When you take a longer view at the body of work Tom Wolfe calls his own, it’s one which features some of the finest in narrative non-fiction (The Right Stuff) and epic fiction (The Bonfire of the Vanities), with moments fitting and starting in between. For as much enlightenment as one might find in say, A Man in Full or Radical Chic, there’s some lesser entries into the canon – just try to get through, say, The Purple Decades, or the meandering pointlessness of Back to Blood and you’ll see what I mean.
So it’s a curiosity, this Kingdom of Speech, as Wolfe reverts back to his essayist role, and choosing two noteworthy figures from history (Charles Darwin; Noam Chomsky) and does what he can to take these two tall poppies down a notch. He basically is letting us know, in his own florid, kitschy manner, that everybody up til now, got it … wrong.
He goes to great length to explore that while Darwin was formulating his theory of evolution, at the same time Alfred Wallace was coining something similar… then we skip forward a number of decades to Noam Chomsky, who says humans have an innate (therefore evolved) capacity to acquire languages: a built-in ‘deep grammar’ or ‘universal grammar’ or ‘language acquisition device’ which explains, among other things, how toddlers can easily construct well-formed sentences. Into that mix is thrown the Pirahã tribes of the deep Amazon, whose linguistic patterns throw the general consensus to the wind (or do they?). Wolfe expounds on the Pirahã, or more specifically Daniel Everett, who spends decades among the tribes and eventually pens Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, as being the case against Chomsky’s argument, as the Pirahã language has no recursion, yet they can easily learn Portuguese, which does.
Wolfe’s prose, as well as his obviously thorough research, make for a thoroughly and typically enjoyable read, but there are (aren’t there always?) caveats. He says, at one point, that Einstein discovered the speed of light. *cough* — so while the book is not the go-to of the topic, the yardstick by which others shall be measured, but more a case of a celebrated author in his dotage having a ponder about that which separates us from the lesser apes.
It is somewhat disconcerting that the old boy, who on occasion in Back to Blood was indicating he was on the edge of some kind of meltdown (HockHockHockHockHockHockHockHock) eyes notions of ‘racism’ and ‘political correctness’ as abstracts, as peculiarities, as museum pieces or carnival oddities, the same way then-modern social mores were explored in Hooking Up, as well as early-millennial dating practices in I Am Charlotte Simmons. I suppose when you’re a well-heeled, WASP-y Fifth Avenue dandy in his mid-80s, what was once just language can be seen as humorous tokens. ‘Racism? Scoff!’
So, yes. There’s that. His closing notions, from atop his all-but ivory tower (bespoke ivory suit in tow) shows an upper class having scaled the trees of the jungle away from the riff-raff below, German sound system included, with views stretching to lower Manhattan. It was a curious thing to read in the immediate aftermath of the Trump ascendancy.
The Kingdom of Speech is an interesting addition to the Wolfe canon, but probably one solely for the author’s completists.
