The American Spectator

p> TAS: Reality outpaces satire. br> Tom Wolfe: That’s one problem with novels. Novels have to be plausible. Take the Paris Hilton phenomenon. I think a novelist could have thought up the story of a beautiful heiress who gets involved in a pornographic videotape. A novelist could have conceived of a beautiful heiress who has no particular talent getting a $10 million television contract. But I defy you to locate the novelist who could have conceived the actual plot of Paris Hilton’s life, which is that she got the $10 million contract because she was on the pornographic tape. That made her career. There’s no question about it. /p> p> TAS: By pursuing realistic fiction during satirical times, you unintentionally became a great satirist? br> Tom Wolfe: I think that is true. I don’t know how you can be realistic without describing the foibles of mankind. If that’s all it takes for a novel to be labeled satire, I guess it is satire but I never sat down and said, ‘Now I am going to write a really biting satire.’ For example, in this book a lot of my conservative friends will probably comment on the political correctness. And there is some in there, but in fact the students pretty much ignore and discount it. They will put up with it and regurgitate it to the extent that they need to get credit in the courses. But as far as I can tell they are really not bothering with it. There is always a faction of activists. When I was visiting Stanford, students were protesting that the catering staff — they weren’t even university employees — were underpaid. If that’s as big an issue as you can come up with, then political correctness is not having a big effect on the students. And there is one good effect of it all, which is that even in the roughest fraternity houses you are very unlikely to hear racial epithets. /p> p> TAS: Just by describing reality as it is you became known as a ‘conservative.’ br>