Hooking Up
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar Straus & Giroux

As he says in the first lines of "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists," where was I? On the wrong page? The wrong channel? Was I not paying attention when Tom Wolfe turned into a reactionary old bore? His new collection "Hooking Up" is one of the most distasteful books I have picked up recently, which is disheartening, because Tom Wolfe was always on top of the game in, well... taste.

Maybe we should have seen it coming. There has always been a healthy disdain for liberal hypocrisy in his work (think: "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers"), but these always seemed like the disinterested observations of an independent, someone who would have hated humbug wherever he found it.

These new diatribes, however — against intellectuals, political correctness and the sexual revolution — betray a different tone: no longer ironical, but indignant. We can no longer picture Tom Wolfe breezing down the block, waving his silver-topped cane at the ridiculousness of the modern world; now he is skulking in his club, fulminating by the fire in his cavernous leather armchair.

Like "Tiny Mummies," Wolfe's 1965 attack on the New Yorker for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine, "Hooking Up" features pieces on neuroscience and evolution theory, on intellectuals and artists, a 75-page novella and the title piece. This is a laughable slice of self-righteous indignation, moaning about how kids are having sex younger these days, and how no one believes that the average American worker is happier than he has ever been. "By the year 2000, the average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink." Forgive me, Tom, but you were harping on about "The Happiness Explosion" 35 years ago, and, funnily enough, none of your fiction or journalism is about this precious electrician.

Embarrassingly, Wolfe has even started repeating himself contemporaneously. It is at first strange how often you find yourself reading something you read 30 pages earlier, until you realize: The articles were all written for different publications. "Hooking Up" has nine articles, collected from seven publications, whereas "The Pump House Gang" (1969) has 15 articles from two publications.

Worse, for someone known for his willingness to get out into the street, and proud of his 11 years researching "A Man in Full," these are ivory-tower think pieces. Only, of course, Tom Wolfe doesn't live in an ivory tower like Sontag, Updike and his other bugbears; he's down in his fully equipped survivalist bunker, hefting sandbags and stockpiling Uzis for when them pinko Commie intellectuals come for him.

If this doesn't sound like the confident swaggering Wolfe we once knew, then rest assured: The old arrogance is there. Wolfe variously compares himself — explicitly — to Solzhenitsyn, Nietzsche and Zola, the latter especially in "My Three Stooges," his controversial retaliation for Updike, Mailer and Irving's savaging of "A Man in Full".

His argument is that these literary giants just don't get out enough — a fair point, though to dismiss "Towards the End of Time" as "a fantasy" is plain ignorant — and that they, like him and Emile, should get out and experience real life. Where they differ is that Zola and Steinbeck didn't just research their characters, they cared about them, too.

Another of Wolfe's favorite targets is deconstructionism, the tool of the "Rococo Marxists" (a witty coinage denoting the successors to the "Vulgar Marxists," who died out with the fall of the Berlin Wall). While he is right that this, too, can lead to an excessive retreat from reality, it is also a useful tool for looking at assumptions behind a text. For example, "Ambush at Fort Bragg," "Hooking Up's" novella. This is the story of an investigative television show catching on tape the confession of a marine to the homophobic murder of a fellow soldier — a crime that neither the police nor the army are interested in solving. The marine is the bad guy, the television crew are the good guys, right? Not so.

Wolfe consistently undercuts the producer, Irv Dutscher, a mildly lecherous, envious, podgy and balding Jew, and then gives the basically redneck killer (Virgil Ziggefoos) a passionate speech about the honor of the marine in a fire fight (or "far fat" — Wolfe is as droll as ever in his phonetic transcriptions of non-NYC WASPs). This oration is the centerpiece of the novella, effectively turning the tables on Dutscher. Wolfe leaves you with the feeling that he is (in his own fearful words) "a coldblooded, slippery, slimey little snake", while Ziggefoos is the true American.

Deconstruction asks: what is the truth behind your truth, and where, Mr Wolfe, do you stand? Wolfe is immoderately proud of his huge sales for "A Man in Full" — and in hardback, too. Might I suggest that this in part because Tom Wolfe is now the fully-paid up mascot of the righteous Right, who are quite happy to buy and not read the new Tom Wolfe for $29, but would never buy and not read it for $9?

— Jonathan Gibbs (jonathangibbs@mail.com)