Hooking Up

by Tom Wolfe

In Hooking Up , Tom Wolfe ranges from coast to coast observing 'the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000.' From teenage sexual manners and mores to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new fields of genetics and neuroscience; from his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (first published in 1965), to a remarkable portrait of Bob Noyce, the man who invented Silicon Valley, Tom Wolfe the master of reportage and satire returns in vintage form.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Journalism, Cultural, Literature, American, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Wolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies.

Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.


He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tom Wolfe is also famous for coining and defining the term fiction-absolute .

http://us.macmillan.com/author/tomwolfe

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is cobbled together creation, rather a literary Frankenstein's monster, a pastiche of various essays with some fiction thrown in, but it's actually a very rewarding read. You don't have to like the man or share his values to appreciate his ability to understand history's machinations, to trace trends and cultural tendencies with a rarely rivaled acumen. I don't share many of his values, and do find him to be an unremittent elitist (which is always an embarrassment for readers) but I still found this book very interesting for the way it traced the genesis of the internet and subsquent shifts globally in mores and values. He's been such a diligent reader in so many disciplines that he has much really worthwhile information to share. Yes, much of this is delivered in his trademark smarmy tone, and in a self-congratulatory gesture he includes some early essays that earned him notoriety in the literary world ("Tiny Mummies" is one of these) which really don't fit the tenor of the book at all. You might be surprised how dated and irrelevant these essays are now, and Wolfe admits as much even as he can't help including them. The man probably realizes the Elysian fields where literary snobs presumably graze on leatherbound D.W.E.M. lit for eternity cannot be that far off, and this sense of mortality has sharpened his vision somewhat. He sneers overmuch (and feel free to sneer back) but I guarantee you will come away with some very interesting backstory on our little god, the internet, and proabably a few other tangential subjects to boot. I know I did, and am grateful for having endured his pallid, often bloodless sense of life.

[L.A. Starks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an anthology of long and longer articles (including one novella) by Tom Wolfe. Despite the title, Hooking Up covers a range of subjects from the at-the-time blasphemous "Tiny Mummies," about the New Yorker (no harm-note the New Yorker is still going strong/stronger 50 years later) to the sheer joy Wolfe found in various American cultures that he so optimistically portrayed. Among his books, this exuberance is seen best in The Right Stuff.

Of the pieces in this anthology, my favorite by far is Wolfe's description of the joyful upending of business and technology Bob Noyce and others accomplished when they started the initial Silicon Valley companies, like Intel, in "Two Young Men Went West." Not to be missed is the riff on West Coast company workers staring at a driver for a Back East exec.

For readers who like Wolfe's novels or his insightful reporting and take on non-fiction subjects, the Silicon Valley article alone is worth the price of the book.

Highly recommended.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Wolfe comes out with guns blazing in this glorious turn of the American Century essay collection that features a few GET OFF MY LAWN! tirades at those lousy intellectuals who were not celebrating the end of history and the triumph of American capitalism as they should have been, and instead delighted in cultural destruction, while average Americans, instead of being proud of their victory, were distracted with shopping and sex on the internet. In other essays Tom Wolfe celebrates the engineers who founded Silicon Valley but passes with nary a bon mot on the idiocy of the new management movement that subjects workers to degrading pep talks, school-marm grades and form-over-substance clock checks.

Reading these gloriously coherent screeds against the insidious programs of comparative American history and cadres of evolutionary psychologists who were undermining the very basis of American success I am now able to get a sense for how my own father got hooked by the neo-conservatives from around the end of the Clinton years.

What Wolfe has chosen to ignore is the fact that the capitalism that resulted in defeating, or outlasting ‘the commies,’ also inevitably produced those distractions of shopping and sex on the internet.

In other words, it was that triumphant pride of the victory of capitalism in 1989 that tempted us further down market-solution lane with the reasoning that because we had defeated communism with the market, there was no problem that the market could not fix, no ethical problem that could not be effectively addressed with a market-based approach, no troubling aspect of life or human nature for which market principles could not yield a better outcome! And what was the outcome? Well, charter schools, de-regulation, the consumerization of higher education, cost-cutting, job outsourcing, more ‘effective’ shopping and sex on the internet. We did not heed the warnings that substituting money for a moral obligation created its own justification in the mind for the breaking of such obligation. (“Why should I have to pick my child up on time, I am paying for it!” “Why should I have to send my child to that school, it’s my money!” “The financial industry is self-policing!”) If these wonderful market mechanisms called for a cash-is-king approach, then who could (or should) argue with that? Unfortunately for us, and for Americans who have been completely left behind by that market and are now supporting the most radical politicians as a result, the market we unleashed has not yet finished with America.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never realized how patriotic Wolfe is. His essay about the end of century fizzle is fantastic. Why didn't Americans celebrate the American century... Also enjoyed the novella about Fort Bragg, but the gem in the book is the long investigative/historical essay about Bob Noyce and the rise of Silicon Valley.

This is a great sampler to cut your teeth on a great American writer. I also enjoyed his Opus Novel, A Man in Full.,

[Neill Goltz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reharmonizing my life for the last several months in the Albuquerque, Santa Fe area of north-central New Mexico - hiking, reading, meeting new people and contemplating a permanent relocation.

Recently, a new acquaintance, "Julia", having learned of my prior life at Grinnell College in Iowa, brought over a book from her collection, Hooking Up, (published 2000) by Tom Wolfe, because its second chapter, “Two Young Men Who Went West” (page 17) is about Bob Noyce, “inventor of the microprocessor (the computer chip) and founder of Intel,” and therefore one of the College’s best-known and revered alumni. (Grinnell was able to purchase shares in Intel’s IPO for its endowment, and this was a huge factor in the College’s subsequent financial success.)

Julia thought that I’d be interested, and I was, though I hardly had the heart to tell her that it was a reprint of a piece published by Wolfe in Vanity Fair in 1983, then entitled “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.” The reprint was required reading for anyone going to work in Grinnell’s Alumni and Development office as I did, beginning in 2000, because so many alumni knew Noyce personally, and many in fact had considerable Intel stock holdings.

So I politely accepted Julia’s offering, refreshed my memory of that important time in my life - ending in 2014 - and then found that I was fascinated by the other chapters in Wolfe’s “Post de’ Siecle.” (My quotation marks).

