Word: thackeray
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Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature...
...Thompson. "Daley" is a corruption of Ayodele, an African endearment bestowed by his Nigerian father and mispronounced by his Scottish mother. It means "joy enters the house." "That was the only thing," in Thompson's bittersweet estimation, "that they got absolutely right." His London childhood was something out of Thackeray, not Dickens, though classic shadows like boarding schools were involved. "Since forever, I always thought I was going to be the best in the world at something. My school friends used to laugh at me, but I kept searching for the thing that would express who I am. There...
...recall many of the pleasures of Glengarry. Both center on salesmen who have no skill except persuasion, no talent but for heightened, theatrical speech and naked yet manipulative emotional outbursts. Although Mamet is highly literary -- he reads widely, and the script for Speed-the-Plow has an epigraph from Thackeray's Pendennis -- few of his witticisms translate well into print, because he does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater (1977) and the singles-bar habitues of Sexual Perversity...
...examine its plumage, to listen to the roar of "well-educated young white men baying for money." In short, New Journalism shares much with the traditional novel of manners and society. "Realism is a plateau from which literature cannot back down," says Wolfe, acknowledging his debt to Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Evelyn Waugh...
Braithwaite has many other literary convictions. He prefers Thackeray to Dickens; he is saving Virginia Woolf for "when I'm dead." He would like to impose bans on certain categories of novel: those in which a group of people, isolated by circumstance, revert to the "natural condition" of man; novels about incest; those set in Oxford or Cambridge. He would also impose a quota system on fiction set in South America, "to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony...