Adam Gellin, a bright senior at Dupont, knows he won’t ever be a sports god. He can’t even match the statue of Saint Christopher in the college square. “What bulging delts!” Adam thinks of the saint’s granite form. But he can make fun of the “diesels” at the gym. Diesels are non-athlete students who lift weights purely for effect. “The new male body fashion,” he sneers to himself, “the jacked, ripped, buff look.” Still, the boy winds up sneaking peaks in the gym mirrors in the hope that his own trapezii might be on the rise.
Undergrads, of course, are notoriously preoccupied with sex and booze, self-image, and self-discovery. A rollicking satire of college culture delivered in roaring Tom Wolfe prose is bound to be swollen from all the “burgeoning biceps” and “loamy loins,” the “grinding groins” of frat-party dancing. The bulge comes with the territory; it is the lay, so to speak, of the fictional terrain.
Open Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, though, and find this page-one description of a sixty-year-old Atlanta property developer: “For good measure, he flexed and fanned out the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi, in a Charlie Croker version of a peacock or a turkey preening.” A former football star, Croker is still impressive and intimidating, even with a bum knee. But then, so are the Bronx district attorneys in Wolfe’s 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities. “Andriutti liked the fact that when he reached around behind one of his mighty arms with the other hand, it made the widest muscles of his back, the lats, the latissima dorsae, fan out until they practically split his shirt, and his pectorals hardened into a couple of mountains of pure muscles.” Ask Andriutti and his colleagues the names of the planets and they’ll shrug. Ask them to pinpoint a deltoid or pectoralis major and they’ll draw you an anatomy chart.
I Am Charlotte Simmons offers declensions of a dialect Wolfe dubs “college Creole.” Selections include “Fuck Patois” and “Shit Patois.” “Jacked Patois” is not explored as fully in the novel, but it could be. To “jack-up” literally means to hoist or boost. In American speech, the term is now applied to anything propelled high and far, anything huge and powerful. It works as an adjective (“That guy is jacked”), with or without an exclamation mark (“This whole country is jacked!”), a verb (“Wolfe has really jacked his satire this time”), or even with gentle irony (“He sure looks jacked in that white suit”). The word is a good one, youthful and masculine, suggestive of incisive action and piston-like vigour.
It is certainly a Tom Wolfe word, applicable equally to his sprawling novels and the muscled America they so fondly satirize and instinctively protect. And who can blame a guy, or a nation, for wanting to stay jacked? Steroids or Viagra, Clinton’s White House sexcapades or Bush’s bench presses: No one likes turning soft. No one likes growing old.
Few pursuits are given more artistic rope than the great American novel. Two assumptions underpin the tolerance. The first is that the pursuit is a largely male obsession, like whale hunting, and thus is obliged almost by fate to wind up a deforming pathology, the way it did for Melville’s Ahab. The second is that the chase, however maniacal, is righteous, given the behemoth- in-question. Even an observer as wry as British novelist Martin Amis grants the hunt its nobility. “Every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called usa,” he writes in his 1986 essay collection The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America. Amis is referring to the eponymous John Dos Passos epic from the 1930s, a genre benchmark. Such strivings are the “inescapable response to America,” and if books tend to be big, it is because the usa is big too.
Tom Wolfe took up his fictional harpoon late in the season. He was approaching sixty when The Bonfire of the Vanities appeared, having devoted himself until then to the New Journalism, a school of non-fiction he helped establish and which, in the opinion of many, produced the best American literature of the latter half of the twentieth century. (Capote’s In Cold Blood, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and Wolfe’s own The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test are examples.) He embarked on the novel hunt with the fanfare expected of the man in spats. Less well-known is that Wolfe gained literary credentials early on, with a Ph.D. from Yale and a dissertation on communist tendencies among American writers between the world wars.
In a Harper’s Magazine essay published shortly after Bonfire, Wolfe declared the American novel a “weak, pale, tabescent” creature in the clutches of anorexia. To revive it would require authors willing to take on this “wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours.” It would require books pumped up on reportage that met the standard of the New Journalism, and were ready to wrestle with issues such as class, race, and status envy; the very same issues, it so happened, being wrestled in the Hog-stomping work of that journalism’s most celebrated advocate. The American novel needed Tom Wolfe, in short, and, lucky for it, Mr. Wolfe was available.
By then, he had won certain bragging rights. The Bonfire of the Vanities was not only chubby and apple-cheeked but passionately engaged with its times. Wolfe’s New York was Upton Sinclair’s Chicago or John Steinbeck’s California: a literary landscape bristling with social conflict and consequence. The pages swarmed with characters at the mercy of flaws in equal parts worrisome and compelling. The tilt toward excess, the blind faith in a certain version of progress, the hollowness at the centre of the American enterprise: such anxieties simmered at surface level in the book, like tar on hot pavement. The nation portrayed in Bonfire, while indeed wild, bizarre, and unpredictable, was equally restless and vital, alive to its own ongoing evolution. It was also naturally out-sized, with no need for any Bronx lawyer to flex his pectorals as proof.
That, of course, was before the Berlin Wall came down and the doors shut on the Cold War. History, as Francis Fukuyama announced at the outset of the 1990s, had ended. A happy ending it was, too, with liberal democracy so certain to spread across the globe under the aegis of the US—American exceptionalism, a view of the planet from high up in that proverbial city on the hill, reigned triumphant, and the impending New American Century promised even better times ahead.