On the one hand Hooking Up seems a mish-mash of previously published magazine articles, deleted chapters from published novels, and eclectic musings which can’t find a normal publishing home. It’s all of that - seemingly a big non-concentric jumble.

And yet I thoroughly enjoyed it as Wolfe’s insight in to our society’s past, present and future.

The title of the book is a reference to the first chapter, and the first chapter is indeed about what that newish slang term is about - S, E, X. But after that, Wolfe takes us on the aforementioned (chapter 2) tour of pre-Noyce and post-Noyce America, which is to say pre and post smart-phone communications, and the pre-Silicon Valley industrial (East coast) and post-Silicon Valley (West coast) high tech America.

This sets up the most interrelated chapters of his presentation,

Chapter 4 - Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill
Chapter 5 - Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died
Chapter 6 - In The Land of the Rococo Marxists

in which he attempts a synopsis and integration of communication media, brain chemistry/neurology, Western philosophy, American imperial and cultural domination, and political correctness.

In this he first utilizes the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom he credits with the prescience of foreseeing the development of the Internet - in the 1920’s!. Calling it the noOsphere, and referencing radios, telephones, and the nascent television and computer devices, he described earth as becoming “humanity united,” with a unified surface consciousness like a “thinking skin.”

But Wolfe is a skeptic. Paraphrasing current thought:

“A computer is a computer, and the human brain is a computer. Therefore, a computer is a brain, too, and if we get a sufficient number of them, millions, billions, operating all over the world, in a single seamless Web, we will have a superbrain that converges on a plane far above such old-fashioned concerns as nationalism and racial and ethnic competition.

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble.”

Next - and there isn’t an index - Wolfe discusses and heroicizes the work of Edward O. Wilson, the Nobel Prize winning socio-biologist, and his impact on both the further development and refinement of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the study and understanding of neuroscience.

Enter noted atheist Richard Dawkins and his assertion of the reality of Memes operating as a gene-like curator of culture, and passable from one generation to the next. (Needless to say, Wolfe is skeptical.)

Now it is time for Rene Descartes (“Cogito, ergo sum”), Nietzsche (“God is dead”), Marx and Freud, (that man is a product of his environment), and now Wolfe goes back to his “research period” in San Francisco in the 60's (for The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test) and tells us that we should have known from the well-known Ritalin-heads (speed freaks) of that era that using Ritalin today to treat ADD is counterproductive, because we are already individually hard-wired to be who we are.

We move on to intellectual history, and America’s embrace of the concept post World War I, and dominance of it post World War II, and then its becoming an apologist for the new American Empire. Wolfe credits Russians and East Europeans behind the Iron Curtain with keeping alive the notion of “Freedom” and this is where Wolfe really seems to have (unknowingly but) accurately anticipated our Trumpean America of 2017.

Is my summarization clear to this point? No, I thought not. Looked at another way, Wolfe's cultural analysis, flailing as it might seem to this point, now appears to be a set-up to go after three of his then colleagues/competitors with whom he had some considerable disagreement as to the status and health of The American Novel. They are/were all fellow older white men - John Updike (now deceased, 2009), Norman Mailer (now deceased, 2007) and John Irving. To set the tone, the chapter is titled “My Three Stooges.”

It seems that all three had roundly criticized Wolfe’s A Man in Full (pub. 1998), which was his next book after the smash success of his previous book (and first novel and, later, movie) Bonfire of the Vanities (pub. 1987). Their complaint is encapsulated by Wolfe, quoting Updike, that "Man in Full is not to be taken as literature, but as entertainment.”

As one might expect, this allows Wolfe to go all out with contempt and ridicule. It really is an 8th grade playground scene. Despite Wolfe having full control in this target-rich environment - and he does skewer Messrs. Updike, Mailer and Irving mercilessly in what at at first seems a self-lauding and humility-lacking ego rant - I believe Wolfe is fairly utilizing the material for his main point, quoting critic Terry Teachout from a 1999 Wall Street Journal article, “How We Get That Story” with the subhead: “Quick: Read a novel or watch a movie? The battle is over. Movies have won.”

Teachout’s main point: “For Americans under the age of 30 - (now in 2017, under the age of 47) - film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression.” And why? “Because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.” It is within these pages, 167 through 171, that Wolfe seems to agree - quite wonderfully, in my opinion - acknowledging that the “lurid carnival” of present day American life is what excites the film making directors, producers and their teams, and not the traditional novelists. (Think Breaking Bad, from 2008 to 2013). And, once again quoting Teachout, “As a result, the movie, not the novel, became the great naturalistic storytelling medium of the late twentieth century.”

Wolfe then discusses the 4 key elements necessary to make a compelling naturalistic story in both literature and film:

1) Scene-by-scene construction;
2) Liberal use of realistic dialog;
3) Interior point of view (reader or filmgoer “inside the head” of the character or actor); and
4) Notation of status details

As to this last point - status details - Wolfe totally captured my attention with the following: “...the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and has or hasn’t warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation.”

But here Wolfe parts ways with Teachout because he so strongly feels that film cannot adequately create “the interior point of view” - what the mind is thinking - in the way that only the words of a novelist can.

Still holding this tour de force together? Computer Technology, The Brain, Post-modern Angst, Contemporary Politics, the Naturalistic Story?

The stage has now been set for a full 75 page novella, Ambush At Fort Bragg (which may have originally been intended as a part of A Man in Full, but seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor). It is a full-on naturalistic story, fully pre-dating Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, but fully, almost preternaturally, predicting the advent of both. Wolfe’s setting is the use of “ambush journalism” (a la Mike Wallace and Morley Safer at the old “60 Minutes” news program) to create a reality show ratings victory. Its characters are the TV news team from New York going up against 3 under-educated Army non-coms thought to have killed a fellow soldier who was gay, but who turn out to have been on the ground in the streets of Mogadishu during the “Blackhawk, down” incident and firefight.

It is entirely reminiscent of the Wolfean Style I remember from Bonfire (which I’ve read) and, presumably, Man in Full (which I have not).

Very very enjoyable. And Wolfe makes his point. (My words): “This is how I write a late twentieth century, early twenty first novel or story to engage the contemporary reader.”

Unfortunately, at this point the whole thing goes off the rails.

The last several chapters are a reprise - and part of it directly republished - of his 1965 feud with the legendary editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn.

