Tom Wolfe, visionary: 1931-2018

There aren't many people about whom the word 'visionary' would mean so much. Tom Wolfe had a far-reaching insight into his subjects and characters, a highly specific look (the memorable visual branding of his white suit and tailored clothes), and a ringing voice to his writing that stood out even among the singular styles of his New Journalism peers.

From the title of his first big article, readers knew Wolfe was changing the face of reportage. He and his peers used fiction-writing techniques like writing in present tense to report real-life events, changing objectivity for immediacy. Wolfe dumped emotional distance to shove his readers face first into the living, breathing moment.

Many of his books came from 'saturation reporting', in which Wolfe would tirelessly immerse himself in the daily lives of the people he wrote about. He made his subjects into heroes and wildly drawn cartoons, exaggerated figures with emotions and adventures writ large into his books. He was no dispassionate observer. There would be no detached, cool 'reporting' from Tom Wolfe: he wrote right into the heads of his protagonists, even the real-life ones.

He was a satirist, his novels and non-fiction bleeding into each other, fed by his acidic observations of the culture of the time. He wrote his first draft of The Bonfire of the Vanities serially, like Thackeray or Dickens, spending hours at the Manhattan Criminal Court or shadowing police officers from the Bronx Homicide squad.

About what he saw as the flaws of society he was merciless: not hateful but raw in his observance, passionate in mockery. In his book The Painted Word he describes the hunger of artists for recognition, waiting for the New York tastemakers to make them the hot new thing:

Rolling across Lower Manhattan like the cosmic pulse of the Theosophists would be a unitary heartbeat: Pick ME Pick ME Pick ME Pick ME--!

For all his innovation and groundbreaking work, Wolfe was very much a product of his time. He was accused of being a conservative, and of being derogatory towards women and people of colour, notably some members of the Black Panther party. His later work about language, neuroscience, and evolution was critiqued as shallow research, more opinion than fact. (It's still readable as hell.)

Whatever he was, Tom Wolfe was singular, striking, and hypnotic; a man with an uncanny vision into the mystery of humanity, and the fearless wit to paint, in boldest colours, what he saw there.