jour to demonstrate to the world their noble and progressive minds. Wolfe used them to turn his eye on how cultural elites were now using political extremists and screeching protesters, often violent, as status symbols. Hyperventilation ensued among the chattering classes. As cutting and foresightful as Wolfe was, it seems satire is not the deadly weapon it is made out to be. If you don't see the relevance to today's world you may be a lost cause. Now, you'll find the a lite version of the same behavior everywhere, from the boardrooms of multinationals to the PTO at your elementary school they find ways to link with fashionable sanctimony and victimhood through noble statements and activities. In some venues you will be punished for not displaying it such solidarity.
It tempting to say we need a new Tom Wolfe but like all phenomena, he was of his times. We no longer have time for satire and longer than a tweet or a snippet of newsertainment snark, or worse, a meme. Like Twain and Mencken before him, he used his gimlet eye to cast a light on humanity, and in his way, aided us in holding this cynical, subtextual world to some sort of standard of rationality. We were better for having him.
