for shame.

Tom Wolfe suffers from a serious problem in his fiction: He gets way too far into a way too long book and then doesn't know how to end it so he just stops. I think there's value in his writing but I don't think we can say that either of his novels illustrate true genius.

He also suffers from a serious problem in his nonfiction, and that is that he sometimes inadvertently inserts himself into the action. Thompson said that the merry pranksters were all laughing behind their hands at him because he never really became a fly on the wall so whenever he was around in one of his ice cream suits they would just do what they wanted his writing to reflect and not what came naturally.

Compare Thompson's Hell's Angels with Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid. I'll take the former a hundred times over the latter.