Rick Bogel

Hadn’t read it for decades, since when I was in the antiwar and antidraft Resistance, and I and some fellow Resisters had in fact just had several New Haven Black Panthers to dinner! At the time, it seemed shrewd, wonderfully written, immensely clever, yet also a bit mean-spirited, unfair, and written from a standpoint bizarrely apolitical even as it “skewered” the halting but well-meant politics of the blinkered, decent, naive, insanely wealthy and prominent, good-hearted New York social elite. On this very recent rereading, it still seems all that and, in addition, main-chancey, even decadent. It left me thinking that the real “user” of the Panthers was probably Wolfe himself rather than the Bernsteins and their circle. I won’t read it again.