Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
Encyclopedia
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is a 1976 book by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

, consisting of eleven essays and one short story that Wolfe wrote between 1967 and 1976. It includes the essay in which he coined the term "Me Decade" to refer to the 1970s. In addition to the stories, Wolfe also illustrated the book.

Publication

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine was Wolfe's third collection of essays and short stories, following The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is the title of Tom Wolfe's first collected book of essays, published in 1965...

in 1965 and The Pump House Gang
The Pump House Gang
The Pump House Gang is a 1968 collection of essays and journalism by Tom Wolfe. The stories in the book explored various aspects of the counterculture of the 1960s...

in 1968. Wolfe's 1970 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe's fourth, is composed of two articles by Wolfe, "These Radical Chic Evenings," first published in June of 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party and...

contained two lengthy essays and is not generally considered a collection. Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine was published in 1976 by Wolfe's regular publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Themes

The subjects of Wolfe's essays were considered less original than his previous efforts. When Wolfe wrote about the culture of surf gangs in The Pump House Gang
The Pump House Gang
The Pump House Gang is a 1968 collection of essays and journalism by Tom Wolfe. The stories in the book explored various aspects of the counterculture of the 1960s...

or about stock car racing in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is the title of Tom Wolfe's first collected book of essays, published in 1965...

it was untrod ground. In Mauve Gloves, Wolfe wrote about subjects that had been widely covered before and sought to bring his unique insight to old stories, rather than tell wholly original stories about unexplored subcultures.

The primary theme of Wolfe's essays is the struggle for social status. Wolfe is particularly critical of the intelligentsia and the liberal elite, themes that he had previously explored in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe's fourth, is composed of two articles by Wolfe, "These Radical Chic Evenings," first published in June of 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party and...

. His contempt of distinguished writers (which would later be manifested in a feud with many of his contemporaries, particularly John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

) was evident in an essay about an established West Side author discussing his cash flow at length. Wolfe continued to denounce what he saw as faux-sympathy for poor people coming from a rich liberal elite.

Wolfe terms the status-driven era he chronicled the "Me Decade," and suggests that the wealth of the Post-War era is responsible for the self-absorption of the 1970s. Wolfe declared that people had given up on "man's age-old belief in serial immortality," the notion that people lived on through ancestral tradition and self-sacrifice, and instead focused only on themselves.

The longest essay, however, is "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie," about life aboard an aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

 in the Gulf of Tonkin
Gulf of Tonkin
The Gulf of Tonkin is an arm of the South China Sea, lying off the coast of northeastern Vietnam.-Etymology:The name Tonkin, written "東京" in Hán tự and Đông Kinh in romanised Vietnamese, means "Eastern Capital", and is the former toponym for Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam...

 in 1967. Wolfe writes about the personnel of the aircraft in heroic terms. According to The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...

, another common theme throughout all the books is the effect the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

 had on American society.

The lone short story in the book, "The Commercial" is a fictional story of a black baseball player who is given an advertising deal. Initially, the athlete believes the commercial will help establish him as more than a black athlete, but instead the advertisers want him to mispronounce words, thus dehumanizing him despite his success.

Writing

Often referred to as New Journalism
New Journalism
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included...

, Wolfe's characteristic writing style, characterized by florid prose and obsessive attention to detail, are on display throughout the book.

Wolfe compared himself to British author Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...

, who was known for his dark comedy. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

however, suggested that Wolfe's latest effort most closely resembled the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...

, who in the early 20th century, wrote in a highly colloquial style, and delved deeply into the anxieties of his characters. Because Wolfe's subjects in Mauve Gloves were not people on the fringes of society, the New York Times critic argued that Wolfe had begun to rely more heavily on "writing qua writing," and less on the inherent zaniness of his subjects.

In one of the book's most famous passages, exemplifying his style of description, Wolfe called Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

a "Missionary lectern-pounding Amen ten-finger C-major chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha keyboard loblolly pineywoods Baptist."

Contents

The 12 pieces in the book are divided into four sections as follows:
Stories and Sketches

I. Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine

II. The Man Who Always Peaked Too Soon

III. The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie

IV. The Commercial:A Short Story
The Spirit of the Age (and what it longs for)

V. The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America

VI. The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening
Sex and Violence

VII. The Perfect Crime

VIII. Pornoviolence

IX. The Boiler Room and the Computer
Manners, Decor, and Decorum

X. Funky Chic

XI. Honks and Wonks

XII. The Street Fighters
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