Rangy Manatee

Reading Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. A Christmas present from my brother. I loved A Man in Full. I revelled in each chapter, savoured each beautifully comic turn of phrase. Every minutiae of social hierarchy and interaction and power and politics and sex is brilliantly explored. He is an absolute master of the set piece. A scene can build and move and you realise you’ve read 200 pages without taking a breath and you still haven’t got where you’re going.

That’s my way of saying it’s a page-turner. I should write for the Hack on Sunday or something. That was snappy, you could put that shit on the cover.

Ok, inside cover.

The copy I read, now lent to a friend, was one of those huge oversized paperbacks where there really should be a hard cover because the bugger’s so damn massive and gets battered around you feel like you’re reading a promotional copy. In fact that copy was the first book I picked up at an Oxfam Books I worked at briefly - shit, I must return it.

What I love about Wolfe is the way he manages to convey man’s attitudes towards women. So many affairs are conceived and executed with such subtlety and insight; you suspect he might well have played away himself. But enough of my outrageous and pointless conjecture, he is always able to convey those gut instincts of masculinity, whereby the woman is always reduced to her physical presence. Or more the way that her physical presence can have such a direct effect upon a man. That there is the buried voice of base sexuality hiding inside every man, only occasionally let loose. It is something not to be envied perhaps, but it seems to convey a truth that I’m sure every man can relate to.

If you get what I’m saying.

Good.

Often we glimpse older female characters, once beautiful young women. Charlie Croker’s ex-wife is a tragic example of the invisibility of the old and rejected. No longer lithe and desirable, her own friends barely recognise her at social functions without the ‘prop’ of her powerful and charismatic husband. Not even I can remember her name.

Bonfire of the Vanities, while so far an excellent read (I’m not yet 100 pages through) leaves me feeling that perhaps the mature Wolfe is the more sophisticated writer. I have this feeling as I read the novel written, what, 15-20 years earlier than A Man in Full, that there is a laugh missing. That his comic subtlety and sense of repetition was not yet fully realised. And fair play to the guy – he hung out with Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey for ages. His mind probably took a few years to calm down.

And he really likes using the word ‘Christ’ in Bonfire. It’s on every page. The narrator is a serial blasphemer. Not that I have a problem, but you know what it’s like, once you’ve noticed something like that you feel you have to decide if it’s a “good” thing or not. Jury’s out on that one.

I’m starting to realise that my blog is becoming a kind of artistic preamble. Not a review of a book or a cd, but a guess at what it might be like. How my preconceptions will affect what I am about to experience. That’s a nice idea. Remind about that tomorrow…

What I actually wanted to talk about was the perception I have of the 1980s. Bonfire has characters berating fellow stock brokers for being lazy or plain stupid if they aren’t earning a million dollars a year by the time they are 30. That’s just a world I can’t comprehend. I mean I lived through the 1980s and I didn’t earn shit – granted I was dribbling for most of it, but the fact unarguably remains. The popular image I hold is that money was sloshing around to the end that it was like some kind of undesirable dandruff currency, almost pointless in its excess, and just making a bit of a mess on people’s shoulders. They had to invent some kind of anti-money shampoo, and it was called timeshares and cocaine and hookers.

People do still surely earn these kinds of figures and yet it can’t be on this scale. Were the 1980s new or romantic? Or were they old and neon and pathetic? Do those that lived consciously through them come out the other side bitter and status hungry? Are they my parents or your parents or you scrabbling around in Sainsbury’s for the most tasteful doily? Do they care what car they drive and which area of town they live in (and yet you can be sure they were never so careful about which area of the WORLD they lived in). Boring Britain: wet, expensive and with a lip so tight you could waggle your nob and feel the world had come crashing down.

Anyway, it’s getting late and I’m becoming incoherent. I might go read some more…