Hooking Up [Paperback]

Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up is an oleo of reportage, fiction, and acrimonious name calling. This last, of course, makes for the best reading. In "My Three Stooges", Wolfe reviles the three big men of American letters--Updike, Mailer and Irving--who cast aspersions on his second novel. Apparently, "the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as A Man in Full, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor". Wolfe gets in a lot of figures about what a big hit his book was with the reading public, and a few gentle reminders about other writers who were big hits of their time, little guys like Mark Twain and Tolstoy.

Equally bitter fun are his two famous 1965 satires from the New York Herald Tribune. As always, Wolfe's titles lead you a good way into the actual stories: "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker". Wolfe, clothes horse of note, gets off some of his best cracks at the expense of New Yorker editor William Shawn's fashion sense: "He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks". The rest of the reported pieces are unexceptional, and while the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, makes the most of its setting--a Dateline-like newsmagazine--it lacks the irresistible momentum required to drag most readers into a novella. Still, it's fun to watch the author reprise his lifelong role of unlikely underdog: Between his sniping at the literary elite and his mocking of the precious New Yorker set, Tom Wolfe makes like a defender of the common man. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Tom Wolfe, the internationally acclaimed author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, returns to the origins of his success with his first collection of essays and short fictin for twenty years.

Hooking Up ranges all over the modern world; in it Tom Wolfe updates us on the sexual manners and mores of teenagers (he is not adverse to doing a survey of teenage address books to find out exactly how many of them don't know the names of the boy/girl they've just hooked up with). From this he moves effortlessly to an investigation of the fundamental ways in which our lives and self-perceptions have changed, living as we do in a modern world of genetic engineering and neuroscience. There are pieces on "sting T.V." as well as forecasts of radical changes sweeping the world of the arts. Hooking Up closes with the legendary, never-before-reprinted pieces about The New Yorker and its famously reclusive editor William Shawn, pieces which early on helped win Wolfe his matchless reputation for reportorial bravura and spot-on insight. A glorious, questioning, memorable book, Hooking Up shows Tom Wolfe at the very top of his form.

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction. Among them are such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. Born in Richmond, Viriginia, he now lives in New York City.