The story is now transformed to film, in an inspired adaptation by Adam McKay. In making that catastrophe not only accessible but also unputdownable Lewis achieved something that armies of financial journalists, teams of regulators and scores of political insiders had failed to achieve. That sense of uncanny access is nowhere more insistent than in Lewis’s masterpiece, The Big Short, which is nothing less than the full shocking story of the most opaque and scandalous event of recent American history, the financial crash of 2008. In The New New Thing, he spent a year getting inside the head of Jim Clark, of Netscape, and revealed exactly how that contemporary creation, the tech billionaire, looks at the world. In Moneyball, he sat for a season in the inner sanctum of a major league baseball team and exposed a whole new scientific way of winning. Lewis has taken over the mantle as the pre-eminent inside storyteller of our times (Wolfe himself acknowledges the fact, calling Lewis, in a recent blurb, “probably the best current writer in America”.) Reading any of Lewis’s books, you are taken immediately into worlds otherwise closed off. The curiosity that Michael Lewis felt about Wolfe is now one that fans of Lewis’s own books cannot help but share.
Wolfe had, it turned out, found the invite on a colleague’s desk and been unable to resist.Įvery writer is in thrall to the techniques and strategies of other writers. Among them he found the original invitation that led Wolfe to the infamous party thrown by Leonard Bernstein, then director of the New York Philharmonic, in honour of the Black Panther party, an event that led to him coining the term “radical chic” and skewering a generation of delusional uptown revolutionaries. Lewis went foraging in the archive in search of clues. In it was every notebook and bill and manuscript and letter and doodle the man in the white suit had ever collected. The occasion for him relating that story 43 years later was the fact that Wolfe’s literary archive, sold to the New York Library for $2.15m, had been opened to the public. A question arose in him: how the hell did Tom Wolfe do it? Lewis was an avid reader but this was the first time he’d had the sense of a real living writer finding and telling the intimate stories behind all those words on the page. When he opened the book and started reading, however, he was entranced by Wolfe’s scathing and hilarious observation of New York’s leftwing elites. Lewis was 12 years old, and of the words in that book’s title, he understood only “the”. In the story Lewis recalled how his admiration began when he pulled down a copy of Wolfe’s book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers from his father’s bookshelves at home in New Orleans in 1972. L ate last year, the American journalist Michael Lewis wrote a long story for Vanity Fair about his first and abiding literary hero, Tom Wolfe.
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