It has been easy, in the last few years, to reread Tom Wolfe and find him horribly dated. After the announcement of his death on Monday, I went back to my copy of The New Journalism for the first time in a decade and found myself tutting in annoyance, or as Wolfe himself might have put it, going tskkkkuh-fnmmm-ught. All those made-ups words and jaunty phrases; the testosterone; the punctuation. Lord, the punctuation. And then I thought of where I was when I first read Wolfe and felt my heart crater.
Tom Wolfe obituary: a great dandy, in elaborate dress and neon-lit prose
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It's not an interesting story. I was on a bus in 1994. It was the 280 service between Aylesbury and Oxford and it was one of those occasions when the mind-blowing effect of the book you are reading forever cements what you saw when you looked up from the page. Boiling hot day, empty bus, spriggy hedgerows through the window and oh my word - I remember it so vividly - these mad sentences I couldn't believe it was actually legal to write.
