Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is about the first American astronauts, and it is not a great example of 'New Journalism'. Like all Wolfe's writing, it is not a great example of anything. If Wolfe described Judgment Day, he would somehow make it sound like July the Fourth in the Hamptons.

The Right Stuff looks like Robert Redford in blue, and sounds like closing time on Cup Final night….

Shepherd, Glenn, Carpenter, Cooper, Grissom, Schirra and Slayton had The Right Stuff, Wolfe tells us. Now, as a New Journalist, it's his job to get us inside that shining armour and give us a swig from the Grail. We don't get near it…. (p. 812)

Wolfe, the intellectual from Yale, the observer of air-conditioned abstracts in centrally-heated penthouses, has no entrée into the hearts and minds, motives and memories, of these farmers' sons from the styx….

I did manage...