Wolfe has great fun with the story, setting up the background and delivering the blow, and enjoying the denouement. But as I was but 12 years old at the time of this semi-historic contretemps of the literary cognoscenti, it seemed to me that Wolfe was simply once again - as with his putdowns of the so-called Three Stooges - being super-egotistical, preening and flaunting.

(Note to self: I did get one tremendous laugh out of the experience. Due to my trusty smart-phone at my side as an immediate reference look-up tool, when Wolfe went down the road of The New Yorker’s intra-staff extra-marital romances, I gleaned the following Dorothy Parker quote, said to have been made to a Shawn-underling sent to inquire (no doubt at the Algonquin) why she hadn’t yet returned a message from Shawn: “Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”)

Hooking Up is an unusual, non conformative, historical and interesting read.

[Ani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the best piece in this book is the first one, a fascinating story detailing the impact of Congregationalism and the state of Iowa on the birth of Silicon Valley and really, modern corporate culture in the US. You can see the seeds of the atrociously long and out-of-touch novel I Am Charlotte Simmons in the piece called "Hooking Up," which is much better than the novel that it generated.

[Abhi V]

(Skipped the novella, but might read it later, or not)

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my gooooooddd this book was boring. Please be forewarned - this book has nothing to do with delving further into societal rituals, like dating in the 2000s, as the title "Hooking Up" might imply. This book is a mishmash of dry essays on the evolution of technology, a silly short story (there was a reason it was cut out of A Man in Full, like how deleted scene extras on a DVD always kinda suck), and then a section on his literary wars with famous authors and The New Yorker. I remember liking his fiction, I should probably stick to that.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The birth of Silicon Valley is particularly entertaining.

[Brett Strausser · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a 3.5 star book, but I round up for Wolfe. There is much to learn from reading this collection (hodgepodge) of essays and brief histories. Don't be fooled by the salacious title. There is a short article that exposes the sorry moral state of "youth" in the year 2000, but most of the book is other. Wolfe tackles lots of topics with vigor: evolution, psychology, politics, ethics, etc. He also throws in some some fiction that lampoons TV journalism.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great. I've never read essays or an essay collection before so it took me a while to warm up to the format, but once I got over that hurdle I found this collection to be a fascinating study of the human experience and a masterful use of the English language. Loved the "Vita Robusta, Ars Anorexica" section. And "The New Yorker Affair" section gave me a glimpse of the man who was a must-read cultural commentator and novelist/journalist.

[Mark Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hooking Up, published in 2000, is Tom Wolfe’s most recent collection of non-fiction pieces. It also contains a novella, “Ambush at Fort Bragg.” The writings collected in Hooking Up appeared in a variety of publications, and demonstrate Wolfe’s wide interest in many different facets of modern American life.

As someone who was a college student in the year 2000, I can attest that the title piece was a pretty accurate summary of college life at that time. Wolfe’s examination of campus life at the turn of the millennium would provide inspiration for his next novel after Hooking Up, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe explains to the reader that “hooking up” is the new way that young people meet each other. As Wolfe writes, “The old term ‘dating’—referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner—was now deader than ‘proletariat’ or ‘pornography’ or ‘perversion.’” (p.6) I was naively shocked when I got to college and discovered that people didn’t date very much—it was mainly about hooking up.

“Two Young Men Who Went West” connects 19th century politician and pioneer Josiah Grinnell and 20th century engineer Robert Noyce, who pioneered the microchip and was the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. What do Grinnell and Noyce have in common? Well, Grinnell founded the town of Grinnell, Iowa, home to Grinnell College, which was Noyce’s alma mater. The parallels between Grinnell and Noyce are perhaps overstated in the article—you can hear the framing device creak now and then as Wolfe stretches it out. However, Noyce is a pretty interesting guy to read about, as he was one of the founders of what came to be called Silicon Valley.

“Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill” bites off a lot, covering the careers and theories of priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, media critic Marshall McLuhan, and finally biologist Edward O. Wilson, one of the chief Darwinists of the late 20th century. All three men were people who had unified theories about human behavior. Wolfe is always suspicious of those who claim to have all of the answers. (He wrote about Marshall McLuhan in the article “What if He is Right?” in The Pump House Gang.) Wolfe is also skeptical about Darwinism providing all of the answers to human behavior. This piece plants some of the seeds that will sprout in The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe’s 2016 book about how human speech developed.

“Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died” is about brain imaging. It fits in again with The Kingdom of Speech, as Wolfe examines neuroscientists who think they have all of the answers to human behavior. According to Wolfe, there are neuroscientists who think that they could predict someone’s life down to the very minute. (p.97) Wolfe sees neuroscience and brain imaging as being part of a great shift during the late 20th century away from the dominant theories of the century, Marxism and Freudianism. (p.100)

Wolfe frets that this shift towards science could lead to a collapse of personal responsibility—that people will excuse their behavior based on their wiring. “Don’t blame me, honey. Four hundred thousand years of evolution made me do it.” (p.104-6) Wolfe seems to wonder, if we are only these walking, talking computers, then where’s the mystery, the poetry of life? If everything is predetermined from birth, then why go on with the charade?

“In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” is an excellent takedown of liberal academic pretensions. Wolfe writes about the turn of the millennium, and how little it was remarked upon in the media. “My impression was that one American Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a mouse pad.” (p.114)

Wolfe writes that “For eighty-two years now, America’s intellectuals, right on time, as Nietzsche predicted it, have expressed their skepticism toward American life.” (p.128) Wolfe, despite his consistently ironic viewpoint, does not have as much skepticism towards American life, writing: “The country turned into what the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simons and Fouriers, had dreamed about: an El Dorado where the average workingman would have the political freedom, the personal freedom, the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he saw fit.” (p.119)

This has been a favorite theme of Wolfe’s since the 1960’s, that America is actually in the middle of a happiness explosion, rather than constantly teetering on the brink of incipient fascism, as most liberals have said it is.

“The Invisible Artist” is about the sculptor Frederick Hart. Hart was a realistic sculptor, and he worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Hart was also the sculptor for The Three Soldiers, also known as The Three Servicemen, which depicts American soldiers in Vietnam overlooking the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (And was added after Vietnam veterans raised a furor over sculptor Maya Lin’s controversial design for the Memorial.) Wolfe makes the point that although Hart worked on several important commissions and became very successful in his own right, the mainstream art publications never gave him the time of day, so he never became accepted as a “serious” artist. According to Wolfe, if you don’t fit in the appropriate boxes as an artist, you won’t get any press. This fits in very well with Wolfe’s 1975 book on modern art, The Painted Word, in which he makes an argument along a similar line.

