THE PUMP HOUSE GANG (309 pages) and THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST (416 pages) by Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95 each.
The question is not only whether Tom Wolfe can be taken seriously but whether he can be taken at all. He uses a language that explodes with comic-book words like "POW!" and "boing." His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names and anatomical terms. He is irritating, but he did develop a new journalistic idiom that has brought relief from standard Middle-High Journalese. His outlook is partly cool, partly hysterical, and just slightly unconventional enough to make it provocative. The need for journalists like Wolfe is clear, and he has become the most talked about, the most imitated, if not the most bewildering journalist of the '60s. Wolfe's first collection of articles—The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, written mostly for Esquire and New York magazine—was a carnival of pieces about custom-car styling and demolition derbies, teenage tribal rock music, Las Vegas, and the girl of the year. His reportage on the rages and outrages of modern America's cultural phenomena was fascinating—and fatiguing.
Ravaging the Retinas. Perhaps the frugging, neon-lit, chromium-plated, plastic, pastel peregrinations of the times demanded a breathless roller-coaster rush of words to re-create the "shockkkkkk" of the real-life experience. But too often, Wolfe, dressed for the role in orange or off-white suits, merely seemed like an action-painter-writer recklessly ravaging the retinas with pastel word-blobs. Was he freaking out at the reader's expense? Was he in fact a social critic using a comic-strip writer's approach or a flack for pop cultists? A high priest of the gadgetry gods or the Walter Pater of contemporary esthetics? His two new books, bursting simultaneously like a couple of hot spray cans of Mace, suggest that the answers are all yes.
The Pump House Gang is a sequel to the earlier collection of articles. Wolfe, with characteristic flair, romps through such diverse subjects as Hugh Hefner, Natalie Wood, Marshall McLuhan, the California surfing cult, Carol Doda (the topless go-go girl with silicone-inflated breasts), the pop art collectors Bob and Spike Scull and teenage London society. What he achieves is an impressionistic interpretation of new status symbols and contemporary life styles.
Hip Mythology. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a kind of nonfiction novel about Ken Kesey, the celebrated author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is a more serious and successful attempt to proselytize the antic way of freaky esthetics. It may even be considered the New Testament of hip mythology: Wolfe implies a likeness between Kesey and various religious figures—including Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha. In 1964, Kesey forsook the literary world, having already established an LSD cult in La Honda, Calif. Wolfe records the events, carefully drawing religious parallels.