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.

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).

The front-cover of the version of “Hooking Up” that I own is florescent yellow with the name Tom Wolfe emblazoned in firetruck red covering the entire page with no space left for a book title. Similarly, the back-cover is a black and white photo of Tom Wolfe in his characteristic white tuxedo. When I first picked up “Hooking Up” I thought it was a strange cover, but now I understand. Tom Wolfe is not for everyone, but if you read Tom Wolfe you LOVE Tom Wolfe. And no one loves Tom Wolfe more than the man himself.

These essays, and a novella, are phenomenal. Many of them are dated and irrelevant in the 2020s, but they are enjoyable nonetheless. My eyes started to glaze over while reading the descriptions of Silicon Valley tech in “Two Young Men Who Went West” (p.17), but this appears to be many reviewers favourite essay. I was thoroughly engaged in “Ambush At Fort Bragg: A Novella” (p.175). Usually when a book contains a few chapters I find so-so I would rate it lower than five stars, but the bits that were good were oh so, so, good.

I can’t say I agree with all of Wolfe’s opinions, but I definitely find his expression entertaining—he really does not hold back from roasting those who incite him. He is all about Americana, Elitism, New York, and the Red Scare. His journalistic background really allows him to capture Baudelaire’s concept of modernity. Everything feels alive and contemporary written by Tom Wolfe. I cannot wait to pick up another of his books.

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,

tChapter 4 - Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill
tChapter 5 - Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died
tChapter 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.

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/

Writing is fully what one would expect from a writer with works with crazy titles like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. One can only guess at the confidence of a man who could cut a dandy figure in a signature white suit. Smart, snappy, sardonically winsome, his literary mannerisms and elastic rhythms echo the brisk and incisive character of journalism. Wolfe is witty & detailed but never gossipy, opinionated and wry and ever-curious. And much to this reader's amusement he skewers relentlessly the hoity-toity presumption of that curious phenomenon, the American intellectual, which to him is but an idol's wrappings in which is clothed an expert stumbling in the outer darkness beyond the sure lamplight of his field of expertise.

Despite being a reader, writer and pioneer of a new movement (New Journalism), Wolfe is full of optimism - for a new world, for modern life, for America, and broadly for civilisation's cultures and values, for the vitality of lives that flourish at an unprecedented peacetime. It is almost a travesty today to say that aloud. He went against the grain of his contemporaries, who could only deplore in chorus a time of the burgeoning middle class buoyed by the ascent of the capitalist tide as decidedly terrible, oppressive, unjust, unfair, etc. These essays freeze-dry for posterity the mood of the 20th-going-on-21st century - the slang ('hooking up'??), new vistas of scientific knowledge (semiconductors, neuroscience, psychology) and the wonder and anxiety at its potential consequences. He explores the invention of the circuit-boards, opines on the advent of social media (and is pessimistic about its meaningful impact and contributions), developments in neuroscience and man's knowledge of the brain leading him too merrily towards a deterministic view of the universe, the 'Rococo Marxists' (the card-carrying smart set), the state of modern art (no true replacements of skill and technique), 'My Three Stooges' (on fellow old writers Mailer, Updike, and Irving and their discontentments with the popular reading public) and satirizes what he sees as the petrified irrelevance of the New Yorker magazine. No matter what Wolfe writes about, two main notes stand out to this reader: (1) His caution/cynicism which hesitates at the slope towards that might've seemed self-evident or natural back then. (2) His enviable gift of condensing complex /dry passages scientific theory and history into interesting, bite-sized, essential ideas. Such as 20+ pages of the invention of the semiconductor and the founding of Intel.

Some of this is laughably bad. The man actually makes the argument that the Nazis were socialists because they put it in their name. That take was debunked long before this book came out. I suppose Mr. Wolfe thought that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea was as advertised. Jeez. I mean, distractingly bad stuff. The novella was OK, and a couple of the articles were of real interest, however, so it wasn't a waste of time. And I actually think the New Yorker parody was pretty good, still.

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.

While I typically enjoy reading essays and seldom enjoy novels, Tom Wolfe turns that around. I thought The Bonfire of the Vanities was a wonderful book, but I have not enjoyed his essays. This book was no exception. At one point I started just reading the first sentence of every paragraph and that helped a lot. Unfortunately it was just too much work.

I've never read any of Tom Wolfe's other books, and the only insight I got was that he loves to use the words "insouciant" and "ponderous". A lot.

For me this book was just meh. It had parts where it was really really good and interesting but there were also many parts that I had to struggle through that had me considering DNFing the whole thing. The main thing that bugged me about this work of nonfiction was that it lacked a sense of cohesion. There didn't seem to be an overall connecting theme which was a bit frustrating.

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.