Wolfe writes in “The Invisible Artist” that “Art worldlings regarded popularity as skill’s live-in slut. Popularity meant shallowness. Rejection by the public meant depth.” (p.137) Wolfe has a point here. In the visual arts, as in jazz, popular success is often scorned and questioned—the assumption is that if you’ve had mainstream success you’ve “sold out” in some way.

“The Great Relearning” is a short piece about the late 20th century. Wolfe predicts that the 21st century will be known as the “Twentieth Century’s Hangover.” (p.144) It remains to be seen if he is correct or not.

“My Three Stooges” describes a great literary feud. John Updike and Norman Mailer, two of America’s leading writers, wrote very critical reviews of Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full. John Irving also got into the act, swearing at Wolfe on TV and attacking his skill as a writer.

In “My Three Stooges,” Wolfe swung back hard, calling Updike and Mailer “two old piles of bones.” (p.152) Updike, Mailer, and Irving all essentially said that A Man in Full wasn’t literature, but Wolfe fired back that in fact, A Man in Full was the best kind of literature—a book that drew on real-world reporting. On a TV show, Wolfe said that his three critics had “wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them.” (p.156) In other words, they should have been writing novels the way Tom Wolfe does. This was an oversimplification on Wolfe’s part, since Mailer had been alternating journalism with fiction since the early 1960’s, and indeed, many of his most famous books drew heavily on non-fiction reporting—books like The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Fight, and The Executioner’s Song. While Updike didn’t do journalistic writing, his novels still depended on an accurate picture of a specific time in America, and his Rabbit tetralogy books are full of his attention to real life details.

Why were Updike and Mailer so hostile to Wolfe? They may have simply been jealous of Wolfe’s staggering sales success, or they may have been settling scores that were decades old. Updike may have been peeved by Wolfe’s 1965 takedown of The New Yorker, the magazine that was closely associated with Updike for his entire career. Or, he might have been annoyed by Wolfe’s 1964 article about him in the New York Herald Tribune, which Updike quoted in his 1998 speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Updike quoted from the first two paragraphs of Wolfe’s story, which included the lines, “No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time.�� (John Updike, More Matter, p.853) Wolfe then goes on to describe Updike blushing. In his speech, Updike said he remembers the evening differently than Wolfe. Updike also said that someone offered him a program to sign on that long-ago night: “That, and the subsequent report by Tom Wolfe, were my first taste of the joys of celebrity.” (More Matter, p.853) It seems clear that Updike had a vivid memory of the first time his celebrity was mocked in print.

Mailer’s beef with Wolfe goes back to the 1960’s as well. Specifically, to Wolfe’s March 1965 review of Mailer’s novel An American Dream. Wolfe’s review, titled “Son of Crime and Punishment: Or, How to go Eight Fast Rounds with the Heavyweight Champ—and Lose,” posits the theory that Mailer was trying to complete with Dostoevsky, and Wolfe ends the review by comparing Mailer to James M. Cain, author of hard-boiled fiction like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

The same month that Wolfe’s review appeared, Mailer said of the review in a New York Post interview, “The review is personally insulting as opposed to critically insulting.” (Conversations with Norman Mailer, p.100) Two years later, Mailer was still smarting over Wolfe’s review, telling Newsday in October 1967: “I never mind a bad review so long as the reviewer stays in bounds. But that one bothered me. When Wolfe started in telling me how to write—when he said it would have been better if I started the book on page 14—well, I objected to that. It struck me as kind of…punky, smartass, you know.” (Conversations with Norman Mailer, p.110) Mailer was famous for getting terrible book reviews—twice he took out ads for his books with the negative reviews highlighted, rather than the positive reviews—so it really says something that Wolfe’s words got under his skin.

Updike’s review of A Man in Full had dismissed the book as falling short of literature, and Mailer’s review took a similar tack, as it was full of questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” There’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black here, as Mailer writes as though he had never hankered after having best-sellers of his own.

Mailer does have words of praise for the book, but in the best Midwestern, passive-aggressive style, there are always reservations: “Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great—his absence of truly large compass.” Mailer is still thinking that American writing is like a heavyweight boxing match! Thank God Wolfe didn’t have the stamina! He broke down in the fifth round! He was busy looking at the referee’s shoes, trying to figure out what brand they were, and then WHOMP! Norman finally landed that right hook!

Just as Wolfe compared Mailer to Dostoevsky and intimated that he fell short and was more like James M. Cain, so Mailer compares Wolfe to Dickens, and intimates that Wolfe falls short, so he compares him to…Margaret Mitchell. They are both confining the other to the status of mere genre novelists, rather than Great American Novelists.

“Ambush at Fort Bragg: A Novella,” is moderately interesting, as it shows Wolfe’s great talent for getting inside the minds of status-conscious, insecure men—namely Irv Durtscher, the producer of a TV show that is about to get a murder confession from three Army recruits.

A gift for long-time Wolfe fans in Hooking Up was the first publication in a book of Wolfe’s two articles from 1965 about The New Yorker, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets.” Both are superb skewerings of The New Yorker’s self-important style. I’ve been an admirer of many of the writers associated with The New Yorker, in particular the “three Johns,” O’Hara, Cheever, and Updike. That being said, I find the magazine itself to be quite full of itself.

Wolfe is stinging in his critique of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who helmed the magazine from 1952 until 1987. Wolfe writes: “William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross. To preserve The New Yorker just as Ross left it, exactly, in…perpetuity.” (p.270)

Coming in for criticism also is what Wolfe calls the “fact-gorged sentence,” something that, in my opinion, still plagues The New Yorker. “All those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.” (p.273)

In an afterword, Wolfe details the heat he felt after the two New Yorker articles were published, as numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to Walter Lippmann, denounced him in print. But Wolfe survived to write another day.

It’s too bad that Hooking Up doesn’t include the essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” first published in the pages of Harper’s in November, 1989. It outlines Wolfe’s thoughts about realism in American fiction writing—perhaps it was deemed to be too repetitive, as Wolfe chronicles some of the same arguments about fiction in “My Three Stooges.” Regardless, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” is well worth seeking out.

