THAT'S HOW GOOD IT WAS

My introduction to the Faber Book of Pop

Dear Readers,

Here is another historic text as I continue to work on the feature film of Shattered.

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In November 1989, not long after hed published The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Harpers entitled Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast - a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel'. It stated that since the mid-196os, Wolfe had been waiting for American writers to deliver versions of the novels of Balzac, Dickens and Zola, monsters of epic realism that would capture the tremendous social upheavals of the period. Hippies, the universities, feminism, political assassination, war, civil rights, black militancy in the boiling cities: what irresistible subjects they were for the novelist! The author only had to be able to write fast enough to get it all down. During this fervent period, Wolfe himself was working on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; mere journalism, of course, but about this new subject, the psychedelic or hippie movement. Yet Wolfe was terrified. His book, which he was calling a 'non-fiction novel', would, he knew, be 'blown out of the water' by the real thing: great literary fiction. Wolfe waited and waited. It never happened.

Why not? Perhaps Philip Roth could help explain. In his essay 'Writing American Fiction', published in 1961, he wrote: 'The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.' Roth then approvingly quotes Edmund Wilson's remark that after Life magazine, he feels he does not belong to the country depicted there, that he does not live in the country at all.