Ed Smith posted a new installment in his New Statesman column, “Ed Smith’s Left Field,” in which he considers Russell Brand in the context of Tom Wolfe in the context of John Updike and other writers who slammed Wolfe for A Man in Full.

Wolfe’s response was to build another bonfire of “the vanities”:  “Bad? Why should I feel bad? Now I’ve got all three . . . Larry, Curly and Moe. Updike, Mailer and Irving. My three stooges.”

Smith writes, “Given Updike’s reputation as the great man of American letters, it was an attack of thrilling bravery. Wolfe is contemptuous of Updike’s suggestion that there aren’t enough intelligent readers to sustain ‘literary’ writing. ‘The novel is dying,’ Wolfe replied, ‘not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs . . . food . . . The revolution of the 21st century, if the arts are to survived, will have a name to which no ism can easily be attached. It will be called ‘content’.”

“Tom Wolfe always cuts through modish nonsense. I wonder what he’d make of Russell Brand?”