Hooking Up is something of a coda to the large and distinguished body of non-fiction work that Wolfe has left us, including such classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic, and The Right Stuff. As Michael Lewis wrote in the November 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, “The marketplace will encourage Wolfe to write nothing but novels. And a funny thing happens. The moment he abandons it, the movement he shaped will lose its head of steam. The New Journalism: Born 1963, Died 1979. R.I.P. What was that all about? It was mainly about Tom Wolfe, I think.” (p.194) Wolfe largely moved on from journalism after The Right Stuff, and the pieces in Hooking Up, while very good, do not have the same impact that Wolfe’s earlier journalism did.

[Matthew Chisholm · Rating 3 out of 5]

his was my first Wolfe anything. I had seen several of his works lying around collecting dust on friends bookshelves, and had often wondered,"Who is this man with the ostentatious covers and 90s charisma?" Turns out he is somewhat of a relic and somewhat of a genius. Like most carnal 20-somethings, I picked this one up because I was engaged by the prospect of an explanation of the process of temporary sexual desire. Instead, I got a narrative that weaved in and out of the cybertropolis of Y2K leftovers and Jerry Springer hangovers. It's not that Hooking Up is bad, in fact, it's quite good, it's just...dusty, fantastically 90s writing. Wolfe starts out strong telling the tale of Silicon Valley via a midwestern states dowsing of homespun Americana. The comparison to Josiah Grinnell, the coiner of the sternum lifting "Go West, young man," to Intel's brilliant business/physicist Robert Joyce is a tired cliche at best. Wolfe makes the argument that the success of the tech industry was based on the lingering residue of "Dissenting Protestantism" fighting against the elitist stigma of the Eastern United States. But, Wolfe's biting diction and playful tone allow for the insurgence of the technical age amidst all the limp-wrist elitists hanging around in Humanities departments (I am one by the way). For all of his modern American apparatus drum-banging, Wolfe goes wildly off base by suggesting that the "ivory tower" fields of history, sociology, english, etc. are all boiling in a stew of remnant Marxism. Come on, there's plenty of capitalism here, what with all the competing and throat crunching for some sort of subject that hasn't been written about. Ok, so the Humanities is sinking under the weight of its own libraries, but there is a freshness in the air that is moving the tweed mildew out of our crumbling marble buildings. Surprise to Wolfe, however, the movement is not flamboyant or cutting edge. Good history today is patient, human-centered, and rich in overlapping methodologies. By lumping all of the liberal arts into a block of deconstruction, Wolfe failed to see what was coming as an attache to the estrangement caused by our technical enterprise: a quest for identity. And I would argue, most emphatically, that the past has the most to say about that one. Cue: ivory tower. "Ambush at Fort Bragg" was a giant disappointment for me. It seemed like Wolfe was trying to hold some sort of pep rally for primetime journalism that no one really gave a shit about in the 90s. A whole short story about a murder of a gay person in the military by two erstwhile "skinhead" rednecks? Ughickphargh!!!! The whole plot was so Ricki Lake in the worst sort of 90s way, and still, this was to be the example of the great opportunity of current American journalism at the turn of the millenium? We got it all in "Ambush": nudey porno half asians, gay murders, big busted middle-aged female anchors, a sweaty palmed, emasculated whiner, and a giant criticism of the American military. I'll give Wolfe some credit because this was written in 2000, but I remember that year I was entranced by the emerging internet apparatus governed by Napster, AIM, and ebay. What Wolfe gave us was a last ditch pilot for the Jerry Springer show. Wolfe's other autobiography about laying out William Shawn to the triumph of the 1960s journalistic world was an equal match of tedious brazenness. Wolfe let us know full well how awesome he USED to be, back then, you know, when newspapers were cool and such, and people cared about editors. Talk about "tiny mummies," Wolfe became one as soon as he published this in Hooking Up. Sure, it's an interesting story about bringing The New Yorker to its knees, and it's actually quite funny at parts, but I don't see any real purpose in it being in this volume other than to prop Wolfe up as some bare-knuckel bad-ass with a real life typewriter! Anyways, this book is good for one reason only: Wolfe is an unbelievably good writer, and actually, he's a pretty sweet bad-ass too. Hooking Up seems to try too hard to make those points, but after all of the "Hey guys, I'm Tom Wolfe, and I'm really good, have been for awhile," one is convinced that this eccentric, pompous man, is a magician with words. So, I'll read other stuff by him-maybe even a novel, but I suppose from here on out I will be looking over my shoulder to guard against an Icabod Crane in the form of Wolfe who's lost his head because it exploded from egotism. 61 Respectable

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up is a collection of essays on a variety of themes which he explores more fully in I am Charlotte Simmons: American Exceptionalism vs. colonial apologetics; the morphing of the date into the "hook-up" and other interesting modifications in American sexual mores; and most entertainingly his response to being called "not real literature" by Updike, Mailer, and Irving.

In addition, he includes a novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg about a group of journalists involved in a "gotcha" TV show: not quite "To Catch a Predator," but a kissing cousin. As always, one of Wolfe's excellent qualities is his ability to get inside the heads of the characters and present them, in their own distinct voice, with a completely consistent justification for their actions and beliefs - no matter how repellant those end up being.

This is a good introduction to Wolfe's style - if you like the first couple of essays, you'll probably like his other work, and if you don't, then he's probably not for you. I liked it immensely.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like Tom Wolfe like Tom Wolfe likes Tom Wolfe, you will like "Hooking Up." If you think Tom Wolfe is ok, like I think Tom Wolfe is ok, you will probably think this book is ok.

My biggest complaint is that "Hooking Up" only appears in the first essay(?) and only there in a convoluted, confusing, dissatisfying way. The book improves after that providing some interesting biographies of people that I'd never heard about before, such as William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker and Bob Noyce, a pioneer in Silicon Valley.

I think Tom Wolfe makes interesting observations, but his best work seems to be when he pairs real life with fiction. My favorite part of the book was a novella about a news crew executing a sting operation. It packed in some suspense, social commentary, and the Wolfe style I prefer.

