https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/books/review/tom-wolfe-radical-chic-black-panthers-leonard-bernstein.html Skip to contentSkip to site index Book Review Today's Paper What to Read * Best Books of the 21st Century * Find Your Next Book * 2024's Best Books (So Far) * New Novels This Summer * August Releases Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Supported by SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Essay The Secret to Tom Wolfe's Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop How the author of "The Right Stuff," "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" and other classics turned sociology into art. * Share full article * * This black-and-white photo shows a clean-shaven young man in a light-colored suit and tie and white saddle shoes, posing nonchalantly against a streetlight at a busy crossroads in Midtown Manhattan. Tom Wolfe in Midtown Manhattan in 1968. Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him.Credit...Sam Falk/The New York Times David Brooks By David Brooks David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," to be published by Picador this month. Aug. 15, 2024 There are certain writers you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe. For if you do, you will not be able to get their voices and rhythms out of your head, and you will have to confront the absolute certainty that you can't pull off what they did. In Wolfe's case you'll find that you can't quite replicate the raw energy of his prose: the fun; the snap, crackle, pop; the fuzzy effusions of new sociological categories -- masters of the universe, social X-rays. And then there's his sheer audacity. His essay "Radical Chic" -- about a cocktail party the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw for the Black Panthers in 1970 -- begins with Bernstein waking up in the middle of the night in a state of wild alarm. He had mentioned having a bad dream in an interview somewhere, and Wolfe took that little autobiographical morsel and spun it into a grand tour through the inside of Bernstein's brain. Any responsible journalist can report, "Bernstein had a nightmare," but Wolfe has the guts to take a flight of fancy and describe the nightmare from the inside, with its moments of narcissistic grandiosity and its descent into degrading humiliation. Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma. He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book "The Right Stuff," about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In "Radical Chic," you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite -- the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables -- Catholics, Jews, Black people. Image Wolfe's goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance. He was a provocateur, not an advocate. He came to examine fashions, not legislate morality. The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn't like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines -- the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. 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