Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever | By Walter Kirn | Doubleday | 224 pages, $24.95

How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them | By Daniel Wolff | Bloomsbury | 352 pages, $26

It wasn’t the best publicized of the many literary feuds that Tom Wolfe conjured up around the 1998 publication of A Man in Full, but his waspish attack on Walter Kirn was surely one of the more misguided. Kirn had given Wolfe’s book an unkind notice, and the white-suited eminence responded by going after Kirn’s own impending novel, Thumbsucker, a coming-of-age story set in eighties Minnesota. He hadn’t read the thing, but a plot summary was circulating, and that was all it took. “Thumbsucking,” Wolfe informed one interviewer, “sums up most of American fiction today.”

This one-liner was the zingerish version of an argument that Wolfe had been amplifying for nearly a decade: an attack on the solipsism and gamesmanship of the contemporary literary world, joined to a call for a more journalistic fiction, in whose service novelists armed with notebooks would sally forth like Balzac or Zola to capture the bizarre and teeming bigness of America. As a critique of card-carrying fabulists and postmodernists—John Barth, say, or Paul Auster—this argument made a certain sense. But as an attack on the author of Thumbsucker, it made no sense at all. Indeed, if you were looking for a rising writer who embodied exactly none of the faults that Wolfe found in contemporary fiction, you could have done worse than start with Walter Kirn.

Indeed, Kirn, who was born in 1962, has spent the last decade depicting America (and the American heartland, especially) in all its gonzo, God-bothered, Ritalin-addicted glory. There are few writers who move as effortlessly from reportage (a profile of Warren Buffett here, a sojourn among evangelical chastity-boosters there) to literary criticism to the personal essay; there are fewer still who channel the gifts they’ve honed as journalists into novels with as much bite and zip as Up in the Air (2001) or Mission to America (2005).

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