[Maggie · Rating 1 out of 5]

i have so far read electric koolaid acid test as well as bonfire of the vanities by tom wolfe. after reading up to the novella about fort bragg i felt seriously let down by an author i previously considered one of my favorites. it seems he has abondoned his more objective (obviously not totally objective) journalistic style and decided to hop up onto his soapbox for a while. i found his essays in this collection opinionated and a little too patriotic for me. i did semi-enjoy the novella near the end although i didnt entirely get the point he was trying to make with it.
although i have to admit, i couldnt even finish reading this book (i skipped the last essay) i am not ready to give up completely on tom wolfe and i plan to try reading i am charlotte simmons in the near future.

[oswald · Rating 3 out of 5]

The < a href="https://content.time.com/time/covers/... white man< /a> with a penchant for cultural criticism often finds himself obliged to choose between skepticism and dogmatism. Mencken had the luxury of being able to take potshots at practically every class, doctrine, institution, and political tendency in the United States. Wolfe occupies essentially the same position at the end of the same century. The masses have become no less absurd, but he looks on them with a sort of reverent stupefaction, and his keenest attacks are leveled at Norman Mailer, the cabals of NYC art critics, and the staff of the New Yorker. There are two or three superb fairy tales in this volume about the secret virtues of the humble Amerikaner. "Ambush at Fort Bragg" is a failed attempt at something for which the window may have forever closed.

[Jim Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think we may be on to something here. After WWI will certainly be visiting Mr. Wolfe again.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found on the charity book shelf at my mum's local supermarket, to her seething jealousy because they never have anything she wants. Some of the language and attitude on display in this collection made me uncomfortably aware that the year 2000 is longer ago than I thought, but I love Wolfe's writing and I learned a lot: about Silicon Valley, about a 20th-century American sculptor, and about finding the perfect hook for a piece of journalism.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A turn of the millennium book by Mr. Wolfe, in which he overstates that the U.S. is the center of the world (as Britain was 100 years ago). One also ponders how much Mr. Wolfe would have changed his outlook after Sept. 11/2001. To some extent there is a bit of prudery and anti-liberalism in this book – or perhaps a lack of tolerance in his tone.

There seems to be an underlying glorification of Middle America – and Middle American values (the work ethic, religion). But regardless, Mr. Wolfe is an entertaining writer and is always able to arouse interest in a wide variety of subjects – like the rise of Silicon Valley.

His exposure of Updike, Irving, and Mailer in “My Three Stooges” was hilarious. I rather agree with Wolfe that modern fiction lacks realism and is too insulated. For example, some of Irving’s works are populated with outlandish characters – midgets playing basketball, people constantly dressed as clown- bears.

“Ambush” was interesting, but made for uncomfortable reading; I am not sure where Mr. Wolfe’s sympathies lie – probably with nobody. As a colleague of mine observed, the military is likely populated with these character types.

The New Yorker pieces were hit and miss. Despite Wolfe’s criticisms “The New Yorker” is a far better magazine than most. I appreciated the article, “The Invisible Artist”, on the sculptor Frederick Hart – that was revelation. For more on Frederick Hart see http://www.frederickhart.com/

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe (Farrar Strauss and Giroux 2000)(818) is a collection of recent nonfiction works by the eminent author. The title work begins with the author's update on the struggle between the sexes. The book jacket sums it up best: "Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today's first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is learning each other's name." As far as Tom Wolfe can discern, the playing field has changed. I can only hope he's wrong. There are several other pieces contained in this volume, but none captured my interest like the title piece. My rating: 6.5/10, finished 8/12/14.

[Downward · Rating 1 out of 5]

wow, who knew that tom wolfe was so stupid? among things he completely misunderstands within these essays are: marxism (numerous times), nietzche, des cartes, judith butler, susan sontag, marshal mcluhan, noam chomsky, richard dawkins and memes, the bell curve, and basic linguistic development of slang (as well as completely wrongheaded use and appropriation of that slang). there was a time when wolfe was a very good journalist (before the '80s), and there was a time when wolfe was a very good novelist (for exactly one novel in the '80s) but this collection makes it clear to me that his talents have very severely atrophied; his detached and narrow view of society (---he makes the point multiple times that there is no more working class in the United States because even plumbers can have third wives and plan for vacations in the Caribbean...) has rendered any sort of the naturalism that he pretends to completely and utterly meaningless. i am stupider for having read this book.

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology contains several noteworthy or entertaining pieces: a short story, "Ambush at Fort Bragg," that didn't make it into Wolfe's 1998 novel A MAN IN FULL; an essay on Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan, and the Internet; another piece on the founding of Intel; Wolfe's review of Frederick Hart, the sculptor who created the servicemen's statue at the Vietnam Memorial; and two dated but amusing critiques of the NEW YORKER from 1965. Unfortunately, it also contains gratuitous swipes at Stephen Jay Gould, Maya Lin, and American intellectuals generally, and one of the longest pieces of literary auto-fellatio I've ever seen, "My Three Stooges," which would be disgusting if not for the comical short-sightedness of its assumptions (chief among them Wolfe's belief that A MAN IN FULL would herald a new realist movement in American novel-writing).

[Russell Bittner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Wolfe may dress up like Mark Twain, but Tom Wolfe’s a sheep in Twain’s clothing.

That said, Tom Wolfe — in Hooking Up — gives a riotous performance. From Silicon Valley to the halls of the hallowed “New Yorker” Magazine, Wolfe sheds light: much-needed and much-appreciated light. There are gems in this book, but you’ve got to know how to spot them.

Wolfe’s prose is edgy, amusing, straightforward — and a joy to read. He just ain’t Twain, Huck. (But then, nobody is except Samuel Clemens himself.)

RRB
04/16/11
Brooklyn, NY, USA

[Barbara Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still thinking about "Two Young Men Who Went West." It has all the elements of well-done new journalism-- getting inside the heads of people, and turning what, in lesser hands, could be a very dull tale into something good. While I don't necessarily align with Wolfe's politics, and some of the essays are self-congratulatory, when he's good, he's very good.

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought this book sucked. It seemed to me that Wolfe, previously an acute observer of the American Social Scene, has lost touch with the common realities of American life. Give this one a pass.

[John Nasaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Tom Wolfe masterpiece! I have run out of superlatives to describe Tom Wolfe's books!

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I give this book a 2.5 for his Silicon Valley piece and his short story the rest of the book was just not interesting.

