[andy58-in-nh]

I like your graphic a great deal, but I'll have to disagree with you to some extent about Tom Wolfe - Bonfire of the Vanities was awful, but The Right Stuff and Radical Chic... most decidedly were not. Normal Mailer is bad, but not as awful as Gore Vidal. Truman Capote, I was once told, is an acquired taste. I never acquired it. Likewise, John Steinbeck I adjudge a fine writer of fiction, yet I've always despised his desolate, irredeemable sense of life as well as the pathetic hopelessness of his characters.

[Borges]

Vidal’s fiction will be forgotten but his essays are going to be around for a long time.

[Daffynition]

I bought "Bonfires" as one of those beach books and I just couldn't get through it, even though I tried a couple of times...as you say ... a stylistic, taste thing.

I recall watching Vidal on Firing Line in my formative political years ...dang those were super debates. I never read any of Vidal's novels b/c I disliked his values so...guess I thought I wouldn't identify with his themes and characters either. And in all fairness, I didn't particularly like Buckley's Blackford Oakes novels either.

Funny that you mention Steinbeck ...at one time I devoured everything he wrote. I was very socially liberal during my growing up ...joined the fight for migrant laborer's rights, the Peace Corps, yada. And it was precisely his character's *pathetic hopelessness*, as you say, that made me such a sucker for Rand, Goldwater, and all who followed, when I read them.

RIP Mr. Salinger. I'm sure there was some good you did. ;)

[Clemenza]

Andy, I will disagree with you about Bonfire. It was THE novel of New York in the 1980s, and, unlike "Bright Lights, Big City" or "Money," still holds up very well. The characters are on the money (especially Sherman, Peter Fallow, and Reveran Bacon) and it works as both satire and a critique on the double sided nature of New York culture (the Morloch and Eloi personified in the Bronx/Manhattan).

Wolfe's other fictional work (Man in Full, Charlotte Simmons) is awful, I agree.