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By Root 1082 0

at zonky conclusions couched in scholarly terms....Verdict: excellent book by a genius who will do anything to attract attention.” (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., N.Y. Times Book Review). Newsweek summed it up: “This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.” I don’t think Wolfe will be read with pleasure, or at all, years from now, and perhaps not even next year, and for the same reason the reviewers, and the reading public, are so taken with his book now: because he has treated novel subjects—fairly novel, others have discovered our teenage culture, including myself, seven years ago, in a New Yorker series—in a novel style. But I predict the subjects will prove of ephemeral interest and that the style will not wear well because its eccentricities, while novel, are monotonous; those italics, dots, exclamation points, odd words like “infarcted” and expressions like Santa Barranza! already look a little tired in his recent Trib pieces. As Mr. Knickerbocker writes, “There is no one as dead as last year’s mannerist.” A memento mori is another first book by a (really) young writer, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which nine years ago went up like a rocket, and came down like one. The reasons for Colin Wilson’s success were more interesting than his book, and so with Tom Wolfe’s present vogue.

The distinctive qualities of parajournalism appear in the lead to “The Nanny Mafia”:

All right, Charlotte, you gorgeous White Anglo-Saxon Protestant socialite, all you are doing is giving a birthday party for your little boy...So why are you sitting there by the telephone and your old malachite-top coffee-table gnashing on one thumbnail? Why are you staring out the Thermo-Plate glass toward the other towers on East 72nd Street with such vacant torture in your eyes?

“Damn it, I knew I’d forget something,” says Charlotte. “I forgot the champagne.”

The “knowing” details—Charlotte’s malachite coffee table and her Thermo-Plate windows (and, later, her “Leslie II Prince Valiant coiffure”) are fictional devices, reminding me of similar touches in the young Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills. But Wolfe, who has publicly promised to write eight novels by 1968 and the sooner he gets at it and gives up journalism the better, is no Kipling but a mere reporter who is, ostensibly, giving us information—in this case that there is a mafia of superior, British-born nurses who tyrannize over socially insecure Park Avenue employers like Charlotte to such an extent that they don’t dare give a children’s party without providing champagne for the nurses. This may or may not be true—he rarely gives data that can be checked up on—but if it isn’t, I don’t think we would be quite as interested. Unlike Kipling’s tales, it doesn’t stand up as fiction. Marianne Moore defines poetry as putting real toads into imaginary gardens. Wolfe has reversed the process: his decor is real but his toads are dubious. Junior Johnson and Murray the K and Phil Spector and the kustom-kar designers are real, but somehow in his treatment come to seem as freely invented as Charlotte.

Stylistically, the above passage has the essential quality of Kitsch, or a pseudo-cultural product manufactured for the market: the built-in reaction. The hastiest, most obtuse reader is left in no doubt as to how he is supposed to react to Charlotte with her malachite table and—later—“her alabaster legs and lamb-chop shanks...in hard, slippery, glistening skins of nylon and silk.” As T.W. Adorno has noted of popular songs: “The composition hears for the listener.” The specific Kitsch device here is intimacy. Intimacy with the subject not in the old-fashioned sense of research, but an intimacy of style: the parajournalist cozies up, merges into the subject so completely that the viewpoint is wholly from inside, like family gossip. “All right, Charlotte, you...” There is no space between writer and topic, no “distancing” to allow the most rudimentary objective