Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
Tom Wolfe's Greatest Hits
By James Wolcott
The Purple Decades: A Reader
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pp., $17.50
Not since Garry Wills uncorked his rather fanciful notions on the origins of the cold war in the opening pages of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time has a book been so fatefully torpedoed by its own introduction. Subtitled 'A Reader,' The Purple Decades presents an ample selection of Tom Wolfe's writings from the Sixties and Seventies—a bewilderingly familiar selection, considering how many of Wolfe's fugitive pieces on fashion and pop remain uncollected. Rather than spruce up the book with some of Wolfe's lesser-known sorties (such as his tribute to the photographer Marie Cosindas, which appeared in American Photographer, or his meditation on schlock movie violence in the July 1967 Esquire, which in many ways anticipated the current rage in 'splatter' films), The Purple Decades safely sticks to what one might call Tom Wolfe's Greatest Hits: his famous profiles of Baby Jane Holzer and racecar driver Junior Johnson, his explorations of radical chic, the right stuff, and the Me Decade, and highlights from his recent sprees on the absurd excesses of art-think, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.
Review, 2348 words
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