The New Novel

The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs…food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty, un-slaked thirsts for…America…as she is right now. It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with the ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye. If the ranks of such novelists swell, the world—even that effete corner which calls itself the literary world—will be amazed by how quickly the American novel comes to life. Food! Food! Feed me! Is the cry of the twenty-first century in literature and all the so-called serious arts in America. The second half of the twentieth century was the period when, in a pathetic revolution, European formalism took over America’s arts, or at least the non-electronic arts. The revolution of the twenty-first century, if the arts are to survive, will have a name to which no ism can be easily attached. It will be called “content.” It will be called life, reality, the pulse of the human beast.

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up