Volume 26, Number 17 · November 8, 1979
Hog Heaven
By John Gregory Dunne
The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 436 pp., $12.95
Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held. In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks. Class indeed was the unacknowledged secret of the Vietnam war, the first conflict in the nation's history—although I doubt the last—fought by the American version of a Hessian class, a constituency of the dispossessed from the skid rows of the national dream, from the Appalachian hollows and the exhausted farms and the red-lined areas on the urban maps. What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.
Review, 3452 words
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