RUTHFULLY YOURS

You’ll know one of Kesey’s slogans, which entered the language thanks to Wolfe: “You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.” I was decidedly on the Tom Wolfe bus.

Next up was “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of essays published a decade before “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Who knew that anyone could write with such serve, with SO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!? When you’re 16 and have been battened on “The Scarlet Letter” and Kipling’s “If,” it is both a revelation and an emancipation.

I gobbled up a lot of Tom Wolfe’s work as a teenager. Particularly choice was “The Right Stuff,” his magisterial documentary about the origins of the Mercury space program and birth of NASA. What I appreciated then was mostly Wolfe’s style, his sheer exuberance.

Only later did I come to appreciate the stiletto-like polemic concealed beneath the sheath of rhetorical efflorescence.

In “The Painted Word” (1975), Wolfe produced a classic send-up of the insufferable pretensions of the art world circa 1960-70, when Abstract Expression had crested and the hour of Conceptual Art was nigh. Art critics—certain art critics, the happy few, the band of brothers—ruled the roost. Their reign was so conspicuous that Wolfe imagined a museum of the future in which passages from the brotherhood’s writings would be blown up poster-size, illustrated by tiny postcard images of the artworks they commented on. “No more realism,” Wolfe wrote, “no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. . . . Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until . . . it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture . . . and came out the other side as Art Theory!”

Wolfe performed a similar balloon-puncturing, emperor’s-new-clothes-revealing service for the grim modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and other enemies of architectural commodiousness in “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1981).

It was delicious, all of it, and followed the poet Horace’s injunction to delight as well as instruct. Wolfe was fun, no doubt about it.

But he also made serious points about the state of our culture: the sad, dehumanizing state of architecture and the built environment, and the horrible amalgam of snobbery, money and ostentatious historical ignorance and lack of talent in the art world.

Wolfe came back to the art world in his fourth novel, “Back to Blood” (2012), which contains a painfully funny evisceration of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, an epicenter of emetic folly and pretentiousness. One punter spent “$17 million on six obscene pieces of glass,” fabricated not by the artist but by a contract glassblower. As a seductive female consultant explained, “No cutting-edge artist touches materials anymore, or instruments.” Asked what she meant by “instruments,” she said, “Oh, you know . . . paintbrushes, clay, shaping knives, chisels . . . all that’s from the Manual Age. Remember painting? That seems so 1950s now.”

Wolfe was a profound observer of culture, a sort of super-sociologist who could emit singing prose and deliver deadly characterizations. Another classic piece was “Tiny Mummies!,” his hilarious send-up of the New Yorker under the reign of the ever-so-decorous William Shawn, the punctilious, soft-spoken, quietly domineering, politically correct czar of the magazine every aspiring writer wanted to write for.

Everyone except Tom Wolfe, apparently, for his brutal (if laugh-out-loud funny) send up of the New Yorker assured that it would be one place his prose never appeared.

I am not sure exactly when I became aware that, in addition to being funny and percipient, Tom Wolfe was also politically mature.

Probably it was obvious all along. You couldn’t read “Radical Chic” (1970), Wolfe’s stunning account of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s 13-room Park Avenue penthouse, without realizing that he was not at one with the left-wing politics of the 1960s.

Instead, born in Virginia, Tom Wolfe was that nearly extinct creature, the Southern gentleman. In later years, he was famous to the public for his immaculate three-piece white suits, shirts with high collars, and fancy shoes with spats. That sartorial elegance bespoke a deep embrace of tradition, tinctured with just the right amount of satire to be amusing.

I got to know Tom only in the last 15 years of his life. I believe I was first introduced to him by our friend Bill Buckley, but in any event we met casually on and off at various events and gatherings throughout the years. He was unfailingly courteous and jovial. At one of our last meetings, a year or so ago, he introduced himself when people went around the table as a “freelance writer,” which I suppose was accurate, in its way.

By the time of his death, Wolfe was probably best known as a novelist, a contingency that I believe would have pleased him greatly. His first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” a huge best seller, perfectly summed up the excesses of the 1980s and gave to the world a character indistinguishable from the Rev. Al Sharpton avant la lettre.

With the passing of Tom Wolfe we have lost one of our greatest, if not our greatest, men of letters. He was—to cite the title of one of his novels—a man in full. His many friends will miss him. Our culture is the poorer for his absence.

Mr. Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books.