Tom Wolfe's Rooftop Yawp

Croker passes through the furnace of adversity to freedom, as Janis Joplin defined it--""nothing left to lose.'' His discovery, and Wolfe's point, is not just that the avaricious have raw nerve endings in all their possessions. Rather, it is that you have something to lose, and hence are unfree, as long as you fret about status and hence are hostage to the opinions of rivals in the status competition.

Wolfe, a Virginia native, wants to make Jefferson's 18th century idea of freedom--individual autonomy--relevant to late-20th century people enmeshed in the joyless pursuit of joy, understood as status conferred by materialism. He resuscitates a 1950s preoccupation voiced then in books like ""The Lonely Crowd,'' ""The Organization Man,'' ""The Status Seekers,'' ""White Collar'' and Sloan Wilson's underrated novel ""The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.'' The worry was that a nation demobilized from war would be suffocated by a new, soft regimentation of corporate life, mass culture and the dreary temptations of what Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) called ""conspicuous consumption.''

In ""The Age of Reform'' (1955), the pre-eminent American historian of the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter, argued that the political upheaval of progressivism was partly a ""status revolution.'' The professions (lawyers, physicians, clergy, academics), merchants and persons engaged in once-sacred agriculture were provoked, not by shrinkage of their material means, but by changed patterns in the distribution of deference brought about by the rise of big business. By entrepreneurs with animal spirits--by Charlie Crokers.

Wolfe, offering a Nietzschean riff on the role of resentment in an egalitarian democracy, understands the high nastiness quotient in a society in which envy, and hence Schadenfreude, drive a restless search for ""more and tastier gloating'' about the status slippage of others. The gimlet-eyed Wolfe sees mostly vulgarity (e.g., corporations buying Henry Moore sculptures for instant gravitas) and fatuity (see page 436 for the museum director's artblather in praise of a homoerotic exhibit). His only hero (Wolfe's is a deeply conservative temperament) is a young working-class man whose rebellion against his hippie parents takes the form of powerful longings for bourgeois normality.

But America, seen steadily and whole, is better than this. Perhaps Wolfe's third novel will be a happier--more realistic--yawp.

© 1998