Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds and in background research. Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor with readers and with sources. Literary journalists write mostly about routine events. Style counts and tends to be plain and sparse. Literary journalists write from a disengaged and mobile stance, from which they tell stories and also turn and address readers directly.
Structure counts, mixing primary narrative with tales and digressions to amplify and reframe events.
Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions. Wolfe is essentially both the opposite of metafiction in his writing, and in many ways openly opposed to it as a technique. Therefore the novel cannot realistically represent it. Interpretation of events in order to render them into 'literary journalism' is an individual operation. Wolfe seems to ignore that the whole notion of reality is a product of our minds and that the 'real' is therefore a legitimate subject for fiction.