COLUMN: In defense of enjoyable literature

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99This holiday, I finished reading Tom Wolfe's new novel, A Man In Full. After 700 pages, I wished the ending were a little better, but overall I had no significant complaints. All in all, it was a pretty good read. Being from about 90 miles north of Atlanta -- the setting of the novel -- I found Wolfe's portrayal of the New South both interesting and entertaining. In a New Yorker review, Updike called A Man In Full "entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." If you're like me, that may not appear too keen a barb. In some circles, however, they tell me them's fightin' words. Mailer echoed Updike in the New York Review of Books when he labeled Wolfe's work as solely "entertaining." Maybe I've missed something, but since when has entertainment been such a high crime against humanity? God forbid a novel be entertaining as well as significant. Novelist Richard Price agrees. He asks, "Does it automatically make you a panderer because you're entertaining? Some of the greatest books ever written are entertaining." Wolfe, never one to miss a chance to throw his white hat into the ring, asks, "Why are all these old men rising off their pallets to condemn my book? Because my book has cast a very big shadow, and people like Mailer and Updike find themselves in the dark. "And what do you do when you're in the dark? You whistle. They're whistling in the dark." Mailer and Updike are wrong to relegate Wolfe's novel to the "entertaining" tomes of Tom Clancy and Sue Grafton, which they do when they exclude him from their literary clique. In A Man In Full, Wolfe observes that in suburban America, "the only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy's, another Costco, another Home Depot." I'm sorry, but Tom Clancy has never made such an insightful observation about American life. Neither has Danielle Steele, for that matter. Or virtually any other "entertaining" writer who fills the best-seller list and churns out ready-for-TV novels. Wolfe is no James Joyce, to be sure. He'll never write another Ulysses. But our reading society doesn't want another Ulysses. We want realistic literature, situations we can sink our teeth into because they could very well exist just around the corner. As Malcolm Jones wrote, in A Man In Full "Wolfe is off on his favorite theme -- namely that the realistic novel is the way of the future, that navel-gazing literary novels are a thing of the past." The psychological novel isn't dead, but it's certainly been supplanted. Henry James may have been OK for one generation, but when we turn to novels for literary pleasure today, we turn to the likes of Don DeLillo, Kaye Gibbons, Charles Frazier and -- most of all -- Tom Wolfe. So let Updike and Mailer whistle into the night. Tom Wolfe has written one helluva novel. It's entertaining, you say? All the better.