The US author Tom Wolfe, who died in May aged eighty-eight, invented a new way of composing novels, a new take on cultural commentary, and a new style of dress and living, all of which dovetailed with each other. It has been fashionable in high-octane US literary and theory circles to deride his four large (in every way) novels as schmaltzy blockbusters, like James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, because they have a conventional structure of plot, characters and narrative drive. But his novels broke new ground, as the hero and focus in these works is not a character, nor…