Magazines: In Chic's Clothing

(2 of 2)

Flipped Wigs. The spontaneity sometimes sounds a little studied—especially in his leads, which have a tendency to come on like a psychedelic one-man band. The beginning of his piece on Las Vegas, for example, consists of the word "hernia" repeated no fewer than 57 times. And if the 25 pages that follow jump and shimmer at times in their observations and their writing, they also suffer from prose that has a tendency to clot and baroque scrollwork similes that have a familiar look.

Not included in the book is Wolfe's most widely discussed article—a cruel, 11,000-word evisceration of The New Yorker. That piece set literary jowls aquiver from Morningside Heights to Greenwich Village, and threw New Yorker staffers into a spate of semi-public wig flippings that are still going on—notably in a bitter rebuttal that Writer Dwight Macdonald is preparing for the biweekly New York Review of Books.

The best of Wolfe's reporting in Kandy-Kolored might well be required reading in courses with names like American Studies: his examination of Stock-Car Racer Junior Johnson as the American Hero, for example; his portrait of a beautiful, rich, frustrated Manhattan divorcee; his hilarious put-down of New York and New Yorkers called The Big League Complex.

Reporter Wolfe, in fact, rather fancies himself a sociological trail blazer who is hacking his way through the subculture pop worlds that he feels are molding the U.S. scene. But he ought to know that sociologists don't get printed as much as guys who go pop! BANG . . . stretching ... on a flaky, floating Supermatic.