Hooking Up - Hardcover

Tom Wolfe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374103828 ISBN 13: 9780374103828

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

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 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 being introduced by name.

And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!-as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls' File-o-Fax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up's displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers... to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new field of genetics and neuroscience. . . to the inner workings of television's magazine-show sting operations.

Printed here in its entirety is "Ambush at Fort Bragg," a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, "U. R. Here," the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe's forecast ("My Three Stooges," "The Invisible Artist") of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America.

As an espresso after so much full-bodied twenty-first-century fare, we get a trip to Memory Mall. Reprinted here for the first time are Wolfe's two articles about The New Yorker magazine and its editor, William Shawn, which ignited one of the great firestorms of twentieth-century journalism. Wolfe's afterword about it all is in itself a delicious draught of an intoxicating era, the Twistin' Sixties.

In sum, here is Tom Wolfe at the height of his powers as reporter, novelist, sociologist, memoirist, and-to paraphrase what Balzac called himself-the very secretary of American society in the 21st century.

About this title

About the Author

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

Reviews

Arch, vengeful and incisive as ever, the standard bearer for the chattering classes is back, this time with a collection of nine previously published essays, one new one and a reprinted novella. Ranging from the spectacular innovations of neuroscience to the preposterous horrors of the contemporary art world to a bare-knuckled assessment of the critical reception to his novel A Man in Full (an essay that appears for the first time in this collection, and that will set tongues wagging), the pieces run the gamut of Wolfe's signature obsessions. Fans of his character sketches will relish "Two Young Men Who Went West," a revelatory profile of Robert Noyce, a key innovator of the microchip who founded Intel in 1968, where the midwestern Congregationalist values he shared with his former mentor, William Shockley (founder of the original Silicon Valley startup, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory), grew into a business philosophy that's now so pervasive it's practically in the ether. Also included are Wolfe's infamous, irreverent profiles of New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, originally published in 1968. Lopped off of Wolfe's most recent fiction opus, the novella "Ambush in Fort Bragg" concerns a "TV sting" run amok, and sits easily next to his journalism. However, Wolfe's meticulous eye for detail shows signs of jaundice in his hectoring anti-Communist tirades and in the title essay, which turns a snide backward glance on the turn of the millennium. Still, his fans will find plenty of evidence that Wolfe remains willing to plunge into "the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic typanum all around [him]" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow & Nesbitt Associates. (Oct..--" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow & Nesbitt Associates. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wolfe-man steps up to bat again, this time with a collection of essays. Although these essays are not as fully provocative as his novels, they are still quite demonstrative of his feistiness. One of the most inciting is "My Three Stooges," in which Wolfe discusses the writing of and critical and popular response to his novel A Man in Full. Wolfe takes out after three eminent novelists--John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving--who had bad things to say about this particular work. He refers to them as his three stooges, a stooge being "literally a straight man who feeds lines to the lead actor in a play. My three stooges were so upset by A Man in Full, they were feeding me lines I couldn't have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for them." In another essay, "Hooking Up," Wolfe ponders America's obsession with youth and American youth's sexual precocity. The early part of the Silicon Valley story is told in "Two Young Men Who Went West." These and other essays are not simply brief exercises but well-developed, factual, and informative narratives on a wide range of cultural topics. Appearing here, too, is a novella, "Ambush at Fort Bragg," about a military gay-bashing incident and how a TV show is investigating it; the novella is not any less pungent a piece of writing than the essays. Expect demand for this book by a very popular or at least much-talked-about author. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374103828
• ISBN 13: 9780374103828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293