# Spaced Out **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** January 1, 1980 --- “Tom Wolfe's long awaited book about the early astronauts has arrived.” _The Right Stuff_, by Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $12.95. When John Glenn decided to run for the Senate in Ohio, he had to contend with a populace that recognized him but wondered which one he was. Eventually he won, but the man who at one time was quite possibly the best-known and most admired American next to the President (John Kennedy) himself, found himself in a bored and jaded United States somewhat passé. _Sic transit gloria mundi_, and all that, and as Andy Warhol once predicted, tongue only partly in cheek, one day, and that rather soon, every American will be a celebrity for fifteen minutes, after which—oblivion. Tom Wolfe’s long awaited book about the early astronauts has arrived, and it’s a corker. _The Right Stuff_ might surprise readers who expect that everything Wolfe touches turns instantly into satire, or parody, that this gift of the gods to lovers of good writing is the master only of the jaundiced look. If Tom Wolfe doesn’t genuinely admire and respect these giants of space, you’ll have a hard time proving it from this book. Whether he’ll bring himself to pull together the masses of material he’s assembled on the later space adventures, and produce a sequel, is iffy; he indicated a kind of dread contemplating the project, having found this book the hardest of all his ventures to write. We may have only—only!—_The Right Stuff_. What is “the right stuff”? Wolfe says that he realized fairly early that the men who made it, who make it, as astronauts have “it,” that indefinable something that for want of any other name he came to call the right stuff: the combination of attitudes and abilities and ambitions that separate them from those who ascend only partly way up the “pyramid of the True Brothers.” Of course every skilled profession has its “it”; no surprise about that. But the “it” of these men stands quite far from the comforting media image we have of these men as apple-pie-motherhoodcountry-God clones. Oh, divorce was fatal to an astronaut’s career, back then, and membership in one of a handful of acceptable . . . Protestant churches, or perceived affection, at least, for some nice denomination, went with the territory. In fact, many of the early astronauts and many of the current crop do fit the image we have of them. But not all, and their wives hardly manifest the long-suffering little _hausfrau_ vignette that _Life_ and other major media outlets painted for us, back then. Stoic to outsiders but oftentimes quite vigorously demanding and emotional within the fraternity, the astronauts may have come from the same general background—small-town America—but they were not and are not carbon copies of some Ur-astronaut of popular mythology. Wolfe is not at pains to debunk these men, but rather to flesh them out, to help the reader reach into the astronauts’ minds and comprehend something of their natures. Tom Wolfe can’t resist the urge to poke a little well-pointed fun at the composite portrait, showing us the living fellows whom America tended to freeze within it. But in so doing he doesn’t puncture our respect for them, he allows them their individual humanity, he enriches our comprehension of them and brings them back to us with more significance than, as idols, they had before. Contrary to one widely believed notion, fame didn’t destroy these men. Only one of the nearly 100 astronauts, to date, has suffered from a serious problem with alcohol, and the divorce rate is no higher among the astronauts than among others of their age in America. Nor has Potomac fever spread widely among them, however successful half a handful have been in translating their popularity as folk-heroes of NASA into votes. _The Right Stuff_ is a beautiful book about flesh-and-blood men who have what it takes to succeed in a demanding, grueling but also glamorous job. And it is as well a book about the country in which they grew and succeeded. It might puzzle some Wolfe readers who come expecting another _Radical Chic_. But it is in its own way as worthy a book as that modern classic, and it deserves equal fortune. David Brudnoy is a contributing editor of LR.