Hooking Up

Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe

This book was released in the year 2000 and was subtitled as “a book for the turn of the millennium” or something.  I really had no idea what this book was about before I picked it up. I only knew that a) I enjoy Tom Wolfe and b) It was only a $1 at the discount book store.  After reading it, I still don’t have much of an idea of what this book was about.  It’s not that it was hard to understand, Wolfe is an amazing writer, it’s just that the pieces are very disjointed, and I can honestly and sincerely say, I’m really not sure how this whole thing is supposed to be tied together.

For starters, this is mostly non-fiction pieces written by Wolfe supposedly about the reflections of our society in the year 2000.  There is one fiction story thrown in designed (I guess) to compliment the rest of the book.  Most of Wolfe’s observations of Year 2000 America are quite humorous – yet in a very unflattering way.  His observations are mainly on the entertainment industry – specifically in the genre of writing, which he knows so much.

The first piece, which I thought was more of an introduction, he talks about the common practice amongst contemporary youth to “hook up” with one another.  “Hooking Up” is apparently the tendency to have sex with another individual within mere minutes of being introduced to the person.  It’s a pretty crass observation, yet I don’t doubt the validity of his claim in some circles.  Since this was the first installment in this book (that features the same title), I figured he would expand on this thought process throughout the remainder of the book.  Not so.  As a matter of fact, after this brief short “story”, there is no mention at all of “hooking up” anywhere else, yet I kept expecting there to be something, or at least to draw some sort of viable connection with the rest of the book.  Nope.  Nothing of the sort (to be fair, he did write an entire novel about the phenomenon called I Am Charlotte Simmons).

So he wonders from topic to topic throughout the rest of the book.  He laughs, so to speak, at current sociological and philosophical trends that have engulfed the “educated” minds within the last century.  He seems to suggest (and I don’t disagree) that there is a bizarre element in our society that thrives on belittling anything deemed “popular” or “good”.  These individuals on the fringe go to great lengths to fault anything that the masses enjoy, seem to thrive on  being miserable, and have quite the sense of intellectual snobbery when deeming the rest of the world “unsophisticated” or “out of touch”.  He tells two wonderful stories of when he was the victim of such angst.  One, detailing the comings and goings of the famous New Yorker magazine (famous only because the “intellect snobs” enjoy displaying it on their $2,000 coffee table), and the other story, which describes the reaction to his book A Man in Full by some of the more well known, “famous” authors of the yesteryear.  These authors (Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving) seemed to come out of nowhere to slam Wolfe’s new book.  A bit odd since it was critically and publicly seen as a masterpiece.  Wolfe goes onto to point out that these three “brilliant” authors, were basically just pissed off because no one was buying their books anymore.  He makes some good points.

In between all of this, he manages to throw in one short, fictional story about a popular tabloid news show that is about to break a story about three military homophobic creeps that manage to kill a fellow soldier because of his sexual orientation.  The story is good, in places, yet Wolfe has an annoying tendency to write his character’s dialog in how the person sounds to an average person.  So since these three military guys are from the Deep South, Wolfe insists on writing their dialogue in an annoying vernacular such as:

“Hale, no.  Ain’t nobody jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf.  You know what I’m trying to tale you?  You got to take ‘ose ol’ boys and ton ’em into a unit.”

One wishes Wolfe would just spell out the words properly and let his readers use their own imagination.  It gets so bad that you find yourself reading these bits several times before you know what the characters are saying.  That’s really too much work to read a story.

So in conclusion, I did enjoy everything in this book.  Wolfe has an amazing way of making me laugh, and this piece of work is no different.  I was just left with a feeling of not really knowing where he was trying to go, and found myself scratching my head a bit after I finished reading.