Current mood: THE LONG AND SHORT..
Category: THE LONG AND SHORT.. Writing and Poetry
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have many cultural problems...
Yes boss, successfully entertaining the 1 and only citizen of Planet Paul Pious James Giovanni £rd is a very complicated business, and there's no harder way to do it than by telling stories...
The thing is: I don't like length...
No boss, if a film's longer than an hour 30 - I generally dislike it, and if a book's longer than a coupla hundred pages - ditto...
The strange thing with this rule, is that almost all of my very favourite films are more than an hour 30 and a good few of my favourite books are more than a coupla hundred pages long?!?
One of these books is called A Man In Full by the American writer Tom Wolfe...
Of all the alt.writers of the last 40 years, Tom Wolfe is perhaps the least well known, but having read this book and one other, I firmly believe he's set to be amongst the most longevinous, and here's why...
The key difference between Wolfe and the likes of say a Charles Bukowski or a Hunter S Thompson is that Wolfe stands back from his work.
Yes boss, Thompson and Bukwoski and for that matter Kerouac and many of the others are all about expressing their own rage and emotion. They (in some form or another) are always the main character in their work.
Wolfe on the other hand lets others have the main roles. He doesn't have the cult of personality or the overstated ego - the need to be at the center of every story, the 'ME ME ME IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!'
No boss, whilst the other big names were off getting pissed and/or stonned to fuel the fervent and dynamic energy of their work, Wolfe gently sat on the sofabed, watching and making notes...
I take this ability to stay sat on said seat to mean that Wolfe's a lot more secure and stable in himself than your average writer is. If he suffers addictions, he manages to keep them under wraps - they clearly don't dominate his work.
Which brings me to the main reason why I think he'll last..
Basically, writing this way is much harder to do. And to do it at such great length and hold the attention of a hugely impetuos and egotistical bastard like ME ME ME IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!! is a truly incredible feet.
Yes boss, A Man In Full is an epic fucking book. There are hundreds of characters of varrying sizes and the page count comes in somewhere north of 700 large ones (with small type) - but it all works so very well.
So good is it, that I'd have had absolutely no problems with it being double that length. In fact as I neared the end, I started to worry badly about replacing it. I knew that finding another virtual world as good and well worked as that one was going to be very, very hard to find - and so it's proved to be...
So, I'm not going to try and encapsulate the plot or explain further why A Man In Full is so good.
I'll just advise you to buy it, read it and find out for yourselves...
 | Currently reading :
A Man in Full
By Tom Wolfe
Release date: By 12 November, 1998 |
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