Hooking Up

by Tom Wolfe

Book Overview

Tom Wolfe shows us the mad spectacle of American life at millennium's end.​​Tom Wolfe surveys America on the threshold of a new millennium, observing "the lurid carnival actually taking... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374103828
• ISBN13: 9780374103828
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 293 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Hilarious and Insightful

Despite producing some of the best novels, reporting, and essays of the past thirty or mopre years, Tom Wolfe remains underappreciated in literary circles- perhaps because he's never sought to be one of the insiders. His politics are his own, not dictated by the fashions of the New York Review of Books, and his writing owes more to the great novelists like Zola and Tolstoy than it does to the postmodern icons whose work seems to by the standard for literary merit these day. And that's a pity, as few writers can compete with Wolfe when it comes to making important points about culture in a way that's so entertaining. Aphorisms seem to spill out of him like water from a tap. For instance, his reaction to the oft-heard threat that America is falling into some sort of opressive government: "Fascism is forever descending on America- but it always seems to land in Europe." This book contains a number of Wolfe's observations of the cultural scene, going back to a brilliant parody of The New Yorker and New Yorker editor William Shawn that appeared in Esquire around thirty years ago. All are showpieces for Wolfe's brilliant writing style and incisive wit. My favorite? Hard to decide between "Roccoco Marxists" (a discussion of the literary Marxism that lives on in academic and cultural circles) and "My Three Stooges", which combines Wolfe's serious call for a return to the naturalistic novel with a hysterically funny description of the attacks visited upon him by three of America's supposed literary lions. But really, it's impossible to pick out favorites; it's all very, very good. I enjoyed it so much I went out and found a few more used copies to give to friends whom I thought might appreciate it as well. If you like the sort of witty, thoughful writing that seems to have disappeared in the modern era, you might like it, too.

Wolfe is the Mac-Daddy of American Greatness

If you love living in America, if you're thrilled by the raw courage of entrepeneurial effort that explodes into success, and if you refuse to accept the center-left line America's liberal elite wants to hand you, then Tom Wolfe is your go-to guy. He's hard-working, brilliant, and writes like a man playing a burning piano. Although many know him best for his novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full", you're missing his best work if you don't read the essay collections like "Hooking Up". In this volume, we get the true story behind the birth of Silicon Valley, a tale of a great artist no one knows because he possesses actual skill, a novella skewering the television news magazines, and several other gems. If you have a Wolfe collection, add this book to it. If you don't have a Wolfe collection, start one!

Defeating The Slave-Hunting Brotherhoods

With his customary brilliance and brio Wolfe sums up why none of the fashionable people are celebrating the dawn of the "second American Century." He says Nietzsche was right in predicting the exhaustion of 19th century moral capital in the 20th. Brotherhoods of slave-hunting barbarians would rise up to take advantage of the moral vacuum, and their wars would make all previous wars seem to be like Sunday-school picnics (these brotherhoods turned out to be of course the Communists and the National Socialists, irritatingly and misleadingly nicknamed "Nazis".) The slave-hunting brotherhoods were, at enormous cost, eventually defeated, but the moral vacuum remains (if anything it's gotten worse.) Too many on the left failed to properly understand what was at stake (see "In the Land of the Rococco Marxists") and are now embarassed by the collapse of socialism. It remains to the common, bourgeois middle class to take their prosperity and celebrate the freedom America has provided. Wolfe speculates on what will fill the continuing vacuum. In the witty essay "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died" he considers the new orthodoxy of neo-Darwinsim and sociobiology and speculates that God can't be abolished, after all. In "The Invisible Artist" and "The Great Relearning" he specualtes on the possibility of a new, more objective art to replace the worn-out modernism of the last century. The Wolfe many of us love is the relentless, unawswerable satirist, and that side shows up in "My Three Stooges" (where he demolishes Updike, Mailer, and John Irving). The book concludes with his now-legendary lampoons of "The New Yorker" and a new recounting of the extremes to which it drove his targets (the reaction reached all the way to LBJ's White House.) A highly satisfying read from a national treasure.

Soundly Intelligent, Great Sense of Humor

I came to "Hooking Up" after having finished Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals," another great study of thought and its effect in our society. I've actually met Tom Wolfe at Duke Univ., and was struck by how open and sensible he was. This collection of essays is more than a humorous and hip read: it's responsible. The research and journalism are sound; the depth of humanity displayed in the exposition of it is touching. The defense of Naturalism in "My Three Stooges" is something that one would have thought went without saying, but for the past four decades, hasn't. It is so good to see the inward-looking, self-absorbed writers like Updike falling at last by the wayside. Updike's problem is that he never went out into the crazy carnival of American life and lived, took chances, felt emotion in extremis, or at least spent time with people who live in these states. With Updike and Irving (Norman Mailer was always more of a self-promotion specialist than a good writer), writing is an intellectual parlor game: good for themselves, but not so exciting for the rest of us. It's nice to see Wolfe having the final word here. He's a breath of fresh air. His writing, like his lifetime pursuits, are concerned with us, all of us. He is truly the closest we've had in two generations to a writer who can at least claim pretentions of carrying the mantel of Dickens.

Simply the best!

I first read a favorable review of this book in The Wall Street Journal so I bought it because I enjoyed Mr. Wolfe's other books. I then read a New York Times review which wasn't really a review but a political diatribe against the author. After actually reading the book I find that his style and observations so compelling and interesting that I can't believe I was reading the same book as the Time's reviewer.Mr. Wolfe's story about his run-in with Mailer, Updike and Irving is very funny and rings true. The sales numbers tell the story."The Invisible Artist" is another favorite.I only wish Mr. Wolfe would write a piece about the election fiasco and split in the country. I also wish he would write more material and more often as he is a national treasure.His journalistic based style is similar to that of Neal Stephenson and Richard Dooling. I enjoy those books so much more than Updike's pondering himself.