There's nothing in this world that certain white, small-town, God-fearing, airplane-flying boys hanker after so much as the right stuff. The right stuff cannot be described or explained. Anyone crass enough to try and put it into words ipso facto probably doesn't have it. Tom Wolfe is crass enough to try and put the right stuff into words, which ipso facto probably means he doesn't have it….

[But] writing about the right stuff and thinking about the right stuff from the point of view of the men who have the right stuff … tends to make you forget for a while that even though these men with the right stuff are brave and capable, they are also colossally infantile chumps. It's a scary combination.

The reader might lose this complexity from time to time, but Wolfe never lets go of it—it's his foremost achievement in this long-awaited book...