As an information specialist, I think Wolfe is on point. I especially liked his piece on how Silicon Valley borrowed its cultural ethic from the Protestant Congregationalist ethic but I do not like when he starts criticizing other society such as academia or fellow news people. It makes him sound like a bitter old man with a grudge against certain parts of America. His fictional stories is good too but I do not not like his obsession on using dialects in order to create reality based stories. Say what you will about Wolfe, his underlying injecting of aggression and sexuality in any situation can make anything interesting from high finance to "media sting operation."

Wolfe uses biting satirical language to describe the '90's. Even though 90's seem excessive looking back it is hilarious what social conservatives were raving about compared to the issues of today. They were complaining just to complain. It seems that Wolfe is a curmudgeon who focuses on the negatives of American life today. He seems to be a social conservative commentator minus the religious overtones. Wolfe seems to think because the 90's was a time of prosperity that the new millennium will be equally dull so he has to make up excitement by commenting on social issues.


I enjoy how Wolfe ties entrepreneurial success of America with its Protestant work ethic.

His main thesis is that it is Bob Noyce Congregationalist background of disdaining social hierarchy in favor of individual contribution combined with its work ethic that gave context to Noyce’s innovation of corporate culture that is now famous in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley’s culture of course focuses on entrepreneurial spirit that disdain hierarchy in favor of horizontal culture with its emphasis on pure talent. For me, Wolfe proves that real practical value of a religious upbringing as a means of inculcating certain productiveness to societal members. The fact that Noyce later rejects overt religiousness further proves to me that Christianity is a religion that one must experience not a list of dogmas.
Unlike their Eastern counterparts, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs value experience over things.

A further value that American dissenting Protestantism conferred on society is that its members value wealth which the reason Americans today admire the self-made millionaires.

Even though there are culture wars currently in America, the truth of the matter is that it takes both the social conservative side of the Midwest and the South with its penchant for strong work ethic and disdain for “elites” combined with liberal Coastal Regions that allow for innovation that create the great American ingenuity engine. Although Wolfe concentrates on Noyce’s Midwest upbringing, I doubt he would have found Intel if he did not move to the more liberal California coast or been employable if he did not receive his degree from MIT. Because even though Protestantism Utopian societies have a strong distaste for social hierarchy, the disdain usually shows itself in rejection of any show of individualism outside the social group. Incidentally, I tend to like Midwestern social conservatives over Southern because whereas the South loves to preach its values it seems to me that Midwest social conservatives tend to be more understated and thus more innate and less ostentatious.

By providing research grants and creating PhD’s, federal government proves where it is useful in innovative job creation, they are useful in the basic science funding, tax credits to innovative companies and if need creating a demand ahead of the private sector. After all even though it is private enterprise who created the semi-conductor, it was NASA that created the demand for the company to exist and grow in a rapid pace.


INTERNET:
Tielhard, a Jesuit priest, came up with the idea that technology will unite all Christians into the mystical body of Christ. As an evolutionary biologist, he saw technology as the next step in humanities step toward “The Divine Plan”. Too bad the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church stifles free thought and innovation.
McLuhan secularizes this idea into the internet global village and interestingly states that technology changes how the brain is made which is proving to be the case via neuroscience.

Wilson, the founder of social biology, hypothesizes genes determine what innate characteristics one is dealt with at birth while learning how to play those cards is due to one socio-cultural upbringing. Finally, how one plays those cards is due to individual choice.

GENETIC DETERMINISM:
He blames evolutionary biologists for America's bad behavior and pill popping culture. In his thinking of genetic determination via Darwinian evolution explains everything in behavior, then a pill to change ones biology is surely the answer to it.

ROCOCO MARXISM AND THE LIBERAL ACADEMIC ELITE:

Playing up social conservatives fear of research universities, Wolfe decries the all secular research universities and the critical thinking skills that they try to impart towards their students as nothing more than brain washing of the liberal academic elite or what he terms rococo Marxism. The scary thing is the Republican party of Texas is now against teaching critical thinking skills to public school students because they think that that thinking will make them more likely to be liberal. For the Republicans in Texas who are captains of industry, it does not matter to them because they are just going to send their kids to private school after it benefits them because they need "yes-sirs" in order to work for them.

I think that his analysis of liberal academic elite taking over American cultural landscape as largely overblown after all, I did not know any of the "important intellectuals" that he espouses or their ideas. Also Wolfe misses the point on what radicals do for society as they push the general conversation one way or the other. Like other social conservatives, he decries racism, sexism as largely constructs of the liberal academic elite and probably is against the civil rights movement and the positive things that that produced. But just as "multi-cultural" radicals pushed the conversation in the 60's forcing the federal government to enact civil right's laws, the Tea Party conservatives of today although annoying is forcing the federal government to look at budget deficit in a serious way. No matter who wins the election, the writing on the wall is clear that the federal budget is going to be cut.

As for Fish, what so controversial with the idea that a writer tries to influence his reader to think what the writer wants him to think? After all, Wolfe himself tried to sell his readers in "I am Charlotte Simmons" that top research university is nothing more than a breading ground for sexual perversion. Anyone who went to a "top college" knows that one can avoid "sexual perversion" if one wants to.


ARTISTS AND CRITICS:
Never listen to critics because they are just stating their opinion that represents their particular consensus on a subject


LITERARY WORK: AESTHETE VS NATURALISM:

I like Wolfe's books as social commentary but I think literature is big enough to encompass books that deals more with ones internal workings rather than external the external world. I know he is pissed off that other literary giants do not like his work but this editorial piece made him sound like an effette drama queen that is too happy to gloat that his work is a blockbuster hit.


SHORT STORY: THE MEDIA, GAYS AND THE MILITARY

Wolfe fictional stories really have the Freudian animalisitic triad of aggression, anger, envy, and sexuality. I like how he makes fun of the media elite as just one big show with production that makes shows to convey a certain bias. The main character in the media sting operation centers around Irv a Jewish guy who has chip on his shoulder because he has always been an outcast and seeks his brand of social justice via uncovering the hidden racism and sexism in the dominant culture. His main issue is envy. He wants the credit for being the producer himself even though he does not have the necessary skill to make it happen. Even though everyone knows that the show would be nothing without him, he wants the whole world to know it. He is angry that Mary Cary gets all the credit for being the anchor just because she majored in drama and is fearless in her pursuit of the story.

