Age in year of publication: seventy-nine.
Tom Wolfe 1931–
1988 The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe is a brilliant ‘reporter novelist’, one of those writers who, avoiding literary ‘isms’, take life as his subject. Tom Wolfe was lucky. For his version of The Rake’s Progress, he had the comic insanities of 1980s New York for his material and, cool pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’, a baroque writing style to match.
This is a panoramic, rumbustious cartoon of a novel, encompassing every chicanery and vanity New York has to offer. Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street man with an annual salary of a few bucks less than a million dollars, a wife Judy and a mistress Maria. As with so much else in Sherman’s life Maria is a mistake: she involves him in a car accident with two black youths one of whom is mortally wounded and … bingo! Enter black ghetto leader Reverend Reggie Bacon, poisonous English hack Peter Fallow, harassed Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, and creepily ambitious District Attorney Abe Weiss — living, walking and talking examples of the seven deadly sins. All bring about Sherman’s downfall with brio and enthusiasm.
Tom Wolfe comes at the vanities of man like a boxer punching the air, using wit, audacity and ridicule as weapons. As a demolition job on the prancing snobberies, arrogance, greed and ambitions of American man, the novel is unsurpassed, and as a novel of unlimited entertainment and social comment, likewise.
Tom Wolfe was born in Virginia and lives in New York. His renowned non-fiction includes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and The Right Stuff (1979). His other novels are A Man In Full (1998), and I am Charlotte Simmons (2004).
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Tobias Wolff 1945–
1996 The Night in Question
The Americans encountered in these short stories could, with a bit of adaptation of surroundings and preoccupations, just as easily be Muscovites or New Zealanders. Wolff’s people are loners living together. ‘Even together, people were as solitary as cows in fields all facing off in different directions.’ But there is no self-pity and little sadness here. Instead, Wolff conjures up certain moments of recognition, moments when the riddles posed by the bewildering behaviour of others rise to the surface for baffled inspection.
Each story is firmly placed within the traumas and trivia of daily life: the jumble of bottles and tubes on a dressing table, the flickering of the television set, ‘chemical gizmos’ that turn the lavatory water blue. Amid this entirely recognizable world Wolff’s men and women, fathers and mothers, suitors, soldiers and schoolteachers negotiate safe passage. Children look after their parents (a favourite Wolff topic), dogs bark, newspapers are read and discarded, people hope for the wrong kind of love and create their own disappointments. Wolff records all this in writing of beauty and simplicity, a lemon twist of irony or wit often present. These are stories flavoured too with Wolff’s sense of delight in humankind at its most precarious, but there is always a notion of happiness fluttering in the air, like a delicate kite or a multicoloured balloon.
Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and lives in California. His books include the famous memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989), and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994). He has also written the acclaimed novel Old School (2003) and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Francis Wyndham 1924–
1987 The Other Garden
In Francis Wyndham’s novel, which quietly marks the end of a certain kind of English life, the narrator is a young man living in a village near Marlborough before and during the Second World War, an atmosphere recalled here through the songs and movies of that time. In this village live Sybil and Charlie Demarest, the class of English person young men were supposed to be defending, in fact odiously snobbish, boring and preternaturally cruel, most of all to their daughter Kay, whom they detest. She is not like them. Kay is awkward, undistinguished, with simple affections for the sun, for film stars and for friends. Kay has a droll penchant for not quite managing things, but she is not a snob, she loves what crumbs of life come her way, and most of all the dog Havoc whom she passionately adopts, abandoned as she is. Kay is the personification of those people who do not so much wish to be different, as are, and have to be. What happens to Kay and Havoc and the narrator is the stuff of this report from the Other Garden of England, the untended one, and nothing quite like it exists. The Other Garden gives an alternative view of the accepted world, always in subtle ways, not a word too many or out of place. Quizzically wise, irresistibly funny, this is a poignant novel of great intelligence.
Francis Wyndham was born in and lives in London. He is also a distinguished journalist, critic and short-story writer.
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
Autobiographies and Memoirs
TWENTY OF THE BEST WRITTEN SINCE 1950
J. R. Ackerley
My Father and Myself 1968
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 1951
Frank Conroy
Stop Time 1968
Jill Ker Conway
The Road to Corain 1989
Harry Crews
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place 1978
Quentin Crisp
The Naked Civil Servant 1968
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Apology 1951
Lillian Hellman
An Unfinished Woman 1969
Pentimento 1973
Scoundrel Time 1976
Michael Herr
Dispatches 1977
Christopher Hope
White Boy Running 1988
Mary Karr
The Liar’s Club 1995
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts 1976
China Men 1980
Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle
Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 (1984 edition)
Frank McCourt
Angela’s Ashes 1997
Rian Malan
My Traitor’s Heart 1990
Arthur Miller
Timebends 1987
Jessica Mitford
Hons and Rebels 1977
Frank Moorhouse
Martini: A Memoir 2005
Sally Morgan
My Place 1987
Blake Morrison
When Did You Last See Your Father? 1996
Nuala O’Faolain
Are You Somebody 1997