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Doubting Thomas. Or at least his suits.

The following opening sentence fell out of a writer's keyboard like an overweight sprinter out of the blocks, staggered through its middle em-dashed clause, and then crashed into a non-sequitured ditch, where it lay bleeding until its writer put it out of its misery, by writing the next sentence.
Tom Wolfe, who died Monday, was — as even those of us who did not share his politics and often deplored his taste and even doubted the fashion wisdom of all the white suits have to admit — one of the central makers of modern American prose.
Let's translate, taking out a couple of 'evens':

White suits, unsavoury politics and bad taste aside, he was pretty good at writing. As if the former even matter.

Comments

  1. I read that opening in the NYT and that's as far as I got, fearing it was a sign of things to come.

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  2. I haven't read his stuff (yet), but I always admired his fearless individuality. ('Fearless individuality' sounds like something the NYT would write, but it's the most accurate phrase I could come up with.)

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