American culture, whatever that is, bears watching. The brahmin rumblings of an Edmund Wilson or the meat-cleaver Macdonald approach (He ought to know about Midcult!) won’t do—or so one suspects after a heavy dose of Tom Wolfe. Resplendent in nubby suit and buckle-over bootlets, our country-elegant mental traveler lunges forth on a whip-zip kaleidoscopic tour up, down, around and underneath the American scene. He may lose his balance now and then, but who can blame him? Lesser culture-watchers haven’t even dared to speculate upon the larger implications of such phenomena as the neon signs of Las Vegas, The Kalifornia Kustom Kar, or Baby Jane Holzer. (Most of them get about as far into it as the New Republic writers who prate to this very day about tail-finned, chromey monsters from Detroit, when there hasn’t been a fin produced for five-six years and the chrome has almost vanished.) In the main, Wolfe is able to preserve a hard core of perceptiveness amid the riot and the wreck; always he poses and bravely tries to answer the frustrating question “What (if anything) does it all mean?”
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, by Tom Wolfe. Farrar, $5.50
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