Can We Talk? Tom Wolfe’s

Peter Wood

The Kingdom of Speech is an extraordinary display of intellectual independence.1 This is a book that treats Charles Darwin as a toplofty prig and Noam Chomsky as a haughty fake—which is to say it aims to harpoon two of the biggest whales of modern secular thought.

Tom Wolfe, writing at age eighty-five with the deftness and assurance of Queequeg on the prow of Starbuck’s boat, undertakes these perilous ventures with his accustomed nonchalance. Having dispatched modern art in one book and modern architecture in another, why not aim a spear or two at exemplars of intellectual modernity?

We may not usually think of Darwin and Chomsky as a pair, but Wolfe traces a convincing link. Darwin struggled with and left an unsatisfactory hypothesis for the origins of human language. Chomsky, by conjuring (without much evidence) a portion