An Elegant Execution

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Last week's National Book Awards banquet in Manhattan was an exquisite literary evening. Copies of nominated books graced each table, nonfloral arrangements for perusal by the usually rumpled and solitary wrestlers of verb and tense now glittering in tuxedos and sequins. There was some disappointment over Tom Wolfe's absence. The room, so festive in black, had expected a coronation for the man so tailored in white: his A Man in Full was the talk of the town, the favorite for the fiction prize. But then John Updike, the most influential of America's living novelists, took the stage looking as sharp as a scythe. What a night for a beheading!

Gasps went up when Updike, receiving a lifetime-achievement medal, said the word Wolfe. He had just pricked A Man in Full in the New Yorker, calling its author "a talented, inventive, philosophical-minded journalist, coming into old age," who goes for broke on a novel that is just "entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." At the podium, a smiling Updike read Wolfe's vivid if catty 1964 account of Updike receiving his first National Book Award: "He squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses, then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward his right shoulder." "Newspapers don't lie," Updike mischievously remarked before adding, "I remember the event as being rather intimate and sedate...a small low room with a scattering of librarians in flowered hats on folding chairs."

Updike the Yankee and Wolfe the Virginian are gentlemen of carefully carved manners, but they represent competing schools of fiction. Updike's novels are introverted and literary, painted in subtle pastels. Wolfe, who once wrote a manifesto urging writers to rediscover the Thackeray tradition of sweeping social tomes, prefers raucous and sprawling journalistic narratives that spray-paint the world in bold colors. In 1965 Wolfe wrote a bratty piece calling the New Yorker "the most successful suburban women's magazine in the country." Updike, a fixture there since the '50s, has jousted at the man he calls "Tom, as distinguished from Thomas, Wolfe" and "Tom Wolfe (the younger)."

Last week the awards sided with Updike's sensibilities. A Man in Full lost to Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. Wolfe was at a party in Atlanta, where his new novel is set, avoiding the scythes.

--By Howard Chua-Eoan