On a crisp night last fall, I found myself sitting next to the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico for a celebratory dinner at the Waverly Inn. Normally the picture of sprezzatura, he had been reduced to a chain-smoking bundle of nerves during the cocktail hour and appetizer course. When the time finally came for him to accept Air Mail’s inaugural Tom Wolfe Prize for Fiction, he was, well, a mess.
Yet he pulled himself together, delivering a speech about how his novel Perfection, a canny skewering of the millennial experience, had been, in large part, inspired by Wolfe’s keen eye for social signifiers (in addition to Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, Things). During his speech, and the subsequent one by Meghan Daum, winner of the nonfiction prize, delivered to a room full of writers, publishers, actors, and artists there to celebrate the joys of literature and metropolitan life, Tom Wolfe’s spirit felt alive and well.
