A man in full: Tom Wolfe's latest obsession

I didn't read Tom Wolfe's long polemic on historic preservation in New York last November. Luckily the Village Voice has Wolfe's latest foray into participatory journalism.

From the lofty heights of Mount Week in Review, Wolfe had summoned up all of his rhetorical powers—his vroooom vroooom, kandy-kolored, tangerine-flake streamlined prose—to smite an obscure municipal agency, the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The agency's mission: to designate historic landmarks and to vet planned construction projects in the city's historic districts. Wolfe declared the commission "de facto defunct." He called its members pushovers for City Hall, patsies for developers—and he said they're more concerned with their own popularity than with protecting the city's historic assets.

"The writer Tom Wolfe and other neighbors have taken to lobbying objections in the direction of the Landmarks Preservation Commission," wrote Wolfe, speaking of himself in the third person. "Today it is a bureau of the walking dead."

For the most part, preservation advocates tend to be sincere traditionalists, who revere the established order and speak earnestly and without irony about the grave importance of such things as safeguarding the fabric of a neighborhood. In short, they are nothing like Wolfe—a bestselling author who has spent much of his career singling out the establishment's plump sacred cows and then reveling in their subsequent slaughter as he enriches his own life and parades about town in his trademark white suit, top hat, and spats.

Then again, historic preservation tends to attract an older crowd, and that would clearly include the 75-year-old Wolfe. His most recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons—about the softcore adventures of a handful of college undergraduates—explored the terrain of young Americans and was the least successful book of his long career. And just as aging buildings need preserving, so do the reputations of aging writers. Wolfe's salvo in the Times may say less about the commission's attempts to save old buildings and more about Tom Wolfe's attempt to preserve his own decaying facade.

Writers who refer to themselves in the third person are a little weird but one always has to make an exception for Tom Wolfe.