These unknown men, it said, are modern heroes while music and sports stars rule the roost, these forgotten military guys, climbing into their primitive, unreliable rockets and soaring up to the stars, are the truly righteous single-combat warriors of the modern era. Most of all, it captured flying-ace culture. It described the sapping impositions that fell on their wives, and lampooned the media fabrications that drilled their heroics into the public mind. It presented the psychodrama behind America's first blasts into space by introducing us to the seven top-of-the-range pilots selected (in a top-secret series of X-Factor-like auditions) to form the first cadre of astronauts. The Right Stuff flowed straight from these preoccupations. He called this "the incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge into the suburbs", and he became its first and most articulate chronicler. Demotic America, he noticed, now had the wealth to create its own institutions. He was already famous for slapping vivid rhetoric around subjects previously thought too frivolous for literature: stock car racing, scandal magazines, race riots, party girls, art critics, student rebels, sex evangelists and so on. And hardly anyone cared about the lethal mid-air novelty of high-performance flight.
"The old-fashioned tale of prowess and heroism was relegated to second- and third-rate forms," wrote Wolfe. The horrors of the first world war had inspired an austere orthodoxy to the effect that war was hell, and that the only virtuous way to depict it was to present the mortal trials of some dumb bloody footslogger (officers all being callous buffoons). There was, he suggested, an alluring explanation for this. Hardly anyone had written with gusto about fighter pilots, so Wolfe found himself alone, he wrote later, in a "rich and fabulous terrain" which up till then was "as dark as the far side of the moon". The novel tells the story of America's shaky first steps into space, and as soon as Wolfe embarked on the conversations that would fuel his verbal aerobatics, he saw that he had strolled into an unexplored area. As recent pictures of India and China's space missions showed, the time when America's lunar landings spoke of a nation inspired by progress and adventure - reaching for the stars - may be over. The world tilts differently now, and its shifting axis has cast shadows over Wolfe's still-dazzling sentences. At the time, Wolfe seemed in love with his jet-propelled subject, but now we can see that nothing ages faster than the new thing. But it has dated faster than anyone could have expected, and certainly no longer feels like the bright comet that appeared in a shower of sparks in 1979. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is only 30 years old - a mere baby in the hallowed world of classic literature. Books are not stable substances: their tone, flavour and entire angle of attack can be altered by the passage of time.
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