He's Got the Hookup

n the 1980s, Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel that read like a smart piece of investigative journalism, lampooning the arrogant, self-proclaimed "Masters of the Universe" yuppies that nearly destroyed America. That first wave of boomers, who peaked in the 1980's, got a swift literary kick in the shins as Wolfe unmasked the façade of Manhattan's super-rich, fed on the golden crumbs of the Reagan stock market boomlet.

Wolfe is back in force this year with Hooking Up, a collection of essays on topics ranging from the real inventors of the Internet (a certain vice president is suspiciously absent) to the acerbic "My Three Stooges," a less-than-complementary but deserved retaliation toward John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer.

The title essay, "Hooking Up: What Life was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World," begins the book. And, yes, "hooking up" does refer to the term we students use to describe our social lives. The essay takes jabs at the America's uncouth young millionaires, sex and pornography, all of which are easy targets. It's hard to disagree when Wolfe points out that the sexual revolution's downfall has become nothing more than a "lurid carnival." He nails it when he notes that "'Sexy' was beginning to replace 'chic' as the adjective indicating what was smart and up-to-the-minute."

Nonetheless, Wolfe occasionally comes across as a scold. For example, he claims that today's generation moves around the sexual bases (from first to home) with greater speed than Rookie of the Year Rafael Furcal. Someone ought to remind Wolfe that sex and baseball have each been national pastimes for quite a while. We didn't invent sex any more than Al Gore invented the Internet. And while young adults may be hooking up more often than their parents, his assertion that "home plate" is learning your partner's first name is absurd. The sexual revolution may have trivialized sex, but without a first name, one cannot call that hook-up back the next day for another meaningless roll in the hay. Further, the method Wolfe used to learn that girls keep diaries of sexual encounters, coded by the first letter of the done deeds and assign numbers to rate them, is a mystery. Where are these people? Still he has a point when he writes, "The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant for men.... Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility." As America enters the 21st century, "we've come a long way baby," has turned into, "come here, baby."

In the book's sharpest essay, "My Three Stooges," Wolfe explains the choices and research that led up to 1997's A Man in Full. "My children grew up thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called A Man in Full." He also fulfills any writer's dream, telling critics of the novel where to stick it.

Each taking nearly the same slant, Irving, Updike and Mailer blasted Wolfe for producing something they deemed less than literature, with wider appeal than their own recent works. Irving, who pandered beyond compare with his sappy and simple The Cider House Rules, managed to use the f-word a few dozen times to lambast Wolfe on a Canadian television program. Wolfe's rebuttals are more sophisticated, but the essay is less about jealousy than how the stooges have allowed their work to be influenced by outmoded European intellectuals.

Unlike his stooges, who blame the public for not reading anymore, Wolfe indicts American writers for letting themselves be usurped by stale, imported ideologies. Instead of giving up the fight, Wolfe calls for a new deal for the American novel, where writers are as experimental as '70s filmmakers: "The revolution of the twentieth century, if the arts are to survive, will have a name to which no "ism" can be easily attached."

Let's hope so-the novel is a horrible thing to waste. Here's to more of The Right Stuff.