Tom Wolfe’s California
In the Golden State, the great writer first chronicled the social changes that would transform America.
"Tom Wolfe is most identified with New York City, for good reason. He has lived and worked in Manhattan since the early 1960s, and New York dominates his writing the way London looms for Dickens. But Wolfe has never been afraid to venture from his home turf—this fall’s Back to Blood, an exploration of Miami, is a case in point—and his true literary second home is California. Over the course of his career, Wolfe has devoted more pages to the Golden State than to any setting other than Gotham.
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At its best, the hippie Great Awakening gave birth to a heightened appreciation of nature, philosophy, and fine living that sanded some of the hard edges off mid-century California’s rigid pragmatism and restored a sense of grace and ease to the land, or at least the coast. Most of those who lived it, though not all, settled down after waking from their post–Acid Test stupor. David Brooks, who has learned much from Wolfe, gently mocks the institutionalization of hippie culture as “boboism” even as he shows how it has done much good.
But there was a dark side. Wolfe mentions whole towns where “stranded hippies” who refuse or are unable to move on “make money by doing yard work.” For every Alice Waters—the local-foods restaurateur who’s managed to parlay the spirit of that age into a beneficent movement and successful business—hundreds more end up as burned-out wrecks. The Hensley family in A Man in Full are, in effect, Wolfe’s second epilogue toAcid Test, like the captions at the end of movies that tell you what happened to the characters afterward. Conrad—the straitlaced, hardworking son of two Haight-Ashbury wastrels—is a reactionary in the precise sense, rebelling against the disorder of his parents’ lives by becoming everything they are not."
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