The Book Review

The Right Stuff

Though it doesn’t exactly tap-dance, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight puts most of the important pieces in their place. It traces the rise of writers (Talese, Wolfe) who’d made names for themselves in daily newspapers, then opted to break their chains—first in magazines, later in best-selling books. It recounts how certain members of the gang (Mailer, Didion) brought A-list literary credentials to the party. And how others still (Michael Herr, Timothy Crouse) simply showed up uninvited, bright-eyed and hungry, with fresh and subversive takes on the American way of war and politics. Predictably, the author also throws a bushel or two of poppy petals at the feet of the late, great, self-branded king of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, who made an art out of running amok.

See a pattern? Personally, I never did. But, as I say, the spitball stuck.

Anyway, it’s nice to keep the flame flickering, and one is reluctant to be too hard on The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight. However, Weingarten is so intent on glorifying New Journalism that he loses perspective. His dismissal of The New Yorker (borrring!) is near total, no matter that the magazine under William Shawn, while often long-winded and snoozy, was home to much lively and innovative work. After dissing Capote for In Cold Blood’s inaccuracies, Weingarten goes radio silent on The New Yorker, wasting not so much as a footnote on John McPhee, who, while less of a preener than Tom Wolfe, has arguably been a more potent influence on literary journalism over the past four decades.

What we’re left with is a heavy sigh: Journalism-will-never-be-the-same. The fact is, despite the magazine industry’s depressing state, good journalism does survive out there. Weingarten gives cursory credit to Ted Conover, Jon Krakauer, and Barbara Ehrenreich, who are now parsed in J-schools as the New New Journalists. But it wouldn’t have hurt to go further, noting the accomplishments of many others—William Langewiesche and Michael Lewis, to name two—who reliably give their forebears a run for their money, in terms of both reporting and writing. But to bestow too much credit on today’s gifted gang would have only contradicted Weingarten’s basic premise: that Breslin, the Gonz, Wolfe, and the rest of the disparate cast were “our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience,” the greatest of whom, Weingarten says, “burned with a Promethean flame.” I’d say that’s a bit overreaching—and I suspect that Hayes, Felker, or Morris would have advised the author to tone things down, and might have taken a sharp pencil, if not an ax, to those sentences.

The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and The New Journalism Revolution
Marc Weingarten.
Crown. 336 pages. $25.

Lee Eisenberg is a former editor of Esquire. His book The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life will be published in early January by Free Press.