The other half of the story centers on the military and gay-bashing. In the 90's, the military had a homophobic atmosphere which is not surprising since the military prizes conformity to a certain order. Gay people even in today's world will not be open in military fighting units if they value the "military culture" over their civil liberties. Although I reject the rangers conclusion that homosexuals are not battle-tested let's face it if you are in fire fight the last thing you will be thinking about is sex, I like how Wolfe shows the other side of the equation. Perhaps Wolfe is suggesting we need these "rednecks" perhaps sadist in order to fight our wars and do the dirty jobs normal American's will not due despite their homophobic sadistic ways. Despite the fact that we need killers in the military, we also need discipline so that if a member is killed by another then they have to be punished so military command structure will be ordered and organized.

[Clem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was released in the year 2000 and was subtitled as “a book for the turn of the millennium” or something. I really had no idea what this book was about before I picked it up. I only knew that a) I enjoy Tom Wolfe and b) It was only a $1 at the discount book store. After reading it, I still don’t have much of an idea of what this book was about. It’s not that it was hard to understand, Wolfe is an amazing writer, it’s just that the pieces are very disjointed, and I can honestly and sincerely say, I’m really not sure how this whole thing is supposed to be tied together.
For starters, this is mostly non-fiction pieces written by Wolfe supposedly about the reflections of our society in the year 2000. There is one fiction story thrown in designed (I guess) to compliment the rest of the book. Most of Wolfe’s observations of Year 2000 America are quite humorous – yet in a very unflattering way. His observations are mainly on the entertainment industry – specifically in the genre of writing, which he knows so much.

The first piece, which I thought was more of an introduction, he talks about the common practice amongst contemporary youth to “hook up” with one another. “Hooking Up” is apparently the tendency to have sex with another individual within mere minutes of being introduced to the person. It’s a pretty crass observation, yet I don’t doubt the validity of his claim in some circles. Since this was the first installment in this book (that features the same title), I figured he would expand on this thought process throughout the remainder of the book. Not so. As a matter of fact, after this brief short “story”, there is no mention at all of “hooking up” anywhere else, yet I kept expecting there to be something, or at least to draw some sort of viable connection with the rest of the book. Nope. Nothing of the sort (to be fair, he did write an entire novel about the phenomenon called I Am Charlotte Simmons).

So he wonders from topic to topic throughout the rest of the book. He laughs, so to speak, at current sociological and philosophical trends that have engulfed the “educated” minds within the last century. He seems to suggest (and I don’t disagree) that there is a bizarre element in our society that thrives on belittling anything deemed “popular” or “good”. These individuals on the fringe go to great lengths to fault anything that the masses enjoy, seem to thrive on being miserable, and have quite the sense of intellectual snobbery when deeming the rest of the world “unsophisticated” or “out of touch”. He tells two wonderful stories of when he was the victim of such angst. One, detailing the comings and goings of the famous New Yorker magazine (famous only because the “intellect snobs” enjoy displaying it on their $2,000 coffee table), and the other story, which describes the reaction to his book A Man in Full by some of the more well known, “famous” authors of the yesteryear. These authors (Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving) seemed to come out of nowhere to slam Wolfe’s new book. A bit odd since it was critically and publicly seen as a masterpiece. Wolfe goes onto to point out that these three “brilliant” authors, were basically just pissed off because no one was buying their books anymore. He makes some good points.

In between all of this, he manages to throw in one short, fictional story about a popular tabloid news show that is about to break a story about three military homophobic creeps that manage to kill a fellow soldier because of his sexual orientation. The story is good, in places, yet Wolfe has an annoying tendency to write his character’s dialog in how the person sounds to an average person. So since these three military guys are from the Deep South, Wolfe insists on writing their dialogue in an annoying vernacular such as:

“Hale, no. Ain’t nobody jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf. You know what I’m trying to tale you? You got to take ‘ose ol’ boys and ton ’em into a unit.”

One wishes Wolfe would just spell out the words properly and let his readers use their own imagination. It gets so bad that you find yourself reading these bits several times before you know what the characters are saying. That’s really too much work to read a story.

So in conclusion, I did enjoy everything in this book. Wolfe has an amazing way of making me laugh, and this piece of work is no different. I was just left with a feeling of not really knowing where he was trying to go, and found myself scratching my head a bit after I finished reading.

[Miles Menafee · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling…;”third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarity as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing(“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names.”

If this humorous quote is evidence enough, in his essay collection, Hooking Up, seventy year-old Tom Wolfe wants you to know that times are a’changin in the twenty-first century.

He uses his seasoned societal magnifying glass to shed light on an array of topics including the evolution of semiconductors, predictions about the internet, the possibly dehumanizing goal of neuroscience, and what he interprets as the plight of modern American “intellectuals”. Wolfe brilliantly connects all of these seemingly disparate topics to piece together a cultural composite of America at the turn of the century.

In the book’s best moments, Wolfe is seamlessly flowing through decades of history with the expertise that one of the progenitors of narrative non-fiction or his self-styled “New Journalism” should posses. Wolfe embodies this most in the part entitled “The Human Beast.” Across three essays, he weaves together short but detailed biographies of Bob Noyce, Teilhard De Chardin, Marshall McLuhan, E.O. Wilson and others to illuminate some of the more cosmic implications of technology and science, notably asking, “what happens to the human mind when it comes to itself absolutely?”

In its worst moments, Wolfe sounds like a curmudgeon who thinks that using big words makes him smarter than everyone else. He embodies this most in the essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” where he shuns American academics and “intellectuals” for refusing to see America as the shining city upon a hill with a military that would make Alexander the Great green with envy and economic prosperity that would make monarchs of yesteryear seem middle-class. “Give it up!” Wolfe basically proclaims, you don’t have to be a Marxist anymore! Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and the tumbling of the Berlin Wall should’ve been proof enough that communism doesn’t work!

He even had the gall to question the intelligence of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky of all people, which of course, only made him look jealous. “Who even is this woman?” This guy is an expert in linguistics what’s he doing talking about the Vietnam War?

But despite this, Hooking Up, is a treasure trove of good writing. I want to write like this when I’m seventy. He’s hilarious, erudite, and stylistically commanding. This was the first of Wolfe’s books I stumbled upon and will certainly not be the last.