Tom Wolfe’s Race Realism

Ben Yagoda writes in the WSJ: “While “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) was a tour de force—not coincidentally set in New York, his adoptive home town, whose streets he had pounded for so many years—I wasn’t able to get through the three novels that followed it. The satire sometimes turned to meanness, and Wolfe’s racial perspective was an obstacle. He didn’t depict people of color (a term he surely loathed) as villains so much as irredeemably different and other. (This was apparent from the start of his career. Describing the Playboy mansion in the introduction to an early collection, he said it had “huge black guards or major-domos inside. Nubian slaves, I kept saying to myself. One of the blacks led me up a grand staircase . . .”)”