The birth of Wired magazine, its launch in the early 1990s by Louis Rossetto and his wife, Jane Metcalfe, and subsequent sale near the end of the decade to Conde Nast is a great story, and Wired - A Romance is a first class book. Its author, Gary Wolf, is an extremely competent writer, who has worked at Wired since its launch, and does a very serviceable job tying all of the pieces of the Wired story together.
But that's the problem.
First, Wolf's understated tone doesn't help matters. In 1973's The New Journalism, A fellow with an almost identical last name--Tom Wolfe--talked about the importance of tone, and how it could be manipulated by the author to great effect:
The voice of the narrator, in fact, was one of the great problems in non-fiction writing. Most non-fiction writers, without knowing it, wrote in a century-old British tradition in which it was understood that the narrator shall assume a calm, cultivated, and, in fact, genteel voice . . . Understatement was the thing. You can't imagine what a positive word "understatement" was among both journalists and literati ten years ago. There is something to be said about the notion, of course, but the trouble was that by the early 1960s understatement had become an absolute pall. Readers were bored to tears without understanding why.
Actually, speaking of Wolfe, Wired - A Romance is the sort of book that thanks to his understanding of tone, humor, and his background in sociology, Tom Wolfe could have knocked out of the park, particularly back when he specialized in non-fiction.
Wolfe has spoken about covering a subject as if he were a man from Mars, viewing it anew, and assuming that the reader knows nothing about the subject. Perhaps one reason why Gary Wolf is so reserved is that he's so close to the Wired Story, having worked directly with Rossetto and Metcalfe, and perhaps fears offending them, or Conde Nast.
Because Wolf is sitting on the big story of the 1990s. And he's got all the ingredients to write the book about it, and the crazy decade we all just lived through, and he's too laidback and genteel to stir the pot and to do something with it, or go far beyond the confines of his main story. And yet, every seemingly divergent path of the 1990s converged at 520 3rd Street in San Francisco, right on top of the desk in Louis Rossetto's office:
Obviously, it would be impossible for Wolf to work all of those elements through to their conclusions. But imagine what the Tom Wolfe of Bonfire of the Vanities or Radical Chic, or the Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker could do with this material--and the sense of glee they'd bring to the proceedings! Alternately, it also could have been fun (and very much in keeping with Wired's style) to see this book as the sort of mixed media effort that Michael Crichton attempted with his first novel, The Andromeda Strain. You could easily see lots of memos, faxes, emails, notes and documents in a variety of typefaces interspersed to break up the more traditional text. All of these techniques would have been perfect to cover the McLuhan-inspired switched on, hyped up, plugged in tone of Wired the magazine and could have helped turn Wired - A Romance into the book of the year, talked about nationwide.
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