Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

The cow...

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Tom Wolfe.

He's the author of the candy-colored tangerine flake,

Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, The Electric Kool-Colite Acid Test,

Radical Sheik and Mow-Mowing, The Flack Catchers, the Pump House Gang, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, radical chic and ma-mowing, the flak catchers, the painted word,

the right stuff from Bowerhouse to Our House,

the Bonfire of the Vanities, and now an enormous novel called A Man in Fall.

It seems to me that this novel goes all the way back to the beginnings of your career.

It seems to me that the Conrad Hensley adventures seem to be very inspired by the kind of writing that Kesey was doing in One Flew over the cuckoo's nest. We've got a hero

who teams up with an islander. He's defeating an institution, making an escape of one kind

or another. And in an odd way, virtue is standing against an establishment and its hierarchies.

It seems to me in a way that the novel there is picking up from those great metaphorical novels.

It sort of feels when you're with Conrad in the Meek packing sub-zero freezer

that we're in the paint factory in The Invisible Man, that we're talking about one of

those places that becomes a metaphor for the grinding of society and social life.

How did that book, were you thinking Kesey in that period of writing?

...