Web Master Even with two of the best-selling, highest acclaimed American novels of the 20th century and some of the best journalistic pieces under his belt, some people still think Tom Wolfe is that author who wrote Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. How this can be is quite a question, considering that even if you’re not a bookworm, Wolfe has been in the public eye for quite some time, covering some of the most important and interesting events in recent American history. What makes Wolfe memorable, however, isn’t his natty suits or his doctorate in American Studies from Yale, but rather his intense commitment to his work. Afterall, the man took eleven years to research and write his second novel. His passion for all things American hasn’t waned in Hooking Up, as several of these brilliant essays demonstrate. Thankfully, Wolfe’s writing is humorous and insightful enough to make the errors in this collection trivial.
On the surface, Hooking Up looks like nothing more than a hodgepodge of material that he threw together to appease his publisher and the voracious reader. It requires a bit of searching, but there is an underlying theme to these works found in Wolfe’s ideas about America and the human spirit. In a nutshell, his overall argument seems to be this: Wow, Americans are really resilient and willing to explore new worlds and isn’t that great? But why aren’t we more excited about it? Why don’t we care? Most importantly, if we don’t get excited and we don’t care, what the hell is going to happen in the 21st century? Wolfe doesn’t directly answer this question, but his trademark humor proves that as long as we can laugh at ourselves, the world can be saved from impending doom.
Why Wolfe titled this book Hooking Up is unfathomable to me. A better title would have been The Human Beast, the title of the second section of essays. Perhaps it was because that is the title of the first essay, or perhaps it’s guaranteed to sell him more books, but I digress. Wolfe jumps right into his first essay, describing life at the turn of the millennium, with all its sexual revolution and worries about age, with dead-on precision. However, he ends his essay on a more serious note, claiming that in matters intellectual, America still lags behind Europe, and American philosophy seems to have fallen off of the map completely. For all the biting comments, underneath Wolfe’s essays are threads of frailty, of a wistfulness for the things that were forty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. Perhaps that’s why he decided to write his next three essays on early technological pioneers like Bob Noyes and Edward O. Wilson rather than Bill Gates. Whatever the case, Wolfe’s next three essays illustrate both the potential perfection and the inevitable pitfalls of technology and science. “Two Young Men Who Went West” is an inspiring and entertaining story of Noyes, the founder of Intel and of Silicon Valley, a “nerd-hero” in every sense of the phrase. The other two stories focus around the fields of sociobiology and neuroscience, and while “Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill” is fantastic, the follow-up “Sorry, Your Soul Just Died” freaked me out. Perhaps it’s just my old-fashioned 20th century ways, but what do you mean there’s no soul? Wolfe not only invests himself in his topics, but he also picks the best topics and asks the right questions.
While the first four essays are very good, Wolfe hits his peak in the next section, “Vita Robusta, Ars Anorexica.” My favorite essay, “The Invisible Artist” is another great example of Wolfe’s dual love affair with tradition and innovation. Tradition is the innovation in the case of Frederick Hart, a gifted sculptor who became incredibly famous without so much as a nod from the art community. In case you didn’t know Hart was a sculptor who had the audacity to possess “skill,” and created lifelike works like “Three Soldiers.” While Wolfe does have a tendency to idealize his subjects in Hooking Up, he makes Hart’s dilemma painstakingly clear-the guy made beautiful traditional art and never got anything but civic reviews. As he usually does, Wolfe provides a ray of hope at the end with the suggestion that traditional art is on the rise, and that “Frederick Hart will not have been the first major artist to have died ten minutes before history absolved him and proved him right.”
Unfortunately for Wolfe, Hooking Up peaks at this point, and the last two sections just don’t measure up. While “My Three Stooges” is very funny in places, Wolfe is too apologetic about his own success and a bit too harsh on Mailer, Irving, and Updike, the three venerated authors referred to in the title. The novella “Ambush at Fort Bragg” is good, but not as engrossing as Wolfe’s other fictional works, and the abrupt ending leaves something to be desired. But the fourth section is the most confusing of them all, as Wolfe rehashes the New Yorker affair which occurred during his Herald Tribune days. Basically, he wrote a satire of the New Yorker’s editor William Shawn, and ruffled feathers and hilarity ensue. In the last pages of the afterword, Wolfe asks himself why he reprinted the article and described its effect, and I’m still wondering the same thing. There’s probably some point, but this last section really doesn’t affect the power of Hooking Up as a whole. Wolfe is still one of the most powerful voices in American fiction and nonfiction today, and hurrah to that.