It took a while, so there was a lot of sitting and reading (for me), sitting, reading, knitting, and multiple walks (for Laine). At one point it was too hot to sit outside and I went to the tiny, dusty waiting room to get out of the sun. Next to me, on the magazine rack, was the Costco members magazine (picture to your right). That guy with the white suit and the black hat is Tom Wolfe, who wrote a non-fiction novel called The Right Stuff about the Mercury Program and the beginning of space flight in the US. That was published in 1979.
A weak pun, but that's puns for you.
When I saw this, I thought something like, "How the mighty have fallen." Tom Wolfe was one of the stars of The New Journalism in the 70s. He, along with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and a bunch of other writers whose names I've completely forgotten, were writing with these new, personal voices. It's commonplace now, but seemed revolutionary at the time. Wolfe wrote a bunch of essays, collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Pump House Gang. His longest piece, in this period, is the book-length The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is one of my favorite books. Wolfe cultivated a cool, sometimes sneering, distance from his subjects. It works fine in some cases, like Acid Test, less well in others. It completely sank him when it came to his novels, all of which are unreadable, imo.
But for this sneering dandy to end up on the cover of the magazine for the store of the masses, Costco? Wearing a hat that's too big (and black?) and a suit that probably fit him better at some point in the past? That's